Bloomberg View: Obama's Solo Act on Climate Change
The president was right to bypass Congress. Now he needs to go further
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On June 25, President Obama laid out a plan to combat climate change that includes solar and wind projects on U.S. public lands, new energy-efficiency standards and fuel-economy requirements, and greater limits on greenhouse-gas emissions of all kinds.
Whether he’s successful will depend a lot on how his administration manages two of his biggest initiatives: placing carbon-emissions limits on existing U.S. power plants and helping the developing world switch to cleaner forms of energy. Both these efforts hinge on moving away from coal, which still provides 40 percent of electricity in the U.S. and almost 80 percent in China.