I wrote about the political explosion about to happen back on May 26. D.R. Tucker called it a “war” in a post over the weekend. But today’s the day when EPA’s new Clean Air Act regulations for existing power plants are released, and you can expect a blizzard of reactions from every direction, some involving the underlying climate science, some the precise means deployed by EPA to achieve carbon emissions reduction goals, some the goals itself, and some the international implications. Matt Yglesias is calling it the most important day of Obama’s second term, and that’s a pretty good guess.
So once the regs are out and are reasonably clear, we’ll try to assess the impact on these various levels, without pretending to know how it’s all going to shake out. But speaking of “shaking,” even if EPA takes a less aggressive approach than it might, today will be a day of much thunder and lightning from our friends in the fossil-fuel industry. So give anyone you know in that line of business a very wide berth today.
