What is the Affordable Clean Energy rule and how does it compare to the Clean Power Plan?

What is the Affordable Clean Energy rule and how does it compare to the Clean Power Plan?

On August 20, Acting Environmental  Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Wheeler signed a notice of proposed rulemaking called the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, the next step in developing the Trump Administration’s much-anticipated replacement to the Obama-era Clean Power Plan.
The Affordable Clean Energy rule establishes guidelines for states to develop carbon emissions reductions standards for existing coal-fired power plants.

Opinion: The frog, climate change, and Trump

Opinion: The frog, climate change, and Trump

There is a short analogy that has been used to explain the human response to climate change (whether in the form of denial, inaction, or delay, or simply nonchalance): that if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, he will hop right out, but if you put the frog in a pot of cold water and then turn on the burner, he will remain calmly in the pot until he is fully cooked.

The analogy does provide some insight into our lackadaisical response to a changing climate. From a human perspective, climate change is indeed a slow-moving phenomenon, but geologically-speaking, it is incredibly rapid. As a set of events and changes unleashed primarily by our discovery of fossil fuels some 300 years ago (and dramatically increased rates of extraction and combustion mostly in the last hundred), a cognitive sense of changing climate is distributed across only a dozen generations – either too slow to notice, or too ambiguous to come to conclusions about causality.