Obama to Unveil Final Power Plant Emissions Limits on Monday

In the strongest action ever taken in the United States to combat climate change, President Barack Obama will unveil on Monday a set of environmental regulations devised to sharply cut planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s power plants and ultimately transform America’s electricity industry.

“This proposed plan is already on shaky legal grounds, will be extremely burdensome and costly, and will not seriously address the global environmental concerns that are frequently raised to justify it”, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell wrote in a March letter to all 50 governors, urging them to simply ignore the EPA rule.

The formal unveiling of the plan on Monday will kick off a major White House initiative on climate. The regulations are among the most sweeping and complex in the Environmental Protection Agency’s history and they promise to revamp the way electricity has been generated and distributed for a century.

With the end of Obama’s presidency drawing nearer, his climate efforts have become increasingly entangled in the next presidential election.

“The rule drives early reductions from renewable energy and energy efficiency, which will drive a more aggressive transformation in the domestic energy industry”, it states.

The Obama administration first proposed the rule past year.

But a person familiar with the rules said they would include incentives designed to reward states that comply as early as 2020.

“This is the most significant action any US president has taken to curb greenhouse gases”, said one of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the revised plan had not yet been made public. “He has viewed the issue of climate change as something he has responsibility for under the law – the moral and ethical responsibility domestically, but also globally”.

But the high court in June ruled against his mercury emissions limits, arguing the EPA failed to properly account for costs. They also planned to ask the courts to put the rule on hold while legal challenges play out.

The new rules also demand that power plants use more renewable sources of energy like wind and solar power. But state governments will also be given more time to meet their targets and considerably more flexibility in how they achieve their pollution-cutting goals, according to two senior officials knowledgeable about the rule.

And EPA could tweak the complicated formulas that set widely varying cleanup targets for each state, which in last year’s draft ranged from cuts of 11 percent for North Dakota to 72 percent for Washington state. New, more efficient plants that are replacing older and dirtier ones have already pushed emissions down almost 13 percent since 2005, putting them about halfway to meeting Obama’s goal.

The costs of the rule will be big – but so will the benefits, the administration contends. Never before has the U.S. sought to restrict carbon dioxide from existing power plants. The final rule aims to keep the share of natural gas in the nation’s power mix the same as it is now.

“Climate change is not a problem for another generation”, he said.

By clamping down on power plant emissions, Obama is also working to increase his leverage and credibility with other nations whose commitments he’s seeking for a global climate treaty to be finalized later this year in Paris.

The final rule is also timed for maximum momentum to take advantage of the final year and a half of Obama’s time in office.

The more serious threat to Obama’s rule will likely come in the courts. The GOP field of 2016 candidates opposes the rule: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said it is “unworkable”, while former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has called it “irresponsible and ineffective”.