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Why Trump's Rollback of the Clean Power Plan May Have Little Impact On the West's Coal Production

PDTillman
/
Creative Commons

Last week President Trump signed an executive order to roll back Obama’s Clean Power Plan. That plan had created regulations on CO2 emissions, especially for the coal-fired power plants that produce a large share of the country’s greenhouse gases.

Analysts say the roll-back of the plan will take quite a while, especially because consumer and environmental groups have vowed to fight Trump’s measure in court. And even if Trump’s executive order makes it through litigation, the measure may not have much impact on coal production in the West. That’s according to an article published in High Country News last Tuesday. It says renewable energy in the West will continue to increase even if the progress is slower than it would have been under the Obama climate rules. To find out more, I talked with the author of the article, Elizabeth Shogren. She’s the Washington, D.C. correspondent for High Country News.

Austin Cope is a former Morning Edition host for KSJD and now produces work on a freelance basis for the station. He grew up in Cortez and hosted a show on KSJD when he was 10 years old. After graduating from Montezuma-Cortez High School in 2010, he lived in Belgium, Ohio, Spain, northern Wyoming, and Himachal Pradesh, India before returning to the Cortez area. He has a degree in Politics from Oberlin College in Ohio.
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