The Trump EPA: A Dramatic Shift From the Obama Era
The Trump administration is taking steps Tuesday toward dismantling former President Obama’s signature climate regulation, the Clean Power Plan, as President Donald Trump signs an executive order the White House promises will both bring back jobs and help the climate.
“The president [is] coming to the EPA to set a new course,” EPA administrator Scott Pruitt said during an interview on Fox News Tuesday. “We’re going to be pro-growth and pro-environment.”
Tuesday’s executive order is a push toward American energy independence, an agenda the Trump administration believes will bring back jobs in manufacturing, coal and gas, Pruitt said.
The “energy independence” directive is a stab at President Obama’s Clean Power Plan which aimed to limit greenhouse gas emissions from coal-burning power plants. The law was halted by the Supreme Court last year after 27 states and a multitude of business groups challenged its legality.
Pruitt called the Obama-era regulation an effort to “kill jobs” in the United States. While both critics and supporters agree with the administration’s sentiment that pro-jobs and pro-climate policies aren’t mutually exclusive, they disagree on what type of jobs should be created.
Rolling back these regulations will “absolutely” lead to a boost in employment throughout the sector, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton told FOX Business.…
Trump’s Order Undoing EPA Climate Regs Isn’t Anti-Environment: It’s Pro Jobs & Pro African/Hispanic-American
by Jeff Dunetz | Mar 28, 2017 | Climate, Economy
Sometime on Tuesday, President Trump will sign an executive order directing the EPA to begin dismantling Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Liberal politicians and the mainstream media (that’s redundant isn’t it?) will call it a blatantly anti-environment move, the truth is the order is another pro-job action by the new president, that will also support America’s minority communities
The Clean Power Plan was the centerpiece of Obama’s Climate Action Plan. It was announced in June 2013, and complies with his more recent pledge to the U.N. that the U.S. will cut its carbon emissions by as much as 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.
The plan, which places heavy restrictions on coal-burning power plants, has served to depress the coal industry, but it effects much more than the coal economy.
The plan is a disaster on so many levels, the most important of which is that it will kill jobs from all industries (and the U.S. labor participation rates already at disastrous low levels), the US economy will find it hard recover from these regulations. The EPA rule is looking to replace cheap energy with more expensive alternate energy, it not only raises the cost of energy for the individual households, but will raise the cost of goods for companies marketing their products resulting in higher costs for all products, but especially staple goods. The Obama created rise in the price of energy and resulting rise in the price of consumer goods, will place the heaviest burden on middle and lower economic class families. And that doesn’t take into account that the rule deals another Obama blow against business resulting in more unemployment, higher government costs, and energy price inflation.
It’s D-day for EPA climate regs. Bombs fall at 2 p.m.
President Trump will try to land a knockout blow on his predecessor’s sprawling climate agenda by issuing an executive order today targeting at least nine actions that form the foundation of U.S. efforts to cut emissions and prepare for rising perils.
The “energy independence” order, to be signed at 2 p.m. today, underscores Trump’s belief that the seriousness of climate change was overblown by the past administration and deserves to be set aside in order to revive a struggling coal industry and encourage an unbridled boom in the production of oil and gas.
A senior White House official, when asked yesterday if the president agrees with scientists who say that people are largely responsible for rising temperatures, told reporters, “Yeah, sure.”
But the administration appears deeply skeptical about the extent of potential damage that climate change might cause, and the order to be signed today would leave the administration seemingly free of any policy to address the risks — both environmental and economic — that scientists have warned about for years.
“I mean, to the extent that the economy is strong and growing and you have prosperity, that’s the best way to protect the environment,” the White House official said in a briefing about the order. “But certainly, natural gas is important. Clean coal’s important. Nuclear is important. Renewables are important.”
Today’s executive order sets EPA on the road to rescind the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era rule to reduce emissions at power plants 32 percent by 2030. The official said rescinding the rule could take up to three years and is bound to face legal challenges.
The order also eliminates Obama-era efforts to improve adaptation, embed climate risks in national security apparatuses, reduce agency emissions, expand the importance of climate impacts in the National Environmental Policy Act and freeze new coal leases on public land. It also begins a review of methane regulations by EPA and the Bureau of Land Management and a rule on hydraulic fracturing by BLM. And it will instruct agencies not to use the social cost of carbon when weighing the costs and