Environmental Protection Agency to propose not protecting the environment

That this was inevitable doesn’t make it less bad:

The Environmental Protection Agency has drafted a plan to eliminate all limits on greenhouse gases from coal and gas-fired power plants in the United States, according to internal agency documents reviewed by The New York Times.

In its proposed regulation, the agency argued that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from power plants that burn fossil fuels “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution” or to climate change because they are a small and declining share of global emissions. Eliminating those emissions would have no meaningful effect on public health and welfare, the agency said.

But in the United States, the power sector was the second biggest source of greenhouse gases, behind transportation, according to the most recent data available on the E.P.A. website. And globally, power plants account for about 30 percent of the pollution that is driving climate change.

The E.P.A. sent the draft to the White House for review on May 2. It could undergo changes before it is formally released and the public is given the opportunity to offer comments, likely in June.

The brutal truth is that climate change is just not a high priority for voters — Republicans are not going to pay the political price for this radicalism that they’re likely to pay for cutting Medicaid. But substantively, it remains one of the better reasons to keep Republicans away from any levers of power.