ALBANY, N.Y. -- Two weeks after officials in two dozen states asked Republican President-elect Donald Trump to kill one of Democratic President Barack Obama's plans to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants, another group of state officials is urging Trump to save the plan.
Democratic attorneys general in 14 states sent a letter to Trump asking him to preserve Obama's Clean Power Plan, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the lead author, announced Thursday.
The letter was a rebuttal to one sent this month by Republican officials from West Virginia and 21 other states and Democrats from the coal-producing states of Kentucky and Missouri urging Trump to issue a day one executive order declaring the Clean Power Plan unlawful and prohibiting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing it.
The Clean Power Plan aims to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions at existing power plants, the nation's largest source of the pollution, by about one-third by 2030. Opponents say the EPA lacks authority to implement the rules. The plan is already the subject of a legal fight.
Schneiderman said states like New York are "on the front lines of climate change" and have demonstrated how to cut pollution and emissions while protecting affordable and reliable electricity, creating jobs and growing the economy.
"The Clean Power Plan builds on that successful work and is a blueprint for the critical action needed to fight climate change's devastating environmental, economic and public health impacts," he said.
Under Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Clean Energy Standard, established this year, 50 percent of New York state's electricity must come from renewable energy sources like wind and solar by 2030. New York and eight other states are part of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade program that has reduced carbon-dioxide emissions from electrical generation in the region by 40 percent from 2005 levels.
California, the nation's most populous state, also signed the letter. The goal in that state is also to have half of its energy from renewable sources by 2030 and a 40 percent reduction of greenhouse gases.
The letter to Trump lists local impacts of climate change from fossil fuel emissions, including drought in California, catastrophic storm surge in New York City, a record deluge on Colorado's Front Range, high-tide flooding in Virginia and south Florida, and diminished shellfish harvest in Oregon and Washington state.
The legal challenge, filed by 27 states that oppose the Clean Power Plan, is before a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. A decision on the plan could come at any time, but the U.S. Supreme Court has blocked temporarily implementation of the rule until the court challenge is resolved.
If Trump wants to scrap the plan, it would be a time-consuming task.
David Doniger, a climate policy expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council who served on Democratic President Bill Clinton's White House Council of Environmental Quality, said the Trump administration "can't make it go away unless they go through rule-making process and unwind it."
"And that's a public process, so they'll have to hear from supporters of the plan," he said.
Doniger said that even if Trump were to issue the executive order sought by the plan's opponents, it still would require a long public process to undo. The plan has gone through a formal process to become a regulation.
Besides New York and California, the letter is signed by attorneys general from the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Washington, as well as officials from Broward County and South Miami, Fla.; Boulder, Colo.; and New York City.
A Section on 12/30/2016