Energy 202 – Trump took long break this December. His environmental deputies didn’t

WHILE a cold snap gripped much of the United States at year’s end, President Donald Trump mocked the majority of Americans who think man-made climate change is real.

Pointing to the thermometer in his adoptive home of Washington and elsewhere along the East Coast while vacationing in Florida, Trump suggested in a tweet that what the country might need is a bit of warming:

“In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!”

Predictably, Democrats and activists who bemoaned Trump’s ignorance of climate science since he began running for president howled in indignation.

But less conspicuously but more consequently, the gears within the administration, which have spent much of 2017 unwinding former President Barack Obama’s energy and environmental policies, were also humming away over the holidays.

- On Dec 29, the last business day of 2017, Interior rescinded a 2015 Obama administration rule that would have tightened standards for well construction and wastewater management for hydraulic fracturing and required the disclosure of the chemicals contained in fracking fluids.

The agency rescinded the rule it said would save “up to US$ 9,690 per well or approximately US$ 14 million to US$ 34 million per year” in industry compliance costs.

- Also that day, another office within Interior, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, published new regulations rewriting rules regarding devices used during offshore oil production that were put in place after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. Among the rules tossed is one requiring that safety and pollution prevention equipment be inspected by independent auditors - an idea born out of the bipartisan presidential commission that investigated the oil spill.

- Shortly before Christmas, Interior moved to renew leases for copper and nickel mines that are on the border of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and that are owned by a billionaire who rents a home to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in Washington.

- Finally, there was one legal decision that, for wildlife activists, was for the birds: Interior’s principal deputy solicitor wrote to other department employees that the Trump administration would no longer prosecute oil and gas, wind, and solar operators for accidentally killing birds under the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act. — WP-Bloomberg