Obama’s big new climate regulations

On Saturday, the People’s Climate March will take to the streets because “everything we have struggled to move forward in the United States is in peril,” according to the march’s organizers. But how much progress has there really been, in the United States, to reduce the impact of human activities on the climate?

What are these great accomplishments that are “in peril”? Fewer than many activists on the left, particularly supporters of President Obama, would like to admit.

One of the most confusing aspects of the Environmental Protection Agency’s big new proposal to cut carbon-dioxide emissions from US power plants is that it appears to treat every state in a wildly different fashion.

At first glance, for instance, it looks like Arizona and Washington have to cut their emissions far more deeply than, say, Kentucky or West Virginia by 2030. And it’s not at all obvious why that would be.

It’s fair to say that Barack Obama has done more than any president before him to address global warming. He’s taken step after elaborate step to try and nudge down US greenhouse-gas emissions in the coming years.

But it’s also fair to say that those efforts are wildly inadequate in the face of the broader climate problem.

A senior adviser to the Chinese government said he was urging China to put a cap on its own carbon-dioxide emissions in the years ahead.*

If that actually happened, it would be a significant boost to international efforts to tackle global warming. But it’s hardly guaranteed. As with many of China’s announcements on energy and climate, it’s worth parsing the details here and remaining skeptical.

But different states will have very different individual goals.

Electric utilities in Washington, for instance, will have to reduce the amount of carbon-dioxide they emit per unit of electricity produced by 72 percent between now and 2030. Arizona’s power plants will have to cut emissions 52 percent. (Note that these state goals are for carbon intensity, not a change in the absolute level of emissions.)

In a statement Monday morning, House Speaker John Boehner offered his views on President Obama’s new EPA regulations cutting carbon emissions from power plants. “The president’s plan is nuts, there’s really no more succinct way to describe it,” Boehner said. He complained that Obama’s efforts to address climate change would “ship jobs overseas,” and would mean condemning Americans to “higher bills and lower incomes.”

It’s a huge day for climate policy. Last night, United States and China announced a joint plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions: the US will cut its emissions by over a quarter beneath 2005 levels by 2025, while China pledges to stop emissions growth by 2030. This is a big deal — it breaks the stalemate that had been holding up international climate negotiations.

This is significant for the effort against climate change and for US foreign policy, but there’s another issue for which it matters a great deal: global poverty. This new agreement with China, together with Obama’s plan announced in June to regulate emissions from existing power plants at home, might be Obama’s greatest contribution to the fight against global poverty. Climate change is bad for everyone. But it’s particularly bad for the world’s poorest people.

The EPA’s draft rule has now been released. You can read it here:

Further reading:

On June 2, the Obama administration announced its most sweeping policy yet to address global warming — a proposed rule that would cut carbon-dioxide emissions from the nation’s power plants roughly 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Now the agency is going even further. The EPA’s newest proposal will require every state to cut the amount of carbon-dioxide emitted by their electricity sectors. Different states will have different goals for cutting emissions, depending on their specific energy mix.

Barring an unforeseen foreign policy crisis of some kind, Monday June 2 is overwhelmingly likely to go down in history as the single most important day of Barack Obama’s second term in office. It’s the day on which the administration will unveil its long-in-the-works Clean Air Act regulations of existing power plants. Those rules — reportedly planning to cut emissions by 30 percent relative to a 2005 baseline — will be the most important climate change measure Obama takes during his eight years in office, and as such they’ll be the most significant thing he does in his second term.

Once upon a time, of course, the White House had a fairly ambitious second term agenda.

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Now the administration is going even further. On June 2, the EPA will propose a rule to cut carbon-dioxide emissions from the nation’s existing coal- and natural gas-fired power plants. The Wall Street Journal reports that the rule will require power plants to reduce their emissions up to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. (That’s a roughly 17 percent cut from current levels.)