Day 15 - Public Action - What is the US Doing About Climate Change?

Total U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Economic Sector in 2011

I've received a few emails in the last week from organizations urging me to tell the EPA that I want them to enact their proposed regulations for power plants.  Not knowing much about the subject, I went to the EPA site to get some background for us all.

It takes a bit of wading through links to get much information but here is the little bit that I did pick up:
1.  Power plants are the biggest source of greenhouse gases in the U.S.
2.  This is a first ever regulation of this type for power plants.
3.  The proposed regulations are for new power plants only.
4.  There will be regulations for existing power plants, but that is still in progress.  Those regulations will not be as strict as the regulations for new power plants.
5.   To comment on the proposed regulations for new power plants go Here. (There is a blue tab at the top right of the page)  I haven't read all of that info.  Too technical for me.
6.  To comment on what regulations should be for existing power plants, go Here.

I did comment after the first email I received saying "yes, go ahead with the proposed regulations", figuring some are better than none, but to tell the truth, I still really don't know what the regulations are or how much they will impact new plants.  Seems to me, we should not be building new plants at all if our trouble is that we already use too much energy.

While filtering through pages at the EPA, I did find an easy to read summary of President Obama's Plan to Fight Climate Change.  It is a "look how good we are doing" kind of piece from the Obama Administration, but it does give a good summary of all of the areas the Obama Energy plan addresses, what has been accomplished so far and what is expected to be accomplished.   I'm not sure what I think about all of the points made, but I was pleased to read that in 2012 the U.S. energy sector carbon pollution fell to the lowest level in nearly 20 years.  That's a bit of good news.

What none of these reports tell me is how do these efforts compare to what they should be for us to reduce greenhouse gases back to a sustainable level?