Obama to hit US power plants with tougher than expected emissions cuts

The president will announce a 32% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 in what he calls America’s biggest ever step against climate change


President Barack Obama will impose even steeper cuts on greenhouse gas emissions from US power plants than previously expected, senior administration officials said on Sunday, in what the president called the most significant step the US has ever taken to fight global warming.

A year after proposing unprecedented carbon dioxide limits, Obama was poised to finalize the rule at a White House event on Monday. In a video posted to Facebook, Obama said the limits were backed up by decades of data showing that without tough action, the world will face more extreme weather and escalating health problems like asthma.

“Climate change is not a problem for another generation,” Obama said. “Not anymore.”

Opponents vowed to sue immediately, and planned to ask the courts to put the rule on hold while legal challenges play out. Many states have threatened not to comply.

In his initial proposal, Obama had mandated a 30% nationwide cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, compared to 2005 levels. The final version will require a 32% cut instead, said the officials, who weren’t authorized to comment by name and requested anonymity.

The final rule also gives states an additional two years until 2022 to comply, officials said, yielding to complaints that the original deadline was too soon. States will also have until 2018 instead of 2017 to submit their plans for how they’ll meet their targets.

But the administration will attempt to incentivize states to take action earlier by offering credits to states that boost renewable sources like wind and solar in 2020 and 2021, officials said.

The focus on renewables marks a significant shift from the earlier version that sought to accelerate the ongoing transition from coal-fired power to natural gas plants, which emit far less carbon dioxide. The revised rule aims to keep the share of natural gas in the nation’s power mix at current levels.

The stricter limits in the final plan were certain to incense energy industry advocates who had already balked at the more lenient limits in the proposed plan. But the Obama administration said its tweaks would cut energy costs and address concerns about power grid reliability.

The Obama administration previously predicted the emissions limits will cost up to $8.8bn annually by 2030, although it said those costs would be far outweighed by health savings from fewer asthma attacks and other benefits. The actual price won’t be clear until states decide how they will reach their targets.

America’s largest source of greenhouse gases, power plants account for roughly one-third of all US emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming. Obama’s rule assigns customized targets to each state, then leaves it up to the state to determine how to meet them.

In the works for years, the power plant rule forms the cornerstone of Obama’s plan to curb US emissions and keep global temperatures from climbing, and its success is pivotal to the legacy Obama hopes to leave on climate change. Never before has the US sought to restrict carbon dioxide from existing power plants.

By clamping down on power plant emissions, Obama is also working to increase his leverage and credibility with other nations whose commitments he’s seeking for a global climate treaty to be finalized later this year in Paris. As its contribution to that treaty, the US has pledged to cut overall emissions 26% to 28% by 2025, compared to 2005.

Even before the rule was finalized, more than a dozen states announced plans to fight it. At the urging of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, some Republican governors have declared they simply won’t comply, setting up a certain confrontation with the Environmental Protection Agency, which by law can force its own plan on states that fail to submit implementation plans.

Yet even in many of those states, power companies and local utility authorities have started preparing to meet the targets. New, more efficient plants that are replacing older and dirtier ones have already pushed emissions down nearly 13% since 2005, putting them about halfway to meeting Obama’s goal.

In Congress, lawmakers have sought to use legislation to stop Obama’s regulation. McConnell has also tried previously to use an obscure, rarely successful maneuver to allow Congress to vote it down.

The more serious threat to Obama’s rule will likely come in the courts. The Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, which represents energy companies, said 20 to 30 states were poised to join with industry in suing over the rule. The Obama administration has a mixed track record in fending off legal challenges to its climate rules.

Obama to hit US power plants with tougher than expected emissions cuts

The US president will announce a 32% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 in what he calls America’s biggest ever step against climate change

President Barack Obama is planning to impose tougher than expected cuts on greenhouse gas emissions from US power plants, White House officials have said.

A year after proposing unprecedented carbon dioxide limits, the Obama administration was poised to finalise the rule at a White House event on Monday. 

The president called it most significant step the US has ever taken to fight global warming. 

Obama, in a video posted to Facebook, said the limits were backed up by decades of data and facts showing that without tough action the world will face more extreme weather and escalating health problems like asthma. 

“Climate change is not a problem for another generation,” he said. “Not anymore.” 

In his initial proposal, Obama had mandated a 30% nationwide cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, compared to 2005 levels. 

The final version, which follows extensive consultations with environmental groups and the energy industry, will require a 32% cut instead, according to Obama administration officials, who were not authorised to comment by name and requested anonymity. 

Opponents said they would sue the government immediately. They also planned to ask the courts to put the rule on hold while legal challenges play out. 

The final version also gives states an additional two years – until 2022 – to comply, yielding to complaints that the original deadline was too soon. States will also have until 2018 instead of 2017 to submit their plans for how they intend to meet their targets. 

