Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Signing day
Order will promote domestic use of oil, coal, natural gas
President Donald Trump speaks Monday before signing bills in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is set to sign a sweeping executive order today aimed at promoting domestic oil, coal and natural gas by reversing many of his predecessor’s efforts to address global warming — prompting warnings the action will undermine U.S. leadership on the issue.
The document lays out a broad blueprint for the Trump administration to dismantle the architecture that former President Barack Obama said would combat global warming, according to details shared with Bloomberg News. Some of the changes would happen immediately, while others would take years to complete.
“He’s trying to undo more than a decade of progress in fighting climate change and protecting public health,” David Doniger, director of the climate and clean air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an email. “But nobody voted to abandon America’s leadership in climate action and the clean-energy revolution. This radical retreat will meet a great wall of opposition.”
The order will compel federal agencies to quickly identify any actions that could burden the production or use of domestic energy resources, including nuclear power, and then work to suspend, revise or rescind the policies unless they are legally mandated, are necessary for the public interest or promote development.
It also will toss out two Obama-era directives that gave consideration of the climate a prominent role in federal rule making. One advised government agencies to factor climate change into environmental reviews, such as those governing where oil drilling should take place. The other, called the “social cost of carbon,” is a metric reflecting the potential economic damage from global warming that was used by the Obama administration to justify a suite of regulations.
Obama ordered agencies to include global warming as a consideration when they conducted reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, a sweeping law that informed any federal decision that had a significant environmental impact. This consideration will be eliminated outright.
The carbon order would dissolve the task force that calculated what has become known as “the social cost of carbon” and revert to the 2003 standard used under the George W. Bush administration. The current calculus, which is set at $36 per ton of carbon dioxide, aims to capture the negative consequences of allowing greenhouse gas emissions to continue to rise and is applied to any regulations that have a climate impact.
“This is about making sure that we have a pro-growth and pro-environment approach to how we do regulation in this country,” Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on ABC’s This Week program on Sunday.
Trump, who has called global warming a hoax, has vowed to reorient the government so that U.S. oil and coal producers thrive and that steel and auto manufacturers don’t face “job-killing restrictions.” Trump said in May that “we’re going to get those miners back to work,” and his promises to support coal-mining jobs helped propel him to victory in industrial strongholds such as West Virginia and Pennsylvania.