Obama's clean power plan hailed as US's strongest ever climate actionHundreds of businesses including eBay, Nestle and General Mills have issued their support for Barack Obama's clean power plan, billed as the strongest action ever on climate change by a US president.The rules, announced on Monday, are designed to cut emissions from power plants and have been strengthened in terms of the long-term ambition as originally proposed by the president last year, but slightly weakened in the short-term in a concession to states reliant on highly-polluting coal.White House adviser Brian Deese said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules represented the "biggest step that any single president has made to curb the carbon pollution that is fuelling climate change". The US is the world's second biggest carbon emitter after China.The rules are expected to significantly boost the wind and solar power generation and switch away from coal power. Republican presidential hopefuls moved quickly to voice their opposition, saying they would be economically damaging.But 365 businesses and investors wrote to 29 state governors to strongly support the rules, which they said would benefit the economy and create jobs.The final rules propose a 32% cut in carbon emissions from power plants by 2030, up from the initial proposal of 30%. However, states will only have to comply by 2015 rather than 2020 as originally proposed, and will be able to submit their plans on meeting the targets by 2018 instead of 2017.
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