Why Obama doesn’t understand the lust for power of our African leaders

Even before the dust could settle on President Barack Obama’s candid criticism of African presidents who manipulate their constitutions so that they can stay longer in power, Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni – once the west’s model of a truly democratic leader – was on his way again to contest the presidential seat he has held for 30 years. From Rwanda to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi to Zimbabwe, Africa’s big men replied to Obama: this oppression – the shackles, the poverty and indignity – are what the African people have chosen. Tedros Adhanom, the foreign minister of Ethiopia, home of the African Union, defended African leaders who cling to power, saying: “Because they made the law, they can change the law.”

Museveni was echoing the actions of Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and indeed all African leaders who have sought to manipulate the law for a chance at eternal presidency. Adhanom proposed that the extension of term limits was acceptable if it had popular support. It is this type of apologist politics that has kept Africa in its current state – a continent of people who accept lacklustre leaders in the belief that there is a miraculous star shining somewhere at the end of the tunnel of bad leadership. It is this desperate need to cling to power, for no apparent reason and to no end, that Obama does not understand.

This lack of understanding of how things work in Africa, Africa’s big men are quick to point out, is a result of their son, Obama, being overly indoctrinated in the ways of the west. To the advocates of Africa’s new and emerging autocrats such as Andrew Mwenda, a former opposition-leaning journalist turned informal PR for the governments of Uganda and Rwanda, Obama is a puppet whose African ancestry is being used by the US to further its agenda of exploitation. And, Mwenda argues in an opinion article for Al Jazeera, Africa should not listen to anything Obama says.

In fact, if African leaders could place Obama across their thighs and spank him until he forgot his western ways and got some good African sense into his head, they would. For one thing, this errant African son does not know what it is like to fight for the loot that is your country. Museveni, who took power after waging a five-year guerrilla war, has compared the demands that he leave office to a hunter killing his animal and then being asked to leave before he can eat the meat.

To African leaders, Obama’s solutions for Africa are untenable. They view him as detached from the challenges and realities of an African leader. For starters, this African son has one wife and no known concubines. No wonder he comes up with wayward ideas such as educating more African women. Does he know how hard it would be to convince a scientist, engineer or entrepreneur to become a second wife? Does he know how many legal cases African countries would have to deal with if most of the masses – whose human-rights violations nosy organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International do not tire of reporting – were educated and employed rather than hungry and destitute?

The reality is that these African leaders do not realise that their argument that human rights, dignity and democracy are a western concept force-fed to the African continent no longer holds water. Its demise happened around the time when Bakayoko, the protagonist in Senegalese writer Ousmane Sembène’s God’s Bits of Wood, declared that dignity, good food, water and housing, are not for white people – they are for people. The notion that human rights and democracy – the kind that Obama speaks about – are not African was stripped of all legitimacy when African leaders, evoking the universal declaration of human rights and drawing inspiration from the French and American revolutions, demanded self governance and equality. They made these demands in English, French, Portuguese and other languages that their tyrants would understand. With their sweat and blood, they adopted human rights, made them African and used these ideals to liberate the continent from colonialism. It is baffling that these same people now dare to reject such ideals as being foreign. With worrying nostalgia, some Africans of an older generation will tell you that colonialism was so much better than the governments they live under. If African leaders cared, it is this kind of talk that would keep them up at night and push them to do whatever it takes to perform better.

But, as Chatham House Africa researcher Ahmed Soliman observes, even after Obama’s speech, successful and peaceful transfers of power in Africa will remain the exception rather than the rule. You can be sure that when the African Union meets in January next year, in the same hall where Obama made his historic admonishment, Africa’s power-clingers will still pat themselves on the back for the incredible job that they have done turning the continent into one on the move. They will have a selective memory of Obama’s speech, remembering only the parts where Africa was hailed as young, prosperous and vibrant. They will forget Obama’s warning of the fragile foundations on which the continent stands.

And yet, like it or not, Obama’s presence in the hall will be haunting and taunting the delegates. His message will not be exorcised. And even as they publicly act nonchalant about it, they will go home and think of the potent words of the first African-American US president. At the next AU meeting, there will be some countries that are still the marvel of the continent and a sting on the consciences of the power–clingers. Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Senegal, Botswana, Ghana and others that strive to respect that basic facet of democracy called “term limits” will be a reminder that perhaps the continent is not doomed after all.

By the time the children who were born during Obama’s Africa visit will be crawling, the reality of a continent that is rising but not rising will have set in. With it will also come the realisation that a good guest is not one who brings food so that you can feast together for days and grow fatter. A good guest is one who brings you a hoe so that you can dig and have food for the rest of your life.

Obama may be blamed for not making grandiose announcements about increased aid during his visit, but his powerful words are the kind of inspirational tool we Africans – both young and old – need to lift our downtrodden and intimidated souls and reminds us that even our grandfathers can and should be challenged when they err.

