Trump to curtail clean air rules

New policies friendlier to oil and gas, counter consensus on climate change

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump will begin a sweeping rollback of the Obama administration’s climate policies Tuesday, targeting rules regulating greenhouse gas emissions and policies that critics believe hinder the domestic energy sector.

Through a series of executive orders and memoranda, Trump will order a review of former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which was expected to shutter a large share of the nation’s coal power plants, as well as rules forcing oil and gas companies to seek out and fix methane leaks at drilling sites, a senior White House official said Monday. The reviews are the first steps toward undoing the regulations.

The administration also will pull back guidance issued last year by Obama, who instructed federal agencies to consider the impact on climate change when writing policies, as well as a federal finding on global warming’s negative social effects, from economic disruption to higher public health costs.

“This policy is in keeping with President Trump’s desire to make America energy independent,” the White House official said. “The president is not going to pursue climate policy that puts the economy at risk.”

Trump’s actions, for now, will not go so far as to pull the United States from the Paris climate accord, in which close to 200 countries have agreed to reduce global greenhouse gas

“This policy is in keeping with President Trump’s desire to make America energ y independent.”

Senior White House official

emissions. That decision, the official said, “is still under discussion.”

The measures, however, run counter to the overwhelming scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal is accelerating climate change with potentially disastrous social, economic and environmental effects as seas rise, violent storms become more frequent and habitats that help support human populations vanish. Many corporations are considering the potential impact of climate change on their business while more investors are asking companies to consider and account for the impact of climate change on future earnings as they plan ahead.

A win for Texas

Even some of the world’s biggest oil companies acknowledge that they must adapt to a low-carbon world. At a recent energy conference in Houston, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP and the Norwegian oil company Statoil agreed that the industry needed to find ways to produce energy with fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

“This is an all-out assault on the protections we need to avert climate catastrophe,” Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “It’s a senseless betrayal of our national interest.”

The administration’s moves were widely anticipated, but they nonetheless underscore that the fossil fuel industry in Texas and across the United States will enjoy more favorable treatment under the new administration. Under Obama’s Clean Power Plan, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency forecast that electricity generated from coal-fired plants in Texas would need to be cut in half to meet carbon emissions targets — a move that likely would force plant shutdowns.

Texas, among several states that sued in federal court to block the Clean Power Plan, had not, as some other states had, developed a plan to meet the federal rules. As a result, rolling back the rules might spare the state some legal expenses and keep coal plants operating for the time being.

But practically, the state’s power industry is already moving toward the goal of Clean Power Plan as cheap and abundant natural gas and wind energy make it difficult for coal to compete economically. Wind already produces about one-fifth of the state’s electricity, according to Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages 90 percent of the state’s electricity grid.

The Clean Power Plan was blocked by the Supreme Court from going into effect while it undergoes judicial review. The case is now before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

‘Welcome departure’

But even if Trump decides to rescind the plan, undoing the regulations would still face a lengthy administrative process and a new round of lawsuits from environmental groups and other interests.

“One year, two years or three years? I don’t know, but it’s going to take some time,” the White House official said.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration says its priority is to grow the U.S. energy sector. The moratorium on new coal mining leases on federal lands will be rescinded. Federal agencies and departments will be ordered Tuesday to identify any policy or regulation that “serve as obstacles to energy production” — whether coal, nuclear or renewable energy — the official said.

“These executive actions are a welcome departure from the previous administration’s strategy of making energy more expensive through costly, job-killing regulations that choked our economy,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue said in a statement late Monday.

Whether the United States remains in the Paris accord, pulling back on existing climate policies is going to make it increasingly difficult to meet the greenhouse gas reduction goals President Obama agreed to last year — a reality the Trump administration appears willing to accept.

“We have a different view on climate policy,” the White House official said.

“This is an allout assault on the protections we need to avert climate catastrophe. It’s a senseless betrayal of our national interest.”

Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council