We were part of the senior team at the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration, when the agency's mission truly was to protect the health of American families from dangerous pollution and act on perhaps the greatest challenge of our time: climate change.
In sharp contrast, the Trump administration's ACE will achieve virtually no reductions in CO2 emissions and next to no cuts in soot and smog pollution. It will prevent next to none of the premature deaths, cardiac problems, lung damage or asthma attacks suffered by the most vulnerable among us—our kids, seniors and poor families—that the CPP would have prevented.
Should states require plant operators to invest in minimal technology fixes, more efficient plants could be called upon to run longer each day and operate over an extended lifetime, emitting cumulatively more CO2.
The EPA could have and should have updated the CPP both to lock in the pollution reductions of this clean energy transition and take advantage of every reasonable, cost-effective opportunity to deepen and accelerate CO2 reductions on a pace that reflects the sense of urgency that climate science now dictates.
If the CPP never existed, those emissions would have continued to decline. And they still are declining, not because of any rules. Because of natural gas and aging coal plants.
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