Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
TRUMP ORDERS reversal of Obama climate policies.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order intended to roll back most of President Barack Obama’s climate-change legacy, celebrating the move as a way to promote energy independence and to restore thousands of lost coal-industry jobs.
Flanked by coal miners at a ceremony at the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump signed a short document titled the “Energy Independence” executive order, directing the agency to start the legal process of withdrawing and rewriting the Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of Obama’s policies to fight global warming.
“C’mon fellas. You know what this is? You know what this says?” Trump said to the miners. “You’re going back to work.”
The order also takes aim at a suite of narrower but significant Obama-era climate and environmental policies, including lifting a short-term ban on new coal mining on public lands.
The executive order does not address the United States’ participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement, the landmark accord that committed nearly every country to take steps to reduce climate-altering pollution.
Trump advertised the moves as a way to decrease the nation’s dependence on imported fuels and revive the flagging coal industry.
“We’re ending the theft of American prosperity and reviving our beloved economy,” Trump said. “The miners told me about the attacks on their jobs. I made them this promise. We will put our miners back to work.”
Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, said in an interview on ABC News on Sunday that the order will help the United States “be both pro-jobs and pro-environment.”
Throughout his campaign, Trump highlighted his support of coal miners, holding multiple rallies in coal country and vowing to restore lost jobs to the flagging industry. At a rally last week in Kentucky, Trump vowed that his executive order would “save our wonderful coal miners from continuing to be put out of work.”
While coal-mining jobs have dropped in the United States, they do not represent a significant portion of the U.S. economy. Coal companies employed about 65,971 miners in 2015, down from 87,755 in 2008, according to Energy Department statistics.
The coal industry cheered Trump’s move.
“These actions are vital to the American coal industry, to our survival, and to getting some of our coal families back to work,” said Robert Murray, the chief executive of Murray Energy, one of the nation’s largest coal-mining companies. Murray, a donor to Trump’s presidential campaign, stood behind the president as he signed the order.
But Murray conceded that he did not expect Trump’s order to return coal-mining numbers to their former strength. “I really don’t know how far the coal industry can be brought back,” he said.
Trump’s directive also eliminates about a half-dozen of Obama’s smaller executive orders and memorandums related to combating climate change.
For example, Trump’s order requires White House economists to recalculate a budgeting metric known as the social cost of carbon, which under the Obama administration limited pollution by arguing that global warming outweighed economic benefits for industries. The order also eliminates a requirement that federal agencies consider the effect on climate change when analyzing all future environmental permits.
Combined, the measures might ensure that the United States’ emissions of planet-warming pollution remain too high to meet the terms of the Paris climate accord.
The aim of the Paris deal is to reduce emissions enough to stave off a warming of the planet by more than 2 degrees Celsius, or about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, from preindustrial levels. That rise in temperature is the level at which, experts say, the earth will be irrevocably locked into a future of extreme droughts, flooding and shortages of food and water.