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Obama to Take Action to Slash Coal Pollution


By CORAL DAVENPORT JUNE 1, 2014


Photo

Coal-fired power plants, like this one near St. Marys, Kan., are at the center of the debate on climate change. Credit Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Monday will announce one of the strongest actions ever taken by the United States government to fight climate change, a proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulation to cut carbon pollution from the nation’s power plants 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, according to people briefed on the plan who spoke anonymously because they had been asked not to reveal details.

The regulation takes aim at the largest source of carbon pollution in the United States, the nation’s more than 600 coal-fired power plants. If it withstands an expected onslaught of legal and legislative attacks, experts say that it could close hundreds of the plants and also lead, over the course of decades, to systemic changes in the American electricity industry, including transformations in how power is generated and used.
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It is also likely to stand as President Obama’s last chance to substantially shape domestic policy and as a defining element of his legacy. The president, who failed to push a sweeping climate change bill through Congress in his first term, is now acting on his own by using his executive authority under the 1970 Clean Air Act to issue the regulation.

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Coal-fired plants like the Morgantown Generating Station in Newburg, Md., in the background, would be affected by the rule. Credit Mark Wilson/Getty Images Under the rule, states will be given a wide menu of policy options to achieve the pollution cuts. Rather than immediately shutting down coal plants, states would be allowed to reduce emissions by making changes across their electricity systems — by installing new wind and solar generation or energy-efficiency technology, and by starting or joining state and regional “cap and trade” programs, in which states agree to cap carbon pollution and buy and sell permits to pollute.
E.P.A. officials have said they hope the flexible approach will allow states to comply with the regulation more easily and cost-effectively, by adopting policies best tailored to regional economies and energy mixes. But industry groups planning to sue to block or delay the rule have said that approach makes the rule more legally vulnerable.
The details of the proposed regulation were first reported Sunday afternoon by The Wall Street Journal online.
Because burning coal is the largest source of the greenhouse gas emissions that scientists blame for trapping heat in the atmosphere and dangerously warming the planet, the rule is expected to have a powerful environmental impact. It comes on top of a regulation Mr. Obama issued in his first term that sharply increased the required fuel economy of vehicles, the second-largest source of carbon pollution in the United States.
Experts said that the new regulation would set the United States on track to meet its target set forth in a United Nations accord in 2009, when Mr. Obama pledged that the United States would cut its greenhouse gas pollution 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 percent by 2050.
On Sunday, environmental advocates praised the proposed rule for its breadth and reach while the coal industry attacked it as a symbol of executive overreach that could wreak economic havoc. Republican campaigns plan to use the rule to attack incumbent Democrats in this fall’s midterm elections.
“This momentous announcement raises the bar for controlling carbon emissions in the United States,” said Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute, a Washington research organization, adding, “These new standards send a powerful message around the world.”

Scott Segal, a lawyer with the firm Bracewell & Giuliani, which represents coal companies and plans to sue over the rule, wrote in an email, “Clearly, it is designed to materially damage the ability of conventional energy sources to provide reliable and affordable power, which in turn can inflict serious damage on everything from household budgets to industrial jobs.”
Last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a report warning that the rule could lower the gross domestic product by $50 billion annually.
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taylor

YesterdayThe Republicans have kids also, don't you care about them?
Mr. Gadsden

YesterdayDemocrats say: "We fight for the middle class" Democrats do: 1) destroy middle-class jobs (imposing regulations that coal plants can't...
Jim

YesterdayI hope everyone here understands by taking 600 Coal plants off line with no replacement or little replacement. We will have rolling...

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The proposal to be unveiled Monday will be a draft, open to public comment, and is certain to set off a wave of lobbying from states, industry groups and environmentalists seeking to shape the final version of the rule. While there is no legal deadline for finalizing the regulation, Mr. Obama has directed the E.P.A. to issue the rule by June 2015 so that the administration can begin putting the program in place before he leaves office.

Nations around the world are closely scrutinizing the climate change rule and its prospects.

The timing of the rule signals that Mr. Obama may be more interested in achieving a legacy-making global deal on climate change than in short-term political concerns. While the rule could make things politically difficult for incumbent Democrats from coal states in November, it could make things easier for American climate change negotiators this fall at the United Nations General Assembly, where governments are expected to hold side meetings intended to forge a global climate change treaty that negotiators hope to have signed by 2015.

Over the long term, the United States has been the world’s largest emitter of carbon pollution, but today China is the largest, with India and other developing Asian countries poised to see an explosion in their carbon pollution in the coming years as millions of people join the middle class and begin enjoying cheap coal-fired electricity.

But China and India have resisted American pressure to cut their own carbon pollution because, they have said, the United States has no moral authority to push other nations to cut pollution when it fails to do so at home.

