Obama on Clean Power Plan: Climate Change ‘Not a Problem for Another Generation’ | Sojourners

Obama on Clean Power Plan: Climate Change ‘Not a Problem for Another Generation’

CO2 emissions
Emissions from power plant illustration, Aleks Melnik / Shutterstock.com

On Monday, President Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency released the final version of the long awaited “Clean Power Plan,” a regulation setting legally mandated state-by-state reduction targets for U.S. power plants.

Power plants are the nation’s largest source of climate pollution, releasing around 40 percent of America’s greenhouse gas emissions. Previously, there have been not been federal restrictions on how much carbon power plants can emit. White House adviser Brian Deese said the EPA rules represented the “biggest step that any single president has made to curb the carbon pollution that is fueling climate change.”

Some environmental groups are critical that the Clean Power Plan does not go quite far enough. U.S. Climate Plan executive director Evan Weber said, “It’s abundantly clear that President Obama’s climate policies won’t be enough to protect us from the threat of a radically warmed world.”

See Obama’s speech on the Clean Power Plan here.

See a fact sheet on what the Clean Power Plan really means here.