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SOURCE: Politico

DATE: August 14, 2018

SNIP: The Trump administration is preparing to unveil its plan for undoing Barack Obama’s most ambitious climate regulation — offering a replacement that would do far less to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet, according to POLITICO’s review of a portion of the unpublished draft.

The new climate proposal for coal-burning power plants, expected to be released in the coming days, would give states wide latitude to write their own modest regulations for coal plants or even seek permission to opt out, according to the document and a source who has read other sections of the draft.

Obama’s plan was meant to see greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. power sector fall to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

The Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that both carbon emissions and pollutants such as soot and smog would be higher under its new proposal than under the Clean Power Plan. And Trump’s critics call it a recipe for abandoning the effort to take on one of the world’s most urgent problems.

McCabe said based on a description of the proposal, it would offer “a significant amount of discretion to states to decide that nothing at all needs to be done.”

States will be able to present reasons for why they don’t want to regulate coal plants, including considering how many more years they have left before they would probably shut down, according to a source who reviewed a different section of the document.