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Now, welcome to the award-winning BestofTheLifEF podcast with Hubsudae from the Young Turks, the Green News Report on the media,

Counter-Spin, Moir's and Company, Mike Tidwell from the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Activism from BestofTheLifEF, and the Tom Hartman program.

And a quick note that this episode is not about saving the world to be clear, it's not the world that needs saving.

So President Obama, look at this! Doing some good things for the environment!

Cleaning up greenhouse gas is a little bit. Credit work credit is due. And else today, the EPA has taken action.

Now, you have to understand before this, they've already started to do some significant work towards reducing the amount of carbon we're putting in there.

They started with first automobile and trucks limiting their emissions there. Then they put in rules for new coal power plants.

So if you're going to build a new one, here are the new rules that go along with it, so you put less carbon pollution into the air.

Today's rules are about existing power plants. See now that's much more bold because those power plants are used to making a certain amount of money.

And so they want to keep on making that money. So when you put in new rules, they don't like that.

So let me tell you what the current situation is.

First of all, the reason you have to do it with these coal power plants is because they are responsible, and this is amazing, for 39% of total emissions in the country.

Those are the existing power plants. So that's a giant chunk of the carbon that we put in the air. So if you don't address that, well then you're really kidding yourself about the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Now, the good news is that emissions have already declined 10% between 2005 and 2012.

So we've already done some good work here, partly because of the increase in natural gas through fracking.

So everything's got up sides and downsides, but also solar and wind, et cetera, and some of the new rules.

And finally, in terms of what it was, our commitment was to reduce by 17% that emissions put out by the year 2020.

Well, now by doing the new rules, we're going to be in much better shape to do that. So what are the new rules?

The rules are x states that cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants 30% by 2030 using emissions from a 2005 as a baseline.

So actually, progressives don't love that part. You're going back to 2005 and then saying, let's get 30% from there. I just told you we already got 10%.

So that means the additional benefits are going to be about 20% more.

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