St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Obama outlines ambitious plan to cut carbon emissions
In the first-ever regulations meant to control carbon emissions from power plants, President Barack Obama announced on Monday his administration’s long-anticipated rules to limit the climate impact of the country’s largest source of greenhouse gasses.
The rules would demonstrate U.S. action on rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide as negotiators gear up for December talks in Paris to craft a global response to climate change.
Obama, announcing the rules from a televised White House event Monday afternoon, called them “the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change.”
The regulations, published Monday by the Environmental Protection Agency, would require power plant operators to reduce emissions 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. They lay out different emission targets for each state and are supposed to allow air regulators to craft state-specific plans using various strategies. They also finalize rules that would require new coal plants to use carbon capture and storage, a technology still in its infancy.
In Missouri, the rules would mean a major shift in electricity production from coal to lower-carbon natural gas power plants and renewable sources such as wind and solar. Illinois, too, would have to meet similar goals to cut carbon pollution from its coal-fired plants, many of them situated downstate.
With Obama’s successor able to reverse the administrative regulations, the rules are likely to become a major issue in the 2016 presidential election. And with states in charge of developing final plans by 2018, they’re also likely to shake up state politics.
Several states, along with business groups, are expected to mount legal challenges to the rules. The coal industry, which is politically influential in both Missouri and Illinois, also will sue to block the rules.
Attorney General Chris Koster, running as a Democrat for Missouri governor in 2016, wouldn’t say whether he planned to challenge them. He recently has joined a challenge to new EPA water regulations that large agricultural interests are fighting.
