After 20 years of delay and litigation by polluters, the Obama administration approved in December one of the most important rules in the history of the Clean Air Act. It will require power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants by more than 90 percent in the next five years and is expected to prevent as many as 11,000 premature deaths annually from asthma, other respiratory diseases and heart attacks.

The technology to control the pollutants is readily available. The health benefits far outweigh the costs to the power companies. That isn’t stopping Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, one of the most persistent critics of the clean air laws. The moment the rule was published in the Federal Register last week, he filed a resolution of disapproval under the 1996 Congressional Review Act.

The tactic, which has been used successfully only once, allows a simple majority in the Senate and House to nullify a federal regulation, forcing the executive branch to start from scratch the laborious, multiyear process of writing a new one. Mr. Inhofe must know he is unlikely to win. His goal appears to be to force Democrats to vote to support what he calls Mr. Obama’s “job-killing” environmental agenda — following on the Republicans’ relentless denunciation of the president’s sound decision to shelve the Keystone XL oil pipeline and his steady support for clean-energy investments. Yet no matter what the Republican leadership claims, the clean-energy sector is a much more likely source of future job growth than the fossil-fuel industries they are so determined to protect. And the new clean air rules Mr. Inhofe so abhors are likely to create far more jobs than they eliminate.

It is true that the mercury rule, and other clean air regulations, will require substantial upgrades in older, coal-burning power plants and force others to close down. The power companies have had years to prepare. In addition to reducing emissions of global warming gases and ground-level pollutants, the upgrades are expected to create as many as 45,000 temporary construction jobs over the next five years and possibly 8,000 permanent jobs.