Obama’s Clean Power Plan to tackle climate change

In what some critics are calling a “war on coal”, President Obama today unveiled the final version of his plan to tackle greenhouse gases from coal-fired power plants. In a video released by the White House he says: “We can’t condemn our kids and grandkids to a world that is beyond fixing.”

A White House statement on Sunday said the Clean Power Plan will cut emissions by 32 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. The plan cuts emissions about 9 per cent deeper than last year’s draft, the White House said, but gives states two years more to cut the emissions. It will particularly focus on wind and solar power and other renewable energy sources.

This may encourage the EU to strengthen its proposals for the Paris climate change conference, due to take place in November 2015. The conference objective is to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, from all the nations of the world – which has previously been problematic, if not impossible, to achieve.

‘Not an opinion, it is fact’

The Republicans and some US states say the plan will cost jobs and profits. Previoius efforts by President Obama to tackle climate change have been beset by legal battles. In a video released on Monday, he says the administration has “been working with states and power companies to ensure they have the flexibility they need to cut this pollution”.

The US president says in the film that climate change is “not an opinion, it is fact”. Public opinion in America is divided on climate change, with a loud, if not significantly large, group of climate change deniers in public debate.

However, according to Yale’s 2015 report on climate change opinion in America,63 per cent of Americans think global warming is happening, compared to only one in five “deniers”.

US right’s problem with climate change

In 2001 President George W Bush provoked international outrage when it was announced the United States would not implement the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

President Bush – who believed America was being unfairly blamed for emissions – agreed to the Kyoto protocol, but the US Senate failed to ratify the agreement. At the time Mr Bush said he would not sign an agreement which would “harm our economy and hurt our workers” and “exempts 80 per cent of the world… from compliance”.

If the Clean Power Plan passes into law, a Republican administration would be likely to reverse its commitments. In addition to the party’s business ties, some of the leading candidates have made public their views on climate change.

Following a cold winter in 2009, current Republican front-runner Donald Trump said: “The Nobel committee should take the Nobel prize back from Al Gore.”

Former US vice-president Gore is an environmental activist who won the Nobel peace prize in 2007 for his efforts to draw the world’s attention to made-made climate change.

Expressing often cited Republican concerns about climate policy, Mr Trump said: “Gore wants us to clean up our factories and plants in order to protect us from global warming, when China and other countries couldn’t care less. It would make us totally noncompetitive in the manufacturing world.”

Jeb Bush, who is a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential race, told Esquire in 2009: “I’m a sceptic. I’m not a scientist. I think the science has been politicised. I would be very wary of hollowing out our industrial base even further… It may be only partially man-made.”

In 2014 Senator Ted Cruz, another candidate for the 2016 Republican nomination, complained about the “so-called scientific theory”, arguing that “data are not supporting what the [man-made climate change] advocates are arguing.”

During a hustings this month, his stance was described – without protest from the senator – as “full-out denial”.