Obama takes aim at power plant CO2 emissions

Speaking at Georgetown University on Tuesday, President Barack Obama said he would require, through executive orders, that power plants reduce the amount of carbon dioxide they emit. He will also use federal money to help the US advance renewable energy technology and to fortify cities against storms and droughts, the New York Times reports.

Carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants account for about one-third of greenhouse gas emissions in the US and about 40 percent of our carbon output. The president said he didn’t want to leave future generations with a planet they can’t fix:

As a president, as a father and as an American, I am here to say we need to act.

I don’t have much patience for anyone who denies that this challenge is real. We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society.

While we may not live to see the full realization of our ambition, we will have the satisfaction of knowing that the world we leave to our children will be better off for what we did.

The comment about the Flat Earth Society was intended for the critics of global climate change science. President Obama said there was no longer a need to debate whether human activity was responsible for warming the earth: “The question now is whether we will have the courage to act before it is too late.”

House Speaker John A Boehner, Republican of Ohio, called the president’s plan “asbolutely crazy,” the BBC reported.

“These policies, rejected even by the last Democratic-controlled Congress, will shutter power plants, destroy good-paying American jobs and raise electricity bills,” the New York Times quoted Mr Boehner as saying in a statement.

In addition, governors from seven states—Indiana, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, West Virginia, and North Dakota—have called on the president to cancel his plan, which they also say will shut down coal-fired power plants across the country.

The key elements of the plan are as follows: