The Trump administration has been looking into a new, more industry-friendly climate change rule for power plants using coal, scrapping the one written under former President Barack Obama, The Hill reports.
According to a number of sources close to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA), have said that the EPA could present its preliminary draft rule for the Clean Power Plan replacement.
President Donald Trump along with administration officials and EPA head Scott Pruitt have long been criticizing the Obama-era climate rule, and are skeptical that human-produced emissions are changing the climate.
But the administration is starting to accept arguments from industry and business groups that for reasons like regulatory certainty and legal prudence, some limits on carbon emissions from power plants are a good idea.
“This is just sort of the least worst option,” one person familiar with the plans said.
The regulation is likely to focus solely on the carbon reductions that can be achieved at the coal-fired power plants themselves — mainly improving the efficiency of coal-fired generators, an approach known as “inside the fence line.”
That’s in contrast to Obama’s rule, which was “outside the fence line.” It ordered a 32 percent cut to the power sector’s carbon emissions and based each state’s reductions on a formula that judged how much each state could achieve not just in efficiency, but also through utilities using more low-carbon power sources like natural gas and renewable sources.
The shift in approach means that the carbon reductions achievable through the Trump rule would be much lower than Obama’s, angering environmentalists, who support the Clean Power Plan.
David Doniger, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s clean air and climate program, said the efficiency focus wouldn’t fulfill the EPA’s duty under the Clean Air Act to order the maximum reductions that can be affordably achieved.
“This does not meet the legal obligation, and in fact, it could produce more emissions, not less,” he said. “The obligation under the law is to reduce carbon emissions the most you can at a reasonable cost. This would not meet that test.”
Doniger argued that if coal plants are made more efficient, they would become cheaper to operate and utilities would operate them more, which would actually increase emissions.
“You’d be moving in the wrong direction in terms of net carbon emissions,” he said. “It’ll be a problem for Pruitt and company to overcome.”
The EPA declined to comment on the replacement plans, which were first reported by Politico.
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