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EPA Announces Repeal of Major Obama-Era Carbon Emissions Rule (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source: The Trump administration announced Monday that it would take formal steps to repeal President Barack Obama's signature policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, setting up a bitter fight over the future of America's efforts to tackle global warming. At an event in eastern Kentucky, Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said that his predecessors had departed from regulatory norms in crafting the Clean Power Plan, which was finalized in 2015 and would have pushed states to move away from coal in favor of sources of electricity that produce fewer carbon emissions. The repeal proposal, which will be filed in the Federal Register on Tuesday, fulfills a promise President Trump made to eradicate his predecessor's environmental legacy. Eliminating the Clean Power Plan makes it less likely the United States can fulfill its promise as part of the Paris climate agreement to ratchet down emissions that are warming the planet and contributing to heat waves and sea-level rise. Mr. Trump has vowed to abandon that international accord.
In announcing the repeal, Mr. Pruitt made many of the same arguments that he had made for years to Congress and in lawsuits: that the Obama administration exceeded its legal authority in an effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. (Last year, the Supreme Court blocked the rule from taking effect while courts assessed those lawsuits.) A leaked draft of the repeal proposal asserts that the country would save $33 billion by not complying with the regulation and rejects the health benefits the Obama administration had calculated from the original rule.
In announcing the repeal, Mr. Pruitt made many of the same arguments that he had made for years to Congress and in lawsuits: that the Obama administration exceeded its legal authority in an effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. (Last year, the Supreme Court blocked the rule from taking effect while courts assessed those lawsuits.) A leaked draft of the repeal proposal asserts that the country would save $33 billion by not complying with the regulation and rejects the health benefits the Obama administration had calculated from the original rule.
They already tried the punishments for solar and wind in Florida.
And Arizona, too, if I recall correctly.
The insanity shows no sign of ending, instead they are redoubling on their madness. The GOP is the very definition of fanatics.
The thing they don't realize is that states like North Carolina and Maryland are already suing over out of state pollution, states like California are forcing coal owned by their own utilities to shut down, and even Texas and Iowa see the benefits of wind farms.
Coal burned for electric power is dying. The people of Wyoming and West Virginia will just have to find some other way to ruin their lives. Well, they already have meth and opiods.
What is the alternative when you have an openly hostile legislature? Obama did what he could. He should have pushed harder and louder for a bill but ultimately that wasn't going to happen since anti-science agendas have ruled the GOP for quite some time.
Bullshit
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Looks like tariffs on solar imports are next.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
President Obama was very much obeying the law, and a mandate from Congress does exist. The original authority comes from the Clean Air Act of 1963, as amended, Section 111, codified as 42 USC 7411, which covers pollutants from stationary air sources.
The regulation of carbon emissions was already reviewed and ruled on by SCOTUS in 2005.
The stay issued by SCOTUS on the Clean Power Plan had nothing what-so-ever to do with the fundamental authority of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions. The official documents simply state that the stay should be enacted until the rest of the cases wind thru the courts.
It is likely SCOTUS didn't want a possible repeat of Michigan v EPA (2015) where their ruling was so late as to be moot.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/02/09/supreme-court-puts-the-brakes-on-the-epas-clean-power-plan/
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I remember as a kid in the 60s going up to the mountains for vacation and suddenly finding a lot easier to breathe. Then coming back to the city -- visible at a distance by the chocolate brown smudge hovering above the horizon -- and having my eyes water.
When you look at an old TV show or movie and the buildings a few hundred yards away look all hazy -- that's not the lens or the film stock. It actually friggin' looked like that. Back before the Clean Air Act we used to have "smog events" in which hundreds of people died, like the New York Smog of 1966, one of three such events that occurred in just over a decade in that city.
Shit like that is why we have an EPA and a Clean Air act. It wasn't a bunch of tree-hugging hippies, it was average people reacting to the fact the country was being turned into a shit hole.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Trillion dollar wars to ensure their supplies.
Here's an EIA report listing the amounts and types of direct subsidies and tax incentives in 2013 specific to the energy industry, for both renewables and fossil fuels, broken down by type.
It does not include any incentives that are also available to other industries, nor does it go into any detail about past subsidies (obviously fossil fuels have been receiving these subsidies a lot longer than renewables).
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
This is as intellectually dishonest as it gets. At the very end of the article is the clarification:
Emphasis mine.
OMG the radiation shielding does its job, who would have thought it.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap