Earth to President Trump

B

ehold the awesome power of hot air.

Thursday, with his signature on another sweeping, swaggering executive order, President Trump signaled plans to torch his predecessor’s signature effort to deflate Earth-warming, coast-flooding, ominousfor-living things, accumulating-toward-thepoint-of-no-return greenhouse gas emissions.

Tuesday’s order, which puts the brakes on Obama’s Clean Power Plan and tells federal agencies they can ignore climate change in making policy, “will lead to unbelievable prosperity all throughout the country,” in a stroke “ending the theft of American prosperity.”

These are Trumpian promises — which is to say, false ones. And they carry with them profound risks to the planet on which all of us, regardless of party affiliation, live.

Into reverse goes the process by which the Environmental Protection Agency advanced the Clean Power Plan, which forced each state to rein in utility companies’ burning of coal and other carbon-dioxide-spewing energy sources by setting progressively tougher ceilings on power plant emissions.

Obama’s well-conceived actions to combat the indisputable reality of climate change — a phenomenon whose risks are scarcely in doubt, especially for coastal cities like New York — are nothing to trifle with.

They form the spine of the United States’ compliance with the global Paris Agreement to scale back on spewing greenhouse gases into an atmosphere already oversaturated with the stuff.

Not to mention: New York with neighboring states is already proving the concept to work, by setting a regional cap-and-trade system for ratcheting back emissions and setting aggressive reduction goals — heading toward an 80% drop by 2050.

Two dozen other states, led by coal capital West Virginia, had other, abysmal ideas. With the fossil fuel industry, they sued to smother Obama’s action, securing a Supreme Court stay last year.

Representing Oklahoma on the dead-end train was its then attorney general, now-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, now charged by Trump to execute the clean-power death blows.

It’s all a lifeline to embattled coal miners, Trump boasts. “You’re going back to work!” the President glowed with a nod to the hard-laboring guests arrayed behind him for the signature ceremony.

With sympathy for the hard hats and their families: Not quite. The once-mighty coal industry has already stalled out as cheap and far cleaner natural gas has come to dominate energy production, joined by renewable energy on a rapid, technology-fueled rise. That’s not ideology. That’s economics. Then there’s the pesky matter of the EPA’s legal obligation, under the federal Clean Air Act, to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants, as mandated by the Supreme Court about a decade ago.

As New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman put it, alluding to Trump’s doomed attempt to undo the Obamacare health insurance regime: “If they repeal they have to replace, and that didn’t go so well the last time.”

With no evidence to support his claims, Trump promises he can bring back jobs in a dying industry. And despite reams of evidence on climate change, he ignores its dire and mounting risks.

Just like in a coal mine, someone needs to show this administration the light.