Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Gina McCarthy on Monday said last week’s historic climate deal with China won’t effect a forthcoming rule limiting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
As part of the deal with China, President Obama pledged to cut all U.S. emissions by 26–28 percent by 2025.
{mosads}The administration is separately moving forward with a rule to cut power plant emissions by 30 percent by 2030.
McCarthy said the deal with China won’t change the power plant rule.
“We are not going to craft a final rule that is trying to achieve a certain level or a certain timing that is dictated by the climate goal that was recently released by the president,” she said at an event organized by The Christian Science Monitor.
“It will be dictated by what we have seen in the data and what the comments have said.”
Republicans argued the agreement with China was a raw deal for the United States that would lead to a whole new set of crippling environmental rules.
As part of the deal, China agreed to cap its greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon and methane in 2030.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) argued this would allow China to do nothing for the next 16 years even as U.S. power plants come under Obama’s new rule.
McCarthy on Monday said the deal actually requires economy-wide changes for China, the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses thanks to its reliance on coal for its recent economic boom.
“It is clearly a signal that they need to make significant economic changes in the structure of how they look at their economy,” she said. “And it will require significant in zero-carbon technologies, low carbon technologies.”
Those technologies will in large part come from the United States, whose private sector has been developing them in recent decades, McCarthy said, adding that the deal “requires a lot of action now to turn this large economy around.”