(INDIANAPOLIS) – An IUPUI professor who helped write the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan says the Trump administration’s plan to scrap it is a declaration the agency is no longer interested in reducing carbon emissions.
Janet McCabe was an Environmental Protection Agency assistant administrator under Obama. The plan she worked on would have cut emissions by a third, while the EPA projects a reduction of less than two-percent under its replacement, the Affordable Clean Energy Plan. And McCabe notes the agency’s own projections concede increased pollution will lead to as many as 1,400 “premature deaths” per year. Obama’s EPA predicted at least 1,500 fewer deaths.,
Indiana Coal Council president Bruce Stevens says the coal industry has reduced emissions of several pollutants by 93{67cfbb0b132a6b5b3ee724f4f3e93544eae70154f8be103048380fa52e4548d8}. He says you would have paid twice for the Obama plan — first with higher energy bills, then with higher costs elsewhere as manufacturers passed along their higher payments.
And Stevens argues the Obama plan wouldn’t have advanced its goal of pushing back against climate change. He says the EPA predicted a reduction in global temperatures of just a third of a degree in 80 years.
Indiana and 28 other states had successfully sued to block the Obama plan, arguing it went beyond the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act. The Trump plan gives states the power to set their own regulations. Stevens says that allows coal-heavy states like Indiana to avoid what would be an expensive switch to natural gas or other energy sources.
The rollback could take effect as early as October.
