Misguided defiance

FOR all his partisan animosity towards President Obama, it is still shocking to see the Senate’s majority leader, Mitch McConnell, urge the nation’s governors to undermine the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate power plant emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming.

McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, seems to hold Obama personally responsible for what has been the decades-long decline of coal jobs in his state.

The administration has proposed regulations aimed at limiting emissions. McConnell urged the governors not to co-operate with a joint rule-making process aimed at developing final regulations under which Washington will set emissions targets while giving states flexibility to implement them.

Sabotaging this process, he says, will give the courts time to find the plan illegal or give the Senate time to figure out a way to block it. “Without your support,” he said, the administration “won’t be able to demonstrate the capacity to carry out such political extremism”.

McConnell’s call to governors to sit on their hands is a travesty of responsible leadership. What he calls “extremism” is the administration’s eminently reasonable goal to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. That pledge is the centrepiece of the climate strategy Obama hopes to present to the world in Paris in December at the next climate summit. In that sense, McConnell’s defiance is more than the usual states’ rights rhetoric Republicans have used to challenge other initiatives. It is an attack on this country’s credibility as a leader in the fight against climate change.

Non-compliant states could anyway face imposition of a blanket federal alternative.