(CNSNews.com) - "No challenge poses a greater threat to our future and future generations than a changing climate," President Obama said Monday in a speech announcing his plan to achieve a 32-percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by the year 2030.
He spent about a third of his speech refuting critics and "cynics who say it cannot be done."
And he managed to sneak in a plug for Obamacare while he was at it:
"Today, an African American child is more than twice as likely to be hospitalized from asthma. A Latino child is 40 percent more likely to die from asthma. So if you care about low-income minority communities, start protecting the air that they breathe, and stop trying to rob them of health care.
"And you could also expand Medicaid in your states, by the way," the president said, prompting laughter.
The Democrats' Affordable Care Act required the states to expand their Medicaid programs to cover people at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty level. But two years later, in 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court said the decision to expand Medicaid programs must be left to the individual states; the federal government could not compel such expansion. To date, 20 states still have not expanded their Medicaid programs.
Although President Obama did not name the critics of his Clean Power Plan on Monday, he clearly was addressing Republicans.
"We've hear the same stale arguments before," he said. "Every time America has made progress, it's been despite these kinds of claims. Whenever America sets clear rules and smarter standards for our air, our water, our children's health, we get the same scary stories about killing jobs and businesses and freedom."
Obama then told a story about arriving in Los Angeles for college as an 18-year-old, in late August.
"I was moving from Hawaii. And I got to the campus, and I decided I had a lot of pent-up energy, and I wanted to take a run, and after about five minutes, suddenly, I had this weird feeling like I couldn't breathe. And the reason was, back in 1979, Los Angeles still was so full of smog that there were days where people who were vulnerable just could not go outside, and they were fairly frequent."
He got personal again at the end of his speech:
"I don't want my grandkids not to be able to swim in Hawaii or not to be able to climb a mountain and see glacier because we didn't do something about it. I don't want millions of people's lives disrupted and this world more dangerous because we didn't do something about it. That'd be shameful of us.
"This is our moment to get this right and leave something better for our kids. Let's make most of that opportunity."
At Monday's White House briefing, spokesman Josh Earnest said the Clean Power Plan will prompt states and individual utilities to "ramp up their investments in efficiency, ramp up their investments in renewable energy, which is cheaper to produce than energy that's produced by coal, and making those kinds of investments will lead to savings in the utility bills of customers down the line, and that is what we're focused on, both in terms of saving consumers money but also a whole set of benefits that are associated with shifting to renewable energy or the use of less energy."
President Obama refuted critics who "claim that this plan will cost you money, even though this plan, the analysis shows, will ultimately save the average American nearly $85 a year on their energy bills."
Via: CNS News
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