Time Is Ticking for Obama’s Climate Agenda: ‘The president will have to hurry if he wants climate-change rules in place by the time he leaves the Oval Office’
'As President Obama reboots his campaign against climate change, his most formidable obstacle is no longer the coal industry or congressional Republicans. It’s the calendar. In his first term, Obama sought legislative limits on the carbon emissions associated with global climate change but failed when the Senate shelved the “cap-and-trade” legislation the House passed in 2009. Obama this week announced he would pursue the same goals, primarily through the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of carbon emissions from existing power plants. Those regulations would squeeze the use of coal to generate electricity. Together with existing rules improving automotive fuel economy and other pending EPA standards that effectively bar the construction of coal-fired power plants, the new rules could achieve Obama’s goal of cutting emissions by nearly one-fifth by 2020.'