State Department climate negotiators hope that by bringing the new E.P.A. rule to the table, they will be able to demonstrate significant action and have fresh leverage to broker a deal.

“I fully expect action by the United States to spur others in taking concrete action,” Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/us/politics/epa-to-seek-30-percent-cut-in-carbon-emissions.html?_r=0









What is crap and traitor!!!

Mark Udall’s Wife Partners with Leonardo DiCaprio to Call for Carbon Tax

Leonardo DiCaprio begins series of anti-oil, anti-fracking videos


Leonardo Dicaprio and Al Gore together for Earth Day in 2007 / AP

BY: Elizabeth Harrington
August 28, 2014 9:00 am

Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Udall’s (Colo.) wife called for a carbon tax while appearing in a new anti-oil video produced by Leonardo DiCaprio.
“People are ready for conversation,” says Maggie Fox, Udall’s wife and former president of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, in the Green World Rising video, entitled, “Carbon.”
“They’re ready to understand that carbon pollution is causing this challenge and that there is a simple solution: put a price on carbon pollution,” she says.
DiCaprio is releasing a series of environmentalist videos on climate change, the first focusing on gathering support for a cap and trade system. A dark animated robot represents the oil and gas industry, and is shown grabbing money from the ground, producing nothing but black smoke into the atmosphere.
The video states that there is a “moral reason” for a carbon tax, and features Fox; self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.); Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress; Eamon Ryan, the leader of the Irish Green Party, and others.
DiCaprio, who flies “around the world doing good for the environment,” narrates the video. He calls fossil fuels, black oil, coal, and gas an “ancient menace,” and attacks the oil and gas industry.
“They drill, they extract, making trillions of dollars,” he says. “They frack, they mine, earning astronomical profits. We need to keep this carbon in the ground.”
The video ends with the message: “Your community can defeat the carbon monster.”
Fox recently stepped down as president and CEO of the Climate Reality Project, which was founded by former Vice President and environmentalist activist Al Gore. In a statement announcing her departure, Gore said Fox joined the Climate Reality Project to “guide” the failed cap and trade push in Congress in 2009.
Gore said Fox led the organization’s efforts to “combat the climate denial cottage-industry.” He said Fox joined him at a training event in South Africa for “Climate Reality Leaders” this March, where they called for a “market price on carbon and a political price on denial.”
“Faced with the realization that the well-funded and pervasive climate denial industry was winning the broader cultural battle, The Climate Reality Project took up the mantle to dispel doubt and spread the immediate reality of climate change with innovative organizing and communication initiatives designed to transform the cultural conversation,” Fox said, when describing their work.
Sen. Udall’s campaign did not return request for comment on whether he agrees with his wife’s position, and the video’s anti-fracking and anti-oil stance. On his Senate website, Udall says he supports putting a “common-sense price on carbon.”
In the video, Fox, who worked for the environmentalist Sierra Club for 20 years, claims that the United States spends $110 billion dollars on “climate change events” a year, in her argument to tax carbon emissions.
“In the 50s in London—based on the Industrial Revolution—there was so much pollution, as you see in Beijing and around China today, that you actually couldn’t see six straight feet in front of you,” she says. “They put a price on pollution and it changed.”
“What Maggie Fox endorses—and what is touted in the video—is a job-killing, zero benefit to the environment carbon tax that Australia just repealed this year because it did not work,” said Michael Sandoval, an energy policy analyst with the Colorado-based Independence Institute. “Increasing energy prices with a costly tax on carbon might satisfy the wishes of eco-extremists like Fox, but it only attacks small businesses, endangers low income residents, and reduces the number of good paying jobs in the economy.”
Green World Rising proposes taxing carbon dioxide emissions at $100 per ton, or more, as necessary for “saving humanity from global warming-induced extinction.”
“The concept of a carbon tax is simple: make it expensive to pollute carbon,” DiCaprio’s website states. “Once a carbon tax is implemented, polluters would have to pay a tax for every ton of CO2 or other greenhouse gas they pollute. That tax can range anywhere from $20 per ton of CO2 all the way up to $100 or even higher.”
Both DiCaprio and Gore’s environmental advocacy has been criticized as hypocritical, given their lavish lifestyles and large carbon footprints. DiCaprio throws parties on the 482-foot yacht owned by the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, which generates its wealth from oil. Gore has racked up $30,000 electricity bills.
The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation financed the production of the video, which had footage provided by Greenpeace. RT America is also listed in the credits as contributing to the video’s production.

http://freebeacon.com/politics/mark-...or-carbon-tax/


Crap and Traitor Puppets working hard on the latest scam!!!!

Crap and Traitor = Money from you, to them, World Wide.. 1 2 3, all together now, can we say
SCAM..