When the Trump administration this week gave notice it is scrapping President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, it was seen as an unsurprising move by the conservative administration to appeal to its “base,” but it was truly an attack on public health. The Environmental Protection Agency had previously projected that the Clean Power Plan would prevent 90,000 childhood asthma attacks, 300,000 missed work and school days and 3,600 premature deaths by 2030. Some states have made plans to move forward with clean power plans on their own, but Illinois is not among them. Here Gov. Bruce Rauner recently endorsed a plan to allow coal-fired power plants owned by Dynegy to bypass modern pollution controls on its plants. Sierra Club Illinois urged Rauner to reverse course: “Illinois does not have to follow Trump backward.” –Fletcher Farrar, editor and CEO
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2017.
