In September of this year, President Obama gave a speech about the global warming. In his words, he said that all the nations had to act united to avoid future possible problems. Obama also said that the United States was already making changes in their system to decrease the emission of GHG (Green House Gases) and invited all other countries to join them.

However, the plan that Obama states isn’t actually new. In the year 2000 during George W. Bush’s campaign for the presidency, he talked about regulating mercury, sulfur, particles and coal.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued a new rule for all the states in America, regarding this matter. The main goal of these new rule is to lower the emissions of CO₂. With this objective the industries that run mainly with coal and mining coal will be affected.  As the EPA said, the rule requires that every state have to reach a limit of CO₂ reduction. This reduction varies in all the country due to the different current situations of each state.

The plan of this rule is to be flexible because for the states where coal isn’t that important will be easier to comply than states that depend on it. This will make the rule more possible to follow.

As an example of the rule, the Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) agreed to shut down three units of their dirtiest coal plant. With this plan the OPPD expects to reduce the carbon emission up to 49% over the next 20 years.

This new rule might come in a late but good moment. There’s no doubt that the world is not doing enough actions to combat the global warming. To this day, the numbers show that if we keep this pace there are possibly chances for the world to change dramatically.

Here’s an image from http://www.whitehouse.gov/ that shows the temperatures changes over the past 22 years.

We can clearly see the changes and this might be our last chance to change the path so we should do everything we can.  As Obama quoted “ We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it “.

Here are some links if you’d like to know more about this topic:

–       http://www.whitehouse.gov/climate-change

–       https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2014/06/18/2014-13726/carbon-pollution-emission-guidelines-for-existing-stationary-sources-electric-utility-generating#h-8

–       http://ecowatch.com/2014/07/29/obama-clean-power-plant-rule/2/