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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has never been so busy or so aggressive in his role as the defender of Big Coal’s interests as he is now. Earlier this month, the powerful Republican from coal-rich Kentucky made an unusual move in reaching beyond Congress and directly urging state governors not to cooperate with the Obama administration’s pending new regulations to reduce carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, the nation’s largest source of greenhouse-gas emissions.

Mr. McConnell advised governors of coal-dependent states to simply not file the compliance plans needed to carry out the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed tightening of restrictions.

Not content with that states’-rights sally, Mr. McConnell has proposed a special amendment to the federal budget that would give states wide leeway to opt out of the new federal rules on their own initiative. Under the amendment, a governor or legislature could choose among a list of reasons to justify a rebuff of the cleaner rules. These include claimed threats to the state’s economy, power plant investments, electricity prices, employment rolls or government revenue, according to The Hill.

Beyond this resistance, Mr. McConnell has his Senate staff coordinating with lawyers and lobbying firms to flood the E.P.A. with lengthy court challenges. He has sent a detailed letter to every governor in the nation laying out a legal strategy for saying no, contending Mr. Obama was “allowing the E.P.A. to wrest control of a state’s energy policy.” In taking effect, the rules could force the closing of hundreds of power plants and crimp coal production.

The regulations, which Mr. McConnell contends are an unconstitutional “war on coal” by the administration, aim at reducing America’s greenhouse gas emissions 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. This standard is the heart of the reforms that President Obama plans to present at the next world climate summit in December.

Part of Sen. McConnell’s multifaceted strategy of resistance, according to Coral Davenport of The Times, is to undercut Mr. Obama at the summit by sowing uncertainty in the minds of other world leaders that the United States will ever deliver on its pledges to cut carbon emissions.