“YOU’RE going back to work,” Donald Trump told miners on March 28th. Gathered in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), they saw him sign an executive order to review and revise Barack Obama’s flagship energy policy, the Clean Power Plan. Among other measures, the order also requests the reversal of a moratorium on coal-leasing on federal lands and dispenses with rules to curb methane emissions from oil and gas sites. It rolls back internal rules for government agencies on how to tot up the social costs of environmental damage, too.
The Clean Power Plan was unveiled in August 2015. It directed states to work out how to cut emissions from power plants to avoid pollution equivalent to the exhausts from 80m cars by 2030. The policy was meant to get America almost halfway to meeting its pledge to cut emissions by 26-28% by 2025, as measured against 2005 levels, for the Paris agreement (which seeks to limit global warming to “well below” 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures). But legal challenges from 27 states and several companies saw the Clean Power Plan put on hold by the Supreme Court a little over a year...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2ocQi1k
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