Better late than never. This afternoon, speaking at Georgetown University, President Obama laid out what his aides had billed as a major initiative to fight climate change. The big news—which was not really news, since it had already been widely reported—was that the Administration will impose rules limiting carbon emissions from both new and existing power plants.
“For the sake of our children and the health and safety of all Americans, I’m directing the Environmental Protection Agency to put an end to the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our power plants,” Obama said. This is, truly, a big deal. Power plants are responsible for about forty per cent of U.S. emissions. And if the rules actually take effect—years of litigation are considered inevitable—they could significantly reduce the amount of carbon dioxide Americans add to the atmosphere every year.
“This is the change Americans have been waiting for on climate,” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said in response to the announcement.
But if the President deserves to be congratulated for finally taking action—and he does—then he also deserves to be admonished for having waited so long. The option of imposing regulations to limit carbon dioxide has been available to Obama almost since he took office. Indeed, as David Roberts of Grist has repeatedly pointed out, the Obama Administration has been legally obligated to issue such regulations ever since it declared carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant, back in 2009. Steven Cohen, executive director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, put it this way: “We have wasted five years getting to this point.”
Even by its own rather leisurely timetable, the Administration is tardy. The E.P.A. proposed rules governing new power plants last year, which would effectively prevent any additional coal-fired power plants from being built. But in April, just as the deadline for finalizing the rules was approaching, the Administration announced it was delaying them. Ten states, including New York, announced plans to sue the E.P.A. over this decision, but they held off when the White House let it be known that the President would be unveiling a climate-change plan.
As for rules governing existing power plants, these remain to be written, so it’s too early to say what will be in them, or how significant they’ll be. (It’s worth noting that at least Wall Street seems to believe the President is serious about reducing America’s use of coal; shares of coal producers slumped during the buildup to Obama’s announcement.)
Even before the President delivered his speech, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was denouncing it. That reflexive political reaction goes a long way toward explaining why it took Obama so long. And this points to the deeper problem with the President’s announcement today, which is the same problem that afflicts just about everything that happens in Washington these days. As Matthew Yglesias points out, when Obama took office, no one who cared about reducing carbon emissions would have championed E.P.A. regulation as the solution, “for the very good reason that it’s a bad way to make climate-change policy.” It was hoped that the threat of such regulation would bring Republicans to the negotiating table to hammer out some sort of broader legislation—a cap-and-trade plan, or, less likely, a carbon tax. But that didn’t happen, and when it became clear that it wasn’t going to happen the Administration was left with the choice of going the regulatory route or doing nothing at all. It is fortunate that it chose the former, if unfortunate that it took so long to do so.
Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty.