The growing criticisms of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions have a common theme — the agency and the president, it is often alleged, are waging a “war on coal.” And indeed, if the so-called “Clean Power Plan” is successfully implemented by the agency, it’s pretty clear that coal use will decline, even as we’ll get more and more of our electricity from natural gas and renewables (all trends that have begun already anyway).
But according to a new analysis of how the plan will work, all this emphasis on coal may distract from one of the policy’s key features. The Clean Power Plan, finds the analysis by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), will work most of all by stoking more efficient uses of energy. In other words, wherever electricity comes from under the plan — whether coal, natural gas or renewables — we’ll be giving off less greenhouse gas emissions simply because we’ll be using less of it in total (in some cases, if you will, wasting less).
Read the full story. (Washington Post)
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