JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The Environmental Protection Agency announced earlier this week new regulations seeking a 30 percent reduction of carbon emissions at coal-fired power plants by the year 2030. The regulations have been described as the U.S. government’s most sweeping effort aimed at curbing the emissions that cause global warming.

AMY GOODMAN: However, The Guardian reports some of the most coal-heavy states, including West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio, will be allowed to maintain, or even increase, their emissions under the EPA plan. Meanwhile, the European Union and the United States must, quote, “do even more” to help keep global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius.

For more, we go now to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Janet Redman, director of the Climate Policy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies. She recently co-released a statement with Wenonah Hauter called “EPA’s Carbon Rule Falls Short of Real Emissions Reduction.”

Janet Redman, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about what President Obama announced, what the EPA announced last weekend and what it means.

JANET REDMAN: Sure. I think what’s important to keep in mind is there are kind of three pieces to this. This is an exciting and important announcement, but it falls short of real leadership on climate change, and there are a lot of devils in the details that we still need to figure out in the next year. So, first and foremost, this is an incredibly important announcement. This is the first time that the White House—that the U.S. is looking at reducing greenhouse gas pollution from power plants. That’s based on a finding from 2009, when the EPA determined that greenhouse gas emissions do threaten the well-being of Americans because they lead to climate change, which has negative impacts on families and on our environment. So this is an incredibly important announcement.

And it’s important, in particular, because climate change is really an environmental justice issue. The impacts of climate change and the impacts of pollution that come from power plants hurt people who are living in communities of color and low-income communities first and worst. So that’s an incredibly important win.

The second—the problem, however, is that those reductions are not enough to make the U.S. a leader, either here at home or on the global stage. So let’s look at the numbers a little bit. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body of hundreds of scientists from around the world who study climate change, who read thousands of reports and put out their own global assessment every few years, has said that developed countries like the United States need to reduce their economywide emissions between 25 and 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. Now, when you look at Obama and EPA’s plan, they’re talking about reducing emissions from only the power-generating sector, so that’s only about 40 percent of our economy. And they’re talking about reducing those emissions from the year 2005. Our emissions were much higher in 2005 than in 1990 levels, so we’re already creating a kind of a false baseline and measuring our reductions differently than other folks in other countries are measuring them. So, a 30 percent reduction in only a relatively—an important, but small part of our economywide emissions, from a higher baseline and by a later year, means that we’re not meeting the kinds of—we’re not making the kinds of emission reductions that we need to to stay below two degrees of warming from preindustrial levels to avoid catastrophic climate change.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Janet Redman, on the environmental justice aspect of this, there’s also this issue of the allowance of cap and trade as a means of—perhaps where some communities will not be able to benefit from these reductions. Could you talk about that?

JANET REDMAN: Sure. This is where the kind of the devil-in-the-detail piece comes in. What the EPA’s plan does, instead of saying, “Listen, we’re going to have an emission reduction plan that’s the same for every single state,” this EPA plan says, the states—we’ll set targets for each state, and the targets are different for every state. As you mentioned, some of the most polluting states have actually lower targets or, in fact, may not have to reduce their emissions at all. But there are many different ways that states can meet their emission reductions if they have them, things like renewable energy portfolio standards, demand-side energy efficiency. California, for example, has fuel emission standards.

But there’s also a mechanism called cap and trade, where a cap is placed on greenhouse gas emissions—we like that part; the cap’s important—but polluters are allowed to trade emissions permits, pollution permits that allow them to meet their regulatory obligations in the cheapest way possible. That’s a problem because while the atmosphere may not care where greenhouse gas emissions come from, the people who live in the shadow of the most polluting and dirtiest industries, the ones where it will be most expensive to clean up and are most likely to use cheaper mechanisms, like buying credits, will still be breathing in the toxic emissions of those power plants.

But even more importantly, I think—this is where we’re really concerned about what happens over the next year, while states are writing their plans and the EPA are reviewing those plans from states—there’s a problem called offsetting. In the EPA’s plan, it says it will not accept offsets from outside of the power sector. So, for example, it won’t say, if you protect some forests over here, that’s going to count the same as lowering your emissions from a power plant. However, the state plans do accept out-of-sector offsets, so it will be on the states themselves to say to the EPA, “Hey, we’ve got these out-of-sector emissions reductions, so we’re paying farmers to reduce their emissions from, say, methane, from manure, and we’re counting those as our own, while our own power plants continue to emit or emit more. We’re going to figure out a way to have those not count when we report to you at the federal level.” I think even the EPA knows that that’s going to be incredibly complicated. So the plans over the next year are incredibly important. The problem is, once the plans are approved by the EPA, it’s a hands-off approach. So we’ll have to wait about a decade to see if in fact states were able to take apart the various offsets inside their cap-and-trade program to make sure that in fact power plants in states like California are really in fact reducing their emissions.

AMY GOODMAN: Republican House Speaker John Boehner has criticized Obama’s plan, saying it would, quote, “cause a surge in electricity bills … shut down plants and potentially put an average of 224,000 more people out of work every year.” He also said he’s not qualified, really, to talk about climate change. He says, “I’m not qualified to debate the science over climate change.” Your thoughts on this, very quickly, in 10 seconds, Janet?

JANET REDMAN: Certainly. I think what’s important is that reducing emissions and reining in pollution from coal-powered power plants and augmenting renewable energy and energy efficiency actually will create jobs, it will reduce costs that we spend right now on caring for asthma and caring for days missed when kids have to—when parents have to take kids to the hospital to treat asthma. It’s better for our economy, it’s better for our communities, to reduce pollution from power plants. We should be doing a better job than we are. We should be doing a better job than the EPA’s plan.

AMY GOODMAN: Janet, we have to leave it there. Janet Redman is with the Institute for Policy Studies.