As expected, the Trump Administration today rolled out their proposed alternative regulation to the Obama-era Clean Power Plan to reduce carbon emissions from the U.S. power sector. The administration was in the somewhat awkward position of having to promulgate a climate rule by order of the U.S. Supreme Court, so the basic tack is to make the regulation effectively meaningless.

Here are some of the low-lights:

• EPA’s draft rule is expected to lower annual U.S. emissions by 0.7 percent to 1.5 percent by 2030 compared with a business-as-usual scenario, compared to 19 percent below the business-as-usual scenario with the original Clean Power Plan.
• The “foregone benefits” of the proposed rule means more pollution compared with the Clean Power Plan, particularly affecting residents in the Midwest, east to Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, with increases in premature death and morbidity (“foregone avoided deaths”), as my colleague Sean Hecht explains.
• The rule contains a new regulatory loophole that allows existing dirty fossil fuel plants to increase their hours of operation without triggering any new environmental review, as my colleague Meredith Hankins describes.
• The proposed rule has no standard for states to meet in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from their power sector.

So for me there are four ultimate takeaways for the proposed rule:

1. It is a giveaway to the coal industry at the expense of cheaper, cleaner power sources,
2. It has multiple legally dubious provisions that will likely take years to resolve in court.
3. It replaces an unfortunately weak rule in the Clean Power Plan, which was not going to push the power sector much more than existing state policies on renewables and the current supply of cheap natural gas.
4. It means the real action on the U.S. power sector will occur when Democrats regain Congress and the Presidency, at which point they should (and probably will) prioritize some sort of national greenhouse gas standard for the U.S. power sector, as part of a federal response to climate change.

Until the politics change, however, we’ll have to watch this rule work its way through the courts.