US judge rejects Guantánamo detainee's unlawful imprisonment challenge

Muktar Yahya Najee al-Warafi argues his detention is unlawful since Obama declared end to war with Afghanistan but judge says involvement continues

A US judge on Thursday rejected a legal challenge from a Guantánamo Bay detainee who said his imprisonment was unlawful now that President Barack Obama has declared an end to hostilities in Afghanistan.

Muktar Yahya Najee al-Warafi, a Yemeni who was captured in Afghanistan, has been held since 2002 at the prison in Cuba for terror detainees. Judges have upheld his detention on grounds that he likely aided Taliban forces, though his lawyers have said he was simply a medic.

His latest challenge centered on Obama administration statements in the last year indicating that the war in Afghanistan had come to an end. His lawyers said that those assertions made his detention unlawful under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, which provided the legal justification for the imprisonment of foreign fighters captured on overseas battlefields. The supreme court stressed in a 2004 opinion, Hamdi v Rumsfeld, that such detention is legal only as long as “active hostilities” continue.

US district judge Royce Lamberth wrote in a 14-page opinion that the president’s statements notwithstanding, the government had offered “convincing evidence that US involvement in the fighting in Afghanistan, against al-Qaida and Taliban forces alike, has not stopped”. Al-Warafi’s detention therefore remains legal, he said.

“A court cannot look to political speeches alone to determine factual and legal realities merely because doing so would be easier than looking at all the relevant evidence,” Lamberth wrote. “The government may not always mean what it says or say what it means.”

Brian Foster, a lawyer for al-Warafi, said the judge’s opinion amounted to a “rubber stamp for endless detention”. He said he would review the opinion and decide whether to appeal.

A similar petition is pending before another judge in Washington from Faez Mohammed Ahmed al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti who was shipped to Guantánamo following his 2001 capture after the battle of Tora Bora.

Obama meets new Nigerian president with praise for anti-extremist agenda

Barack Obama welcomed Nigeria’s new president to the Oval Office on Monday and praised him for working to bring “safety, security and peace” to a nation challenged by economic strains, a history of corruption and violence unleashed by the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram.

Obama met with President Muhammadu Buhari less than eight weeks after Buhari took office, to underscore the importance the US attaches to good relations with Nigeria.

The US president said Buhari had “a very clear agenda in defeating Boko Haramand extremists of all sorts inside of his country.

“And he has a very clear agenda in terms of rooting out the corruption that too often has held back the economic growth and prosperity of his country,” Obama said.

Obama, speaking to reporters at the outset of the meeting, said the US hoped to partner with the African nation “so that Nigeria ends up being not only an anchor of prosperity and stability in the eastern part of the continent, but can also be an outstanding role model for developing countries around the world”.

He said he would discuss with Buhari how the two nations can cooperate on counter-terrorism and how the US “can be helpful in addressing some of the corruption issues that have held Nigeria back”.

Buhari said Nigeria would be “ever grateful” to the US for its support of free elections in his country. Buhari said US and European pressures to ensure the election was “fair and credible led us to where we are now”.

US relations with Nigeria soured over failures by the government and military, including the inability to locate more than 200 schoolgirls, most of them Christian, who were kidnapped by Boko Haram from the northern town of Chibok in April 2014. The abduction led to international condemnation and a campaign to “Bring Back Our Girls” that reached as far as the White House.

The then president Goodluck Jonathan was angered by the US refusal to sell his government helicopter gunships and retaliated by halting a US military training programme.

Relations are expected to improve under Buhari, a 72-year-old former military dictator who has pledged allegiance to democracy and promised to address US concerns.

Obama extended his invitation for a visit to Buhari almost immediately after he was declared the winner of the March election.

“This feels to us like Nigeria is at an important moment in which there can be real reforms across the board,” Grant Harris, the senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council, told reporters last week.

“We’re looking forward to what we can do with a president who has staked out an agenda that we think is the right agenda at the right time.”

Nigeria’s new leader has been criticized for being slow to form a cabinet. He has yet to name any ministers.

Last week, Buhari fired the entire top echelon of the military, which he has accused of corruption that prevents what once was Africa’s mightiest armed force from curbing the Islamist insurgency based in Nigeria’s northeast. The insurgency has killed more than 13,000 people and driven another 1.5 million from their homes.

Besides the Oval Office meeting with Obama, Buhari is to meet with Vice-President Joe Biden, Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior administration officials.

Obama says Iran deal 'will make world safer' as Republicans plot opposition

The Iran nuclear deal “will make America and the world safer and more secure”, President Barack Obama said on Saturday.

The 159-page agreement between six world powers and Iran was finalized this week in Vienna, after extensive talks. On Saturday, Obama used his weekly address to seek support among voters, prior to the congressional vote on the deal and against a backdrop of Republican-led opposition.

