WASHINGTON, June 25
(Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack
Obama unveiled the country's first
national climate action plan on
Tuesday afternoon, pledging to limit
carbon emissions from American power
plants.
Delivering a speech at
Georgetown University, Obama said that
the planet is changing in ways
that will impact all of humankind,
and that the 12 warmest years in
recorded history have all come in
the last 15 years.
"Americans
across the country are already paying
the price of inaction," Obama said.
"As a president, as a father,
and as an American, I'm here
to say: We need to
act."
The president noted that
power plants, which currently represent
one-third of all U.S. carbon
emissions, "can still dump unlimited
amounts of carbon pollution into the
air for free."
"That's
not right ... and it needs to
stop," he added. "I'm directing
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
to put an end to the limitless
dumping of carbon pollution from our
power plants. "
Obama described
a low carbon clean energy economy
as being an engine of growth
for decades to come. "There's
no contradiction between a sound
environment and strong economic growth,"
said Obama, "Using less dirty energy,
transitioning to cleaner sources of
energy, wasting less energy ... is
where we need to
go."
Obama said he's
directing the Department of the
Interior to greenlight enough private
renewable energy capacity on public
lands to power more than 6 million
homes by 2020. He asked the federal
government to consume 20 percent of
its electricity from renewable sources
within the next seven
years.
He also set a
goal to reduce carbon pollution by
at least 3 billion metric tons
cumulatively by 2030, more than half
of the annual carbon pollution from
the U.S. energy
sector.
Some environmental groups
praised Obama's new climate plan
as a positive signal to the
world.
"Tackling carbon pollution
from power plants is the greatest
opportunity and should be at the
core of any serious approach to
reduce U.S. emissions," Andrew Steer,
president of the World Resources
Institute, said in a statement. "A
comprehensive climate strategy will provide
businesses with greater certainty and
drive investments and innovation that
can charge the U.S. economy.
This announcement will have ripple
effects that will increase the urgency
of action around the
globe."
Others, however, warned
that it's "not enough" to
prevent catastrophic warming and extreme
weather dangers predicted by
scientists.
"We're happy to
see the president finally addressing
climate change but the plain truth
is that what he's proposing
isn't big enough, and doesn't
move fast enough, to match the
terrifying magnitude of the climate
crisis," said Bill Snape, senior
counsel of the Center for Biological
Diversity. "This plan is a small
step in the right direction but
certainly begs for something bigger
and bolder."
Obama has pledged
that the United States would cut
emissions by 17 percent by 2020 from
the 2005 levels, and according to data
released by the country's
Environmental Protection Agency in April,
emissions fell 6.9 percent from 2005 to
2011.
But for most countries,
the year of 1990, rather than 2005, is
the base year. Compared with that
of 1990, U.S. emissions were up
about 8 percent, the EPA data
showed.