| On June 2nd, Barack Obama announced that he wanted total emissions from American power stations to fall by 30% from 2005 levels in the next 15 years. This has (correctly) been interpreted as a potshot at the coal industry. States will have to come up with plans to meet specific emission-reduction targets; scrapping coal plants (and replacing them with gas-fired ones, say) is an obvious avenue to get there.
The goal is laudable, but even if the act makes it through inevitable legal challenges its global impact may be limited. Part of the trouble is that scrapping an American coal plant serves little purpose if the black stuff is then put on a ship to China and burned there instead...............................................Full Article: Source
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