A new Trump administration rule is a “do-nothing” approach to curbing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that cause climate change, according to three members of the Environmental Protection Agency’s leadership team under President Obama.
In a June 27, 2019 opinion piece in Newsweek, the team—including Gina McCarthy, former EPA administrator and current director of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE)—wrote that the Trump administration’s Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule “will achieve virtually no reductions in CO2 emissions and next to no cuts in soot and smog pollution.”
The ACE replaces the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which was estimated to reduce CO2 emissions from power plants 32% below 2005 levels by 2030.
McCarthy and co-authors Janet McCabe and Joseph Goffman explained that the new Trump rule will require only minimal technology fixes at coal-fired power plants. This approach could actually result in higher emissions, they wrote, because “more efficient plants could be called upon to run longer each day and operate over an extended lifetime, emitting cumulatively more CO2.”
The Trump administration’s actions “demonstrate its callous disregard for the EPA’s mission to protect public health and our precious natural resources in favor of its singular quest to save polluters money even at the expense of our children’s future,” the authors wrote.
Read the Newsweek op-ed: We Helped Write the Clean Power Plan, and Trump’s Do-Nothing Replacement is an Outrage | Opinion
Learn more
New EPA rule weakens Obama-era plan to cut coal plant emissions