After years of study, the EPA will finally release their initial greenhouse gas emissions rules for power plants, which are likely to end the construction of any coal-fired plants from this point forward. The rules have a delay and do not apply to existing coal-fired plants, but they will change how utilities and generation companies plan for the future.

In a bit of inconvenient truth-telling, the Bush Administration proposed to deal with this through a cap-and-trade system, the very same kind of system that conservatives everywhere now decry as the stirrings of a socialist takeover. But the DC Circuit Court ruled that cap-and-trade system too lenient and not in line with the text of the Clean Air Act, which demands emission cuts of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. So now EPA developed new rules that should have massive economic and public health benefits.