To keep his campaign promises to the coal lobby, Trump has unveiled the Affordable Clean Energy plan, a free pass for old, polluting coal-fired power plants.
We will scrap Obama's Clean Power Plan. It had been one of Obama's key electoral battlegrounds for Trump. He had announced it and, unfortunately, he is keeping his promises.
The United States president has launched Affordable Clean Energy, the new plan for the regulation of coal-fired power plants and CO2 emissions, which scraps the legislation introduced by Obama in 2015 that never actually came into force, having been blocked by the Supreme Court in 2016 following complaints from numerous states.
The measure stipulates that each state may set its own rules and independently decide on emissions targets for power plants and the respective methods.
Trump, who during the election campaign promised more jobs in the fossil fuel sector and a new era for the coal industry, with this plan allows plants to raise emissions limits so that many coal-fired power plants that would previously have been forced to close can now continue to operate without implementing any technological improvements.
The text, which was signed by Andrew Wheeler, the acting head of the EPA (the US Environmental Protection Agency), will now need to be completed in its regulations.
The EPA itself has revealed, in a report whose data were published by the NY Times, that Trump's new energy plan will cost Americans between 470 and 1,400 premature deaths through to 2030. The deaths will be caused by increased emissions of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5), which at high concentrations is frequently the cause of heart and lung disease — figures that have been calculated alongside chronic conditions such as asthma and bronchitis, which the agency has estimated at around 15,000 cases — while tens of thousands of school days will be lost due to respiratory illnesses. The EPA had also calculated that over the same period Obama's plan would instead have saved between 1,500 and 3,600 lives a year.
Several states, led by New York, have pledged to fight back and launch legal proceedings should the Affordable Clean Energy plan be approved.
According to Barbara D. Underwood, New York's attorney general, "climate change is real regardless of how much this administration tries to deny it. What is needed is strong, immediate action to drastically reduce pollution and promote sustainable, clean and affordable energy — not steps backwards that prop up costly, polluting plants."
Alongside Underwood, in addition to environmental organisations, many states have already announced legal proceedings: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and the District of Columbia. The cities of New York City (NY), Broward County and South Miami (Florida), Boulder (Colorado), Chicago (Illinois) and Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) will also support the legal case. Meanwhile, the states of North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and the city of Los Angeles, had already taken a stand against the abolition of the Clean Power Plan since April.