Washington — President Obama may have delayed action on immigration until after November’s midterm elections, hoping to avoid political fallout. But that leaves another hot-button topic for critics in Congress to target: climate change.
It’s another issue on which Obama has sidestepped Congress to the praise of his supporters, but to the scorn of his critics – both Democratic and Republican – on Capitol Hill.
A dozen coal-reliant states have sued the Environmental Protection Agency in an effort to derail proposed rules designed to cut greenhouse gases from existing coal-fired power plants, the single largest domestic source of emissions that drive climate change.
The filing, the first from a coalition of states, follows a lawsuit brought six weeks ago by the country's largest privately held coal mining company, Murray Energy Corp.
In November 2010, three combatants gathered in a sleek office here to build a carbon-emissions policy that they hoped to sell to the Obama administration.
One was a lawyer who had been wielding the Clean Air Act since his days at the University of California, Berkeley. Another had turned to practicing environmental law and writing federal regulations to curb pollution after spending a summer on a pristine island off Nova Scotia.
Although touted by proponents as a flexible and achievable way to curb carbon emissions, recently proposed federal power plant emission standards are merely a de facto attempt transform America's energy usage away from coal, the Pennsylvania Coal Alliance said today.
Alliance CEO John Pippy, testifying before the state Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, said the standards would have a disproportionate, negative impact on jobs and the economy in energy-producing states such as Pennsylvania.
The Brookings Institute has released a report that criticizes the benefits that EPA claims are associated with its proposed new greenhouse gas rule. The report authors note that by cherry-picking claimed world wide benefits of climate change mitigation efforts and ignoring certain world wide costs associated with climate change abatement, EPA has effectively gotten around the need to report actual costs of their new proposed rule for existing CO2 sources.
HARRISBURG, Pa., May 5, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- The Pennsylvania Coal Alliance submitted comments to the Environmental Protection Agency today in response to proposed emission standards affecting new coal-fired power plants, asserting that the standards would result in severe economic consequences and that the technology required has not been proven to reduce carbon emissions.
Federal judges Tuesday upheld U.S. EPA’s air standards for mercury and other hazardous pollutants in a major win for the Obama administration.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the agency acted reasonably in promulgating its 2012 mercury and air toxics, or MATS, rule, which was the most significant EPA regulation of President Obama’s first term.
