Boulder County will be filing a friend of the court brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in support of a lawsuit filed last year by New York, 21 other states, and seven cities including Boulder, against the Trump administration, over its rollback of restrictions on existing coal burning plants.
The Clean Power Plan, announced by President Obama in 2015, represented the nation’s first nationwide limits on pollution originating from existing fossil-fueled power plants, major producers of greenhouse gases contributing to the warming of the planet. New York Attorney General Letitia James, representing the lead plaintiff in the case, filed the petition in August for appellate review of its having been replaced two months earlier by the Environmental Protection Agency with its new Affordable Clean Energy Rule.
Boulder County commissioners approved the county attorney’s office participating in the case at a business meeting Tuesday.
“Basically, our issue with the Affordable Clean Energy rule is that it really is not going to be clean or affordable, for people in local government who are going to bear the burden of experiencing, and addressing, the pollution and climate impacts that would result from this new rule,” said Collin Tomb, air quality team lead for Boulder County Public Health.
