Coal-fired Congress Blocks Path to Clean Energy

[rucky]

Source: earthjustice.org

U.S. leadership on global warming threatened by compromise in Congress
...

Although the Environmental Protection Agency's recent Clean Air Act endangerment finding prescribes a strong antidote to global warming pollution—a fact President Obama will surely highlight tomorrow on the final day of climate negotiations in Copenhagen—a political compromise over coal plants threatens to bind EPA's hands just as it begins to act.

The endangerment finding, based on overwhelming scientific evidence, says that global warming pollutants like carbon dioxide threaten human health and welfare. As a result, the Clean Air Act requires EPA to reduce global warming pollution from a wide range of sources, including cars, factories, and perhaps most importantly, coal-fired power plants.

Coal-fired power plants account for more than a third of U.S. global warming pollution, and as MIT researchers recently concluded, any credible solution to global warming must address emissions from these existing facilities. Period. The Clean Air Act is a powerful tool to do so, and it has in the past successfully reduced harmful pollutants.

But some legislators, feeling the heat from industry (not the planet), struck a deal as part of the American Clean Energy and Security Act—a cap-and-trade bill narrowly passed in June 2009 by the House of Representatives—that restricts EPA's regulatory power under the existing Clean Air Act. If adopted in a final law, the deal would make grandfathers of the 600-plus existing coal plants in the United States, allowing them to take a pass on new technology that would reduce global warming pollution...

Read more: http://unearthed.earthjustice.org/blog/2009-december/coalfired-congress-blocks-path-clean-energy

[notadmblnd]

1. well I guess the clean energy lobbyists are just going to have to out bid coal lobbyists

for their politicians:shrug:

[wtmusic]

2. money vs. the planet, once again.

The odds are with money