Friday Quote: “Obama’s overdue climate-change speech”
Better late than never. This afternoon, speaking at Georgetown University, President Obama laid out what his aides had billed as a major initiative to fight climate change. The big news—which was not really news, since it had already been widely reported—was that the Administration will impose rules limiting carbon emissions from both new and existing power plants.
Image courtesy of IEEE Spectrum.
“For the sake of our children and the health and safety of all Americans, I’m directing the Environmental Protection Agency to put an end to the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our power plants,” Obama said. This is, truly, a big deal. Power plants are responsible for about forty per cent of U.S. emissions. And if the rules actually take effect—years of litigation are considered inevitable—they could significantly reduce the amount of carbon dioxide Americans add to the atmosphere every year.
“This is the change Americans have been waiting for on climate,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said in response to the announcement.
But if the President deserves to be congratulated for finally taking action—and he does—then he also deserves to be admonished for having waited so long. The option of imposing regulations to limit carbon dioxide has been available to Obama almost since he took office. Indeed, as David Roberts of Grist has repeatedly pointed out, the Obama Administration has been legally obligated to issue such regulations ever since it declared carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant, back in 2009. Steven Cohen, executive director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, put it this way: “We have wasted five years getting to this point.”
Even by its own rather leisurely timetable, the Administration is tardy. The E.P.A. proposed rules governing new power plants last year, which would effectively prevent any additional coal-fired power plants from being built. But in April, just as the deadline for finalizing the rules was approaching, the Administration announced it was delaying them. Ten states, including New York, announced plans to sue the E.P.A. over this decision, but they held off when the White House let it be known that the President would be unveiling a climate-change plan.
This excerpt was first posted in the New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert. Full story HERE.
