Trump to back away from Obama’s clean power plan
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Tuesday will order the Environmental Protection Agency to dismantle his predecessor’s landmark climate effort, backing away from an aggressive plan to cut emissions at power plants that had been the foundation of America’s leadership on confronting global warming.
The work of reducing such emissions will continue in California and many other states — and around the world. But the move by Trump threatens to cede the role America had established in leading the global environmental fight, and further cements the Trump administration’s alliance with a fossil fuel industry that has long resisted climate action.
The directive that administration officials said Trump will issue takes aim at the Clean Power Plan, a far-reaching initiative former President Barack Obama signed in 2015. The program mandates a substantial reduction of utility plant emissions by 2030. The plants account for nearly a third of the greenhouse gas released in the United States, making them the nation’s most potent accelerator of global warming.
“We are going to go in a different direction,” said a senior administration official who briefed reporters ahead of the president’s announcement under the condition of anonymity. “The president has been very clear that he is not going to pursue climate or environmental issues that put the U.S. economy at risk.”
Trump’s order to retreat from the plan places in jeopardy the ability of the United States to meet its obligations under the international climate change accord Obama took a lead in negotiating in Paris, which EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt criticized over the weekend as a “bad deal.” It also invites a yearslong legal and political battle with wellfunded environmental groups and states embracing the targets.
Trump’s plans to curb climate action also reach well beyond power plants. A pioneering EPA rule that sets a “social cost” for carbon, placing a dollar value on the long-term damage caused by each ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, will be eliminated. An Obama-era requirement that all government agencies factor climate effects into their decision making, particularly as they launch new projects, is also targeted. Trump will also lift a moratorium on coal leasing on federal land.
But it is the power plant rules that have been the cornerstone of federal efforts on climate change. Trump will join 27 states that were already fighting the Clean Power Plan, characterizing it as an overreach of federal authority — even as many of the states resisting it were already on track to meet the plan’s requirements. Pruitt was a leader of the crusade to scuttle the plan in his previous job as attorney general of Oklahoma.
The Supreme Court put the power plant rules on hold last year to allow states to make their case before federal judges. Trump is expected to ask a Washington, D.C., circuit court to put off an imminent ruling on the legality of the Clean Power Plan while the EPA drafts new, weaker rules.