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Offshore Wind Energy Can Deliver Big Carbon Cuts for Coastal States

Offshore Wind Energy Can Deliver Big Carbon Cuts for Coastal States

Full Title: Offshore Wind Energy Can Deliver
Author(s): Shiva Polefka and Elise Shulman
Publisher(s): Center for American Progress
Publication Date: September 1, 2015
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):

President Barack Obama recently took a historic step toward curbing carbon pollution from America’s power plants by issuing the final version of the Clean Power Plan. The plan—designed to fulfill the Environmental Protection Agency’s, or EPA’s, legal requirements to regulate pollution that causes climate change under the authority of the Clean Air Act—requires each state to achieve its own individual carbon emissions reduction target by 2030. The EPA estimates that the Clean Power Plan will cumulatively reduce carbon pollution from the U.S. electric power sector by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030.1

About one year from now, on September 6, 2016, all states must submit their plans, detailing how they intend to meet their individualized targets using their own unique set of industries, technologies, and resources, or formally request an extension.2 In coastal states, particularly along the Atlantic seaboard, governors and state legislatures should look to a massive, untapped source of zero-carbon energy sitting just beyond their shores and large enough to sustain most of their required carbon pollution cuts: offshore wind power.

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