President Donald Trump’s administration unveiled its plan Aug. 21 to dramatically weaken pollution limits on coal-fired power plants by shifting most of the regulatory burden to states in a further assault on the Obama climate legacy.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s “Affordable Clean Energy” proposal would replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan’s sweeping changes in the U.S. electricity mix with more modest emissions curbs at individual power plants. It would set pollution guidelines based on assumptions about what improvements could be eked out through efficiency upgrades at the facilities, then give states the latitude to design their own plans for paring ...