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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.
No need to drag it out we see whatâ(TM)s going on. Having whores piss on a bed that Obamaâ(TM)s was not enough apparently.
But more importantly:
Fuck you.
Trump is the symptom. You are the problem.
We don't think we're better. We know it.
What's next? Penalize solar and wind and other renewables? Tax people who already have solar panels on their houses and businesses? All so some ass-backwards, mostly dead already coal industry can hang on for a while longer? When will this insanity end?
That lump is the cancer that they got from coal plants' particulate emissions
Or appointed federal alphabet soup agencies to craft a legacy (no I'm not talking about SCOTUS appointments). Easy come easy go. I bet the president after Trump will reverse what Trumps EPA did as well. If you want a legacy you get law passed through Congress. How's that healthcare repeal coming? Obamas legacy is in the ACA good or bad.
Clearly, my parents were wrong about comic books... we could've all learned something from the debate between scientists and politicians on the Planet Krypton.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Free market will drive energy production towards its natural destination, which is away from fossil fuels, and even nuclear. Distributed power generation and storage is where the future (currently) lies - the tipping point has already been reached. Solar production is not skyrocketing because the CAA pushed power companies away from fossil fuels. The core reason is the global manufacturing industry has slowly, and finally, ramped up photovoltaic cell production to the point that it is extremely competitive. Battery technology (not just driven by energy demands, but primarily by mobile computing which requires very high-density, long-lasting batteries) has been increasing steadily as well. Couple the two together and you have a big part of the future of energy production.
So as with many things in politics, this move is purely... political, and really doesn't matter either way. Sort of like the Paris Agreement.
Better known as 318230.
http://www.businessinsider.com...
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
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.
Natural gas killed it. Cheaper, fewer emissions, fewer miners killed. Does't matter what the cheeto in charge wants or legislates, natgas has killed coal.
I remember as a kid dad driving past oil fields burning off natural gas. I couldn't believe it was cheaper to burn it off that to sell it. Still can't, to be honest.
Bullshit
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
"good things are happening for the rest of the country!"
Facts not in evidence. Care to elaborate as to where? Even coal country doesn't really like coal. They only like it because it's largely the only employer in the area, and people need to eat and support welfare rural areas. Even they know the pollution they spew creates problems downwind.
As to the "rest" of the country, so much for bringing the country together. You burn so you can get rich, while the rest of the country chokes.
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.
The draft from the EPA addresses all of that. I'd encourage you to read it.
In short, even IF CO2 is a pollutant (and the statue defines terminology in ways that make that questionable), the law specifies the ways in which pollutants are to be regulated.
Obama's regulation acted outside of the ways the law provides for regulation of pollution.
The Clean Power Plan, when compared against the law on the books, was clearly illegal from the beginning.
Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
If everybody takes care of their own problems and nobody takes care of everybody's problems, then everybody dies. See: Tragedy of the commons.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If a president doesn't have the backing of the rest of the country, well maybe that's good or bad on any particular issue, but it's reality. He can't legally just dictate policy on his own.
I don't think Obama broke any laws. He simply did his best to get an important and necessary job done, in the face of opposition from the reality-challenged knuckle-draggers who think that shouting bullshit loud enough and long enough turns it into truth. In this case, that meant getting creative with the legislative framework. I'm sure he would like to have put his initiative on a more solid footing; but his opposition cared more about tearing him down than about exercising actual leadership, so he had little choice.
(And maybe, just maybe, he might want to reconsider his own position in the process if he finds himself so out of touch with the general perception)
Ummm, that would be a follower you just described. POTUS is supposed to be a leader; you know, the person who sees what others don't yet see, and makes decisions, (even unpopular ones), based on logic, evidence, and science, for the long-term good of all concerned.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
He can only repeal what wasn't put in effect by Congress. To that effect, the Obama administration did a rather poor job at governing, simply laying the groundwork for a Clinton presidency where the same 'ruling by executive order' would be common place.
The US works (or doesn't) based on more than just the President, it was time all parties got that through their little skulls. Elect your congress critters to make laws that make sense for you and if they don't, vote them out. Congress has been "lame duck" since about the time they couldn't agree on the Iraq War.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
If you want to drive electric cars, you'll need electricity. Consider every time you charge your Tesla, 32-33% of that charge comes from coal, in the US. Can't have it both ways. Morons.
Well if you want to be precise, how about 30.4 % from coal. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs..., at least for 2016. Expect it to be a little lower in 2017.
Devoid of ideas of his own trump just wants to repeal everything that Obama did, whether it is good, bad or indifferent
It is, just with alternative facts.
there are only 76,000 coal industry workers in the country.
that's not just miners, but everyone in the industry: office workers, sales staff, equipment mechanics, etc.
actual miners are only 50k.
its a dying industry. destroying the environment for the sake of an industry smaller than the year round ski tourism industry is hardly sound economic policy. there is not and never was a war on coal. coal was killed by free market forces, not governmental ones.
advancing coal industry objectives is a detriment to the economy and the public health.
advancing green energy industry is both a much larger economic stimulus (employing more than 10x as many people), its also better for the public health and as a result less of a drain on future economy as fewer people will be sickened by the pollution from burning coal.
there is no reason to favor the coal industry.
not in economic terms, not in labor terms, and not in terms related to public health.
the ONLY reasons to favor the coal industry is out of some misguided left/right partisan stupidity, or being one of their paid shills.
both of which apply to Pruitt.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Scott Pruitt is an asshole. He's that amoral jackass in the movie who always realizes at the end of the movie just how fucking stupid they are, and die gruesomely as a result. Think of "the company" in the Alien movies. People like Burke. They just have no fucking clue what they're dealing with, and when reality catches up to them them get their faces eaten.
You don't fuck with mother nature.
~X~
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
They are also nominally for a balanced budget and lowering the national debt. They don't seem too concerned with that at the moment.
There was a time, too, when they were purportedly the party that were the hard rationalists, not swayed by touchy-feeling, think-of-the-children arguments. (That kind of mamby-pamby stuff was for bed-wetting liberals, you see.) In other words, the kind of people that would listen to scientists, be persuaded by evidence, and realize this is not all just a hoax, and that something must desperately be done.
Perhaps we need a cap on the maximum age of POTUS? This one seems to think like it's 1955.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
If what is being overturned is indeed an overreach, then it should be rolled back. With that being said, each state can and SHOULD do what they feel is right for their state, if that means that they continue down the path of the Obama restrictions, so be it, THAT is what they should be doing, making choices as a state, not being mandated in a way that doesn't fit within the legal boundaries of Federal jurisdiction. Aren't the states supposed to be more autonomous? Why aren't they making better choices so that a higher power doesn't have to step in and mandate?
I remember as a kid in the 1960/70s not being allowed outside during summer vacation due to "Smog Alerts". So glad we're making America great again. Looking forward to the enjoyable times of not letting my kids play outside.
Sure, every time they're the minority party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
There was a lot of hysteria and alarmism when Obama put these rules in place, about consequences which never came to pass. Scrapping them now is the height of acting in bad faith.
If so little coal is being mined these days, then will the (apperently small) number of remaining coal power plants make that big a difference?
once again you have confused your delusions with reality.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.