The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) today joined major public interest groups urging the to overturn the Trump administration’s plan claiming to address climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently finalized a plan that would fail to avoid a climate catastrophe.
“With climate change impacts rising, and clean energy costs falling, EPA should be strengthening the Clean Power Plan, not scrapping it for a do-nothing dirty power scheme,” said David Doniger, senior strategic director in NRDC’s Climate & Clean Energy program. “We’re going to court today to stop Trump from destroying the clean air laws we have to protect Americans’ health and safety from the nation’s biggest climate polluters.”
The groups filed a petition asking the appeals court to review the EPA’s Affordable Clean Energy rule, which would not cut power plant carbon pollution and the agency’s plan to dismantle the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, our best option to clean up those plants. The groups are: Appalachian Mountain Club, Center for Biological Diversity, Clean Air Council, Clean Wisconsin, Conservation Law Foundation, Environmental Defense Fund, Environmental Law & Policy Center, Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club.
In June, the EPA issued a final rule that replaces the Obama-era Clean Power Plan with one that allows states to set emissions standards for coal-fired plants. The Trump administration called the previous rule “overreaching.”
Introduced in August 2015, President Obama’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) called for national standards to address carbon pollution from power plants and a transition to “cleaner sources of energy” by 2030. At the time, Obama and the EPA projected that the plan would result in $26 billion to $45 billion net climate and health benefits.
