On his last full day in office, Donald Trump was handed one last court defeat, which will reverberate in an important ways for years. E&E News reported:
A federal appeals court this morning struck down the Trump administration’s Clean Power Plan replacement. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit directed EPA to start over with a new regulatory approach after finding that the agency’s Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule failed to provide adequate environmental and public health protections.
Before considering the road ahead, it’s worth pausing to reflect on how we arrived at this point.
As regular readers may recall, then-President Barack Obama first unveiled the details of his administration’s Clean Power Plan in 2014, and it was a fairly ambitious policy intended to reduce carbon pollution from existing power plants. The Democratic White House set a goal of cutting emissions 30% by 2030.
As a candidate in 2016, Donald Trump promised to undo Obama’s plan, and once in office, he unveiled a policy the Republican administration called the Affordable Clean Energy rule (or ACE Rule) in 2018. The policy wasn’t subtle: Trump and his team set out to relax pollution rules, keep coal-power plants in business longer, and in the process, make the climate crisis worse.
The New York Times uncovered an especially pernicious detail, reporting that the “fine print” in the administration’s new plan “includes an acknowledgment that the plan would increase carbon emissions and lead to up to 1,400 premature deaths annually.”
This quickly became the centerpiece of the Republican White House’s climate, energy and deregulatory agenda. And as of this morning, it’s dead.








