Something monumental happened this week: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants. Although there is pushback from coal-producing states and critics say the rule doesn’t go far enough, this first-ever attempt to lower carbon pollution from the largest source in the country is a bold move to deal with climate change.

I’m happy to see President Obama finally taking a big step to lower the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, especially when many of his early supporters thought he failed to deliver on his promise to push for policies during his first term to cut emissions.

The timing of the EPA’s proposed rule couldn’t be better for us here at Climate Confidential. We’ve been working on an energy issue for June that will lay out some of the promising technologies and challenges of moving away from producing fuels and electricity using dirty fossil fuels.

To address climate change, we must use cleaner sources of energy. Power plants produce 38 percent of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas, accounting for 84 percent of the U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and nearly three-quarters of them worldwide.

Many promising clean energy technologies have serious challenges to overcome before they could play a big part of our energy mix. While the Obama administration supports all sorts of clean energy research and power plant construction, it also backs fossil fuel generation. EPA’s proposed rule is pushing to replace coal power plants with natural gas power plants, which produce less greenhouse gas emissions. But natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and mining it, especially through fracking, raises big environmental concerns.

Over the next four weeks, you will see stories from us that look at energy storage technology, ocean energy, biofuel, and nuclear.

You might wonder why we don’t have stories devoted to solar and wind, given their emergence as key sources of renewable electricity. But that’s just it. Wind and solar appear to be on their way to securing a permanent spot in our energy mix. They do, however, lack the ability to produce power around the clock, and that makes them a poor substitute for coal or natural gas power plants. So check out Erica Gies’s story next week about how the use of energy storage — bottling renewable electricity and discharging it into the grid when needed — can help utilities to manage solar and wind generation in the same way that they currently handle power from fossil fuel plants.

What are other potential sources of fossil fuel replacement? Using ocean currents to generate electricity remains promising, even if it faces some big technical hurdles. Josie Garthwaite will take you to the sea to show you projects that are trying to make ocean energy a reliable source of electricity.

We also want to find out whether nuclear power, which draws so much love and hate, will still play a meaningful role for decades to come. The U.S. Department of Energy continues to fund nuclear power research and recently approved a $6.5 billion loan guarantee to build the country’s first nuclear reactors in about three decades. Celeste LeCompte will separate fear from promise, and look at what’s really happening around nuclear.

Given that the transportation sector is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, we will also take stock of the country’s effort to replace gasoline with biofuel. A lot of public and private money has gone into creating transportation fuel out of all sorts of plants. How close are we to seeing people pumping biofuel at gas stations wherever we go? That’s the big question being explored by Mary Catherine O’Connor.

I know there are many other energy issues worth investigating. So this package of stories for June will definitely not be the only time we will tackle this weighty topic. I hope the stories will provoke thoughtful discussions. We depend heavily on all sources of energy to live, and the planet depends on us to use these resources wisely.

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