In a move that will affect coal-fired electric generating plants in Oklahoma and across the U.S., President Trump could unveil a plan on Tuesday to rewrite government rules to help operators of those plants.
The plants were targeted by the Obama Administration using the Clean Power Plan which was attacked by then-Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt and other attorneys general. But President Trump will travel to Charleston, W.Va. on Tuesday for a rally and that’s where many believe he will announce intentions to rewrite the Obama rules.
Here’s how POLITICO’s Morning Energy Report carried the story on Monday.
So, what’s inside? POLITICO reported last week on details within the White House’s draft proposal to rewrite the Obama-era climate plan. It would give states leeway to write their own modest regulations for coal plants, or even allow them to seek permission to opt out entirely — a sharp contrast to the aims of former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which would have sped the shift away from coal use and toward less-polluting sources. Instead, the Trump administration replacement would do far less to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet.
The new Trump proposal makes no mention of an overarching national goal for reductions, The New York Times reported this weekend. “Instead the rule sets guidelines for states to develop and submit to the EPA plans to establish ‘patterns of performance’ for existing coal plants.” And the plan would narrow the options on achieving such cuts — “reductions would be confined to measures coal plants can achieve on-site, like improving heat efficiency,” the Times reports. In fact, The Washington Post separately reports EPA’s “own impact analysis, which runs nearly 300 pages, projects that the proposal would make only slight cuts to overall emissions of pollutants — including carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides — over the next decade. The Obama rule, by contrast, dwarfs those cuts by a factor of more than 12.”
