President Obama is expected
to announce on Monday an Environmental Protection Agency regulation to cut
carbon pollution from the nation’s fleet of 600 coal-fired power plants, in a
speech that government analysts in Beijing, Brussels and beyond will scrutinize
to determine how serious the president is about fighting global warming.
The regulation will be Mr. Obama’s most forceful effort to
reverse 20 years of relative inaction on climate change by the United States,
which has stood as the greatest obstacle to international efforts to slow the
rise of heat-trapping gases from burning coal and oil that scientists say cause
warming.
