People are always like: “Our energy is so dirty! There’s coal ash in the drinking water!
There’s oil all over this pelican!”
And … they’re right! The way we make energy in this country is filthy. That’s because
most of our electricity in the United States still comes from coal, and coal-fired power
plants spew out a lot of pollution.
That makes a big mess here at home, but even worse, the carbon dioxide produced when we
burn fossil fuels is creating a massive shambles all over the world.
(It’s climate change. That shambles is climate change.)
It's pretty remarkable when you think about it that the largest source of emissions in
our economy -- existing power plants -- have not truly been regulated
for their greenhouse gases before.
Now there’s a plan to change that. It’s called the Clean Power Plan, and you can think
of it as a giant Swiffer for our nation’s power plants, with the goal of cutting their
carbon emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels.
Sounds good, right? Except for the part where half the country is royally pissed off about
being asked to clean house.
It's my duty to fight against this unlawful power grab.
So pissed off that they’ve vowed to take the Clean Power Plan all the way to the Supreme Court.
Let’s look at how we got to this point.
The Clean Air Act -- which requires the EPA to … well, clean up the air --
has been around since Nixon.
What are you doing here? I thought you were dead!
Oh, Dick.
But it wasn’t until 2007 that the Supreme Court ruled that the act should also apply
to greenhouse gases, not just cut local pollution.
So now the EPA is telling states: “You gotta cut the emissions from your electricity production, guys --
but you get to decide how to do it.” The Clean Power Plan gives them three basic options"
First, make power plants more efficient.
Second, shift from coal to natural gas
(which is still a fossil fuel, but with less carbon dioxide).
Third, shift to clean energy like wind and solar.
Arroyo tells me that a bunch of states, like California, Hawaii, and New York, were doing
this already. But some -- especially those with a lot of coal, like West Virginia, Kentucky,
and Wyoming -- object to these changes. So they’re making a case
that the Clean Power Plan is unconstitutional.
And in February, just before Justice Antonin Scalia died, a majority of the Supreme Court
blocked implementation of the plan until the case is decided -- which makes this powerful,
historic, potentially world-changing legislation … kind of stuck.
And the upcoming election will actually have a big impact on getting it unstuck --
or just straight up thrown out. The next president can either fight for the Clean Power Plan
or let it die in the courts.
It's really hard to force an administration to implement something or to enforce something
if they don't want to. We lost a lot of time working on climate change during the Bush
administration, even when the Supreme Court ruled that they could and perhaps should be
moving forward under the Clean Air Act.
Abandoning the Clean Power Plan would be a pretty blatant signal to the rest of the world
that the United States is not actually committed to fixing the global climate crisis --
even though we bear a huge share of the blame for it in the first place.
Even fans of the Clean Power Plan acknowledge that it’s not perfect. Kind of like your Swiffer,
it can’t clean up everything: Many activists want deeper emissions cuts.
Low-income communities and people of color still bear more of the burdens of dirty power.
Natural gas releases methane -- itself a powerful greenhouse gas. And communities in coal country
are struggling as the industry changes (which was already happening
regardless of the Clean Power Plan).
But the more time we spend arguing in court over whether the Environmental Protection
Agency has the right to actually, you know, protect the environment, the more trouble
we’re going to be in -- and soon. Contrary to what Cosmo might tell you,
dirty isn’t always sexy -- definitely not when it comes to energy.
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