“This deal will make America and the world safer and more secure,” Obama said. “Still, you’re going to hear a lot of overheated and often dishonest arguments about it in the weeks ahead.”

The president used the four-and-a-half-minute address to explain “what the deal does and what it means”.

The deal, he said, closes off Iran’s pathway to nuclear weapons; allows for “unprecedented” 24/7 monitoring of key nuclear facilities; and gives international inspectors access to the country’s nuclear supply chain. If Iranviolates the deal, Obama said, sanctions will snap back into place.

The president said the talks took so long because the US “refused to accept a bad deal”. The deal that was reached meets “every one of our bottom lines”, he said.

Before it can be implemented, the agreement must pass through Congress. It is unlikely to be defeated, but some Republicans have indicated that they will nonetheless attempt to do so.

“If in fact it’s as bad a deal as I think it is at this moment, we’ll do everything we can to stop it,” John Boehner, the speaker of the House, said earlier this week. 

Bob Corker, the Republican chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, said he would hold hearings to ensure members of Congress know what they are voting on.

“Those who believe that this truly is going to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon will vote for it,” he told reporters. “Those who believe that is not the case, and the world is not going to be safer – and in some ways it may pave the way for them to get a nuclear weapon – will vote against it.”

Republican 2016 presidential candidates have not minced their words. Among them, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin said the deal would be remembered as “one of America’s worst diplomatic failures”; Florida senator Marco Rubio said Obama had negotiated “from a position of weakness”, conceding to a regime that “holds Americans hostage”; and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said the deal “empowers an evil Iranian regime” to carry out its threat to bring death to America.

Among those supporting the Iran nuclear deal is the former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

“Based on the briefings I received and a review of the documents, I support the agreement because it can help us prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,”Clinton said.

She added that signing the agreement was the beginning, implying that enforcement and compliance might prove difficult.

In his address, Obama did not shy away from criticism.

“On questions of war and peace, we should have tough, honest, serious debates,” he said. “We’ve seen what happens when we don’t. That’s why this deal is online for the whole world to see. I welcome all scrutiny. I fear no questions.

“As commander-in-chief, I make no apology for keeping this country safe and secure through the hard work of diplomacy over the easy rush to war.”

Obama plans to promote the deal on Tuesday, when he is due to address the national convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars.

“We have before us an historic opportunity to pursue a safer, more secure world for our children,” he said. “It might not come around again in our lifetimes.

“That’s why we’re going to seize it today – and keep America a beacon of hope, liberty, and leadership for generations to come.”

Obama's climate plan will survive even if Republican elected, EPA chief says

Head of Environmental Protection Agency says carbon pollution rules that are main pillar of plan will also go ahead despite recent supreme court ruling

The EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, at a panel discussion on energy and environment cooperation in Washington last month. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Barack Obama’s main weapon in fighting climate change will survive even if Republicans win the White House in 2016, a key member of his administration said on Tuesday.

Gina McCarthy, who heads the Environmental Protection Agency, said the carbon pollution rules that are the main pillar of Obama’s climate plan would go ahead as planned despite a “disappointing” supreme court ruling last week against another EPA rule for mercury and other toxins, and attacks on the agency’s authority from Republican-led states.

“Last week’s ruling will not affect our efforts,” McCarthy said. “The EPA is committed to finalising the clean power plant plan.”

Nor could the carbon pollution rules be easily set aside once Obama leaves the White House, McCarthy told a talk hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

She said the rules putting the first carbon pollution limits on power plants, due to be finalised this summer, could not be slow-walked if a Republican wins the White House.

“You can not simply decide I am not implementing this. You are going to have to take the case that we [the EPA] are wrong, and the EPA will make this is legally solid,” McCarthy went on. “We certainly know how to defend lawsuits.”

In a week when the EPA authority and budget is due to come under multiple attacks by a Republican-controlled Congress, McCarthy was careful to project confidence in Obama’s climate change legacy despite recent setbacks.

Obama’s ability to safeguard his climate legacy once he leaves the White House is seen as critical to the chances of reaching a strong deal on climate change in Paris at the end of the year.

The US supreme court ruled last weekthat the EPA did not fully take costs to industry into account when it set limits on emissions of mercury, arsenic and other heavy metals from power plants in 2011.

Meanwhile, Oklahoma last week filed a lawsuit to block the EPA rules. At least two other states, Wisconsin and Indiana, have said they will not comply with the regulations.

McCarthy, however, insisted she was confident that the supreme court ruling – a victory for industry and Republican-led states that had opposed air pollution controls – would not derail the EPA’s plans of limiting carbon dioxide emissions from the country’s power plants.

Comparing the mercury rule and the carbon pollution rule was like “apples and oranges”, she said. “We are still on track to produce the rules this summer.”