The cornerstone of the Obama Administration’s environmental program was in the news again on Aug. 3, 2015, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued its final Clean Power Plan rules for reducing power plants’ carbon emissions. The final rules add several meaningful modifications to the EPA’s June 2014 proposal. Some of the revisions add to the proposed rule’s stringencies, such as moderately increasing emissions reduction targets to a 32% emissions reduction by 2030 compared to the 2014 proposal’s 30%. Other revisions modestly relax the implementation timelines by a year or two (see table 1). The extensions address some of the concerns cited in the more than four million comments submitted to the EPA in an effort to allay certain concerns surrounding reliability and feasibility, but it also prompts some new questions, and will almost certainly face a high level of scrutiny and, potentially, judicial challenges.
06-Aug-2015