Obama’s Clean Power Plan

The Environmental Protection Agency is taking additional steps to undo the Obama administration’s marquee domestic climate policy, the Clean Power Plan.

Earlier this month, it announced it will hold three more listening sessions to gather comments from the public after an “overwhelming response” to its first session held in Charleston, West Virginia.

If you’re at all interested in climate policy, you really ought to be following the huge court case over the Clean Power Plan in the DC Circuit Court. Oral arguments begin Tuesday morning.

The central plank of President Obama’s climate agenda is facing a serious legal challenge, and this case will decide whether the plan survives — with potentially large repercussions around the globe. The Supreme Court is likely to weigh in later on, and we may not get a final resolution for a year or two. But for those just dialing in, here’s a short primer:

In the small town of Gräfenhainichen in East Germany, you can now dance on abandoned coal mines, with retired machines serving as the backdrop for occasional music festivals. These machines will never operate again, a casualty of Germany’s effort to move away from coal and transition to a low-carbon economy.

Since the 1990s, successive German governments have set ambitious goals to go fossil fuel free. The country currently gets more than 26 percent of its electricity from renewable sources like wind, solar, biomass, and hydropower. By 2050, it aims to bump that ratio up to 80 percent. Making this task even more challenging, Germany wants to get there without relying on nuclear power. After the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, the country reiterated its commitment to phasing out all its existing reactors.

In August, President Obama ensured that climate change will be one of the major issues at stake in the 2016 election. Whether candidates choose to talk about it or not, whoever gets elected president next year will have enormous influence over US climate and energy policy.

The reason is simple. Back in 2007, the Supreme Court gave the Environmental Protection Agency unprecedented authority to regulate US greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. In the years since, Obama has used that power to enact sweeping new climate rules. That includes stricter fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks. It also includes the Clean Power Plan, an ambitious EPA rule to cut CO2 emissions from the nation’s power plants, which was finalized in August.

It’s easy enough to describe the basics of the Clean Power Plan, President Obama’s sweeping new policy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from America’s power plants. Heck, we can do it in a single paragraph.

The EPA is giving each state an individual goal for cutting power plant emissions. States can then decide for themselves how to get there. They can switch from coal to natural gas, expand renewables or nuclear, boost energy efficiency, enact carbon pricing ... it’s up to them. States just have to submit their plans by 2016-2018, start cutting by 2022 at the latest, and then keep cutting through 2030. Oh, and if states refuse to submit a plan, the EPA will impose its own federal plan, which could involve some sort of cap-and-trade program. Done.

Of the many things that went wrong with the 2009 push for a cap-and-trade bill — and they are legion — one that has always rankled climate hawks is Obama’s tepid and inconsistent support for the effort. When he talked about the issue, he sounded pro forma and defensive, as though reading from talking points instructing him to foreground “green jobs” and background climate itself. It never seemed as immediate to him, as close to his heart, as health care.

Since the beginning of Obama’s second term, and especially since he entered his “lame duck” period of furious activity, his rhetoric on climate has grown much more sophisticated and much more personal. This was on display in his speech on Monday introducing the Clean Power Plan. It was short, but surprisingly pointed and passionate.

You can make a solid argument for each of these views. The truth is it will take years to see how this policy pans out. The success or failure of this plan will depend on how states react, whether courts uphold it, how future presidents implement it, and how other countries respond. In the meantime, here are 14 key points to keep in mind:

1) The basics of the Clean Power Plan are fairly simple. The EPA is giving each state an individualized goal for reducing emissions from their electric power plants. States can then decide for themselves how to get there. They can switch from coal to natural gas, boost renewables, set up programs to boost energy efficiency in homes, enact cap-and-trade systems ... it’s up to them. States will have to submit plans by 2016-2018, start cutting by 2022 at the latest, and then keep cutting through 2030. If states refuse to submit a plan, the EPA will impose its own federal plan.

The EPA’s Clean Power Plan has finally been released. It is expected to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the US electric sector by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Your first stop should be Brad Plumer’s explainer, which gets into all the gory details.

There will be a great deal of talk about the CPP this week, much of it about the mechanisms and timetables in the final rule, but the questions that matter most — what effect the CPP will have on America’s transition to clean energy and the larger fight against climate change — simply cannot be answered yet.

On Monday afternoon, the Obama administration released its Clean Power Plan, a major new EPA rule that aims to cut carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s electric power plants.

A bunch of media outlets are referring to this as “Obama’s climate plan.” But that’s not quite right. More precisely, this rule is just one piece of a much broader Obama agenda to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade. The Clean Power Plan is certainly a significant component, but it isn’t even expected to account for a majority of the cuts Obama’s envisioning. So keep an eye on all those other rules and policies, as well.

Over the past three years, President Obama has quietly made global warming a major focus of his second term. And just about everything he’s done has had to go through Gina McCarthy.

McCarthy is the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, which has lately proposed a barrage of rules and regulations designed to curb US greenhouse gas emissions. That includes new rules on power plants. New rules on trucks. New rules on methane leaks from fracking. None of this has gone through Congress — it’s all being done under authority the Supreme Court granted the EPA back in 2007.

Given that Congress has become so utterly dysfunctional in recent years, it’s tempting to think the upcoming presidential election will be fairly low-stakes. Does it even matter what Jeb Bush thinks about tax policy or what Hillary Clinton is proposing on paid leave? Hardly anything will pass.

But on global warming, it’s a rather different story. Whoever gets elected to the White House in 2016 will have an enormous amount of influence over America’s climate policies — and they won’t need Congress to act.