The US Supreme Court has recently curbed the powers of the country\u2019s environment regulator, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to mandate reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under the Clean Power Plan (CPP). While the Clean Air Act empowered it to put in place the \u201cbest system of emission reduction\u201d, the court ruled that the EPA had not been explicitly delegated powers by the Congress to implement the CPP. This means it will be harder for the Biden administration to move the needle on lowering the US\u2019s GHG emissions, even though it aims to halve this from 2005 levels by the end of the decade. The CPP was seen by the rest of the world as the US pivoting towards meaningful emission control, after having made bolder climate action commitments compared to the past at the Paris climate summit. Under the plan, states would have had to contend with mandates to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants by improving their efficiency and pushing natural gas use for generation and renewables adoption. However, it had soon run into hurdles, in the courts and from the executive once climate-sceptic Donald Trump became the president. States with significant coal-capacity baulked at the idea of such controls, fearing a hit to jobs and the coal industry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The US Supreme Court has recently curbed the powers of the country\u2019s environment regulator, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to mandate reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under the Clean Power Plan (CPP). While the Clean Air Act empowered it to put in place the \u201cbest system of emission reduction\u201d, the court ruled that the EPA had not been explicitly delegated powers by the Congress to implement the CPP. This means it will be harder for the Biden administration to move the needle on lowering the US\u2019s GHG emissions, even though it aims to halve this from 2005 levels by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[198,130,138],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-503638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coal-the-financial-express","category-newspapers","category-the-financial-express"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503638\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}