Trump begins tearing up Obama’s climate legacy
UTURN US President to sign orders rescinding measures to cut carbon emission
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump on Tuesday is expected to sign an executive order granting federal regulators sweeping powers to roll back measures initiated by his predecessor Barack Obama to cut carbon emission, a move that could potentially jeopardise America’s ability to meet its Paris Agreement commitments.
The executive order will instruct the Environment Protection Agency to begin the legal process to withdraw Obama’s Clean Power Plan that focussed on shutting down highly polluting coal power plants and replacing them with those using renewable energy, remove the freeze on coal mining on federal lands, and kill an instruction mandating all federal agencies to consider the environment cost of every decision.
A senior administration official said the goal was to make the US “energy dependent”, and as far as climate change was concerned, “we want to take our course and do it in our own form and fashion.”
The order is also aimed at saving coal-mine jobs — a poll promise by Trump — that have been shrinking because of automa- tion and a market-driven shift towards cheaper and cleaner natural gas for power generation.
Trump has already reversed other Obama-era environmentrelated restrictions such as those on mining and drilling.
The new order is said to be silent on the Paris Agreement, an ambitious global compact which went into effect in November 2016 and was signed by 175 states including the United States, India and China, but experts have said the unintended consequences of the new rules would prevent the US from fulfilling its commitments.
Trump had vowed to tear up the agreement and pull the US out of the agreement during while he was campaigning, but has been ambivalent about it since his election, saying as president-elect that he had an “open mind to it”, and that clean air and “crystal clear water” were vitally important.
Briefing reporters on the order on Monday, an administration official said a decision had not been taken on Paris Agreement yet.
Under the Paris Agreement, the United States pledged to cut its carbon emissions by between 26% to 28% of the 2005 levels by 2025 as part of the effort to reduce emissions to limit global temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius.