Moving
forward with a campaign pledge to unravel former President Obama's sweeping
plan to curb global warming, President Trump on Tuesday is set to sign an
executive order that will suspend, rescind or flag for review more than a
half-dozen measures in an effort to boost domestic energy production in the
form of fossil fuels.
As
part of the roll-back, Trump will initiate a review of the Clean Power Plan,
which restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants.
The
regulation, which was the former president's signature effort to curb carbon
emissions, has been the subject of long-running legal challenges by
Republican-led states and those who profit from burning oil, coal and gas.
Trump,
who has called global warming a "hoax" invented by the Chinese, has
repeatedly criticized the power-plant rule and others as an attack on American
workers and the struggling U.S. coal industry. The contents of the order were
outlined to reporters in a sometimes tense briefing with a senior White House
official, whom aides insisted speak without attribution, despite Trump's
criticism of the use of unnamed sources.
The
official at one point appeared to break with mainstream climate science,
denying familiarity with widely publicized concerns about the potential adverse
economic impacts of climate change, such as rising sea levels and more extreme
weather.
In
addition to pulling back from the Clean Power Plan, the administration will
also lift a 14-month-old moratorium on new coal leases on federal lands.
The
Obama administration had imposed a three-year moratorium on new federal coal
leases in January 2016, arguing that the $1 billion-a-year program must be
modernized to ensure a fair financial return to taxpayers and address climate
change.
Trump
accused his predecessor of waging a "war on coal" and boasted in a
speech to Congress that he has made "a historic effort to massively reduce
job-crushing regulations," including some that threaten "the future
and livelihoods of our great coal miners."
The
order will also chip away at other regulations, including scrapping language on
the "social cost" of greenhouse gases. It will initiate a review of
efforts to reduce the emission of methane in oil and natural gas production as
well as a Bureau of Land Management hydraulic fracturing rule, to determine
whether those reflect the president's policy priorities.
It
will also rescind Obama-era executive orders and memoranda, including one that
addressed climate change and national security and one that sought to prepare
the country for the impacts of climate change.
The
administration is still in discussion about whether it intends to withdraw from
the Paris Agreement on climate change. But the moves to be announced Tuesday
will undoubtedly make it more difficult for the U.S. to achieve its goals.
Trump's
Environmental Protection Agency chief, Scott Pruitt, alarmed environmental
groups and scientists earlier this month when he said he does not believe
carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming. The statement is at
odds with mainstream scientific consensus and Pruitt's own agency.
The
overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed studies and climate scientists agree the
planet is warming, mostly due to man-made sources, including carbon dioxide,
methane, halocarbons and nitrogen oxide.
The
official who briefed reporters said the president does believe in man-made
climate change.
Former
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy accused the Trump administration of wanting
"us to travel back to when smokestacks damaged our health and polluted our
air, instead of taking every opportunity to support clean jobs of the
future."
"This
is not just dangerous; it's embarrassing to us and our businesses on a global
scale to be dismissing opportunities for new technologies, economic growth, and
US leadership," she said in a statement.
Michael
Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University, told The New York
Times that Trump’s order signals that the U.S. will fall short of its pledge to
cut emissions of about 26 percent by 2025. He said Trump’s order “sends a
signal to other countries that they might not have to meet their
commitments—which would mean that the world would fail to stay out of the
climate danger zone.”
AP/FOX NEWS
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