Making the Case for the Clean Power Plan

Rhea Suh, Natural Resources Defense Council

I’m excited to tell you about NRDC’s new resource book on President Obama’s plan to cut the dangerous carbon pollution from our power plants.

The book is called “Clean Power: The Case for Carbon Pollution Limits.”

It’s an NRDC publication that relies on the most authoritative sources anywhere to lay out the enormous benefits of cleaning up our dirty power plants. It’s a searchable, comprehensively sourced tool for journalists, editorial writers, scholars, activists and citizens everywhere who want to know the facts about this vital initiative. And it’s an answer to the big polluters and their congressional allies trying to slow or derail needed action on climate change.

They’re not going to stand in the way of progress. The public is demanding real action.

Seven Americans in ten understand we have an obligation to protect future generations from the growing dangers of climate change. Seven in ten want to cut the dangerous carbon pollution from our power plants. Half of all Republicans want carbon pollution cut.

Last September, more than 400,000 Americans turned out for the People’s Climate March in New York City, calling on our leaders to take real action now. Just last month, Pope Francis issued his compelling encyclical making the case that taking action on climate change is a moral imperative for our generation. And more than 1,000 mayors, coast to coast, have pledged to cut carbon emissions in their own cities.

We know from listening to hundreds of investors and business executives that energy efficiency and renewable power are among the most attractive investment opportunities of our generation. And we know from medical professionals that fighting climate change may be the single greatest global health opportunity of the 21st Century.

This groundswell of support for real action on climate change is driving momentum for successful climate talks this December in Paris, where leaders from nearly 200 countries will gather to chart the way forward.

We’re doing what’s right for our own people, right here in this country.

Our friends around the world, though, are watching.

And this is what they see.

We’re cleaning up our cars – with an agreement to double our gas mileage by 2025 and an effort to build on that progress even more.

We’re cleaning up our trucks, with an agreement to raise fuel mileage for the big rigs that ship everything we buy.

And we’re cleaning up our dirty power plants.

That’s what President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is all about.

He’s directed the Environmental Protection Agency to issue final standards this summer that, for the first time ever, will set limits on the amount of dangerous carbon pollution our power plants may spew into the atmosphere.

This will mark our biggest step forward yet in the fight against climate change. Power plants, after all, account for about 40 percent of the U.S. carbon footprint. Reducing that pollution is essential.

Seems like every time we do anything in this country, though, to protect our environment and health, the big industrial polluters and their allies in Congress start howling that the sky will fall down.

We’re hearing those voices already from Republican leaders in Congress, politicians seeking to derail progress, while offering no plan of their own for confronting the central environmental challenge of our time.

If you’ve struggled to separate fact from fiction in the high-stakes debate over the Clean Power Plan, the NRDC Clean Power resource book is for you.

In a dozen easy-to-digest chapters, this book breaks down the issues. It shows how the Clean Power Plan can help us become more efficient, do more with less waste, and create 274,000 good-paying American jobs while we’re at it; get more power from the wind and sun, while preparing our workers for success in the fast-growing global market for the clean energy solutions of the future; and save the typical family $103 a year in electricity bills, while building the most reliable power system anywhere in the world.

I’m confident this resource book will have outsized influence. Put simply, the more we know about the Clean Power Plan and the benefits it will bring, the more excited we are about putting the plan into action, and doing it now.

Originally posted here.