Our view: As globe warms, Trump doubles down on fossil fuels
As if any more evidence were needed that climate change is making extreme heat more likely, take a look at what happened in Southern California last week. On Tuesday at Dodger Stadium, the first-pitch temperature for the opening game of the World Series was a record-shattering 103 degrees.
And how is the Trump administration responding to the warning signs of global warming? By systematically dismantling the Obama administration’s environmental initiatives.
Just five months ago, President Trump broke with nearly 200 other countries in taking the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, a stunning move given that the accord regulated nothing, relying only on peer pressure and transparency to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Now the Trump administration is turning its attention to gutting the Clean Power Plan, the 2015 Obama initiative aimed at curbing greenhouse gases from energy plants. This latest effort to kill the Clean Power Plan demonstrates sheer contempt for laws governing clean air and the benefits of environmental regulation.
Power plants generate about a third of the 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide America pumps into the atmosphere each year. The Clean Power Plan offered each state a flexible pathway to reducing these emissions by a third. The plan was the next best idea to a market-based carbon tax that would be rebated to consumers.
Yes, it would undoubtedly result in less burning of coal, the dirtiest fuel. But coal was in decline even without new environmental regulations as utilities embraced cleaner natural gas, wind and solar.
U.S. coal mining jobs have fallen to fewer than 77,000, while those in renewable energy have hit 800,000 and keep increasing. Some of the nation’s largest power companies this month shrugged off Trump’s regulatory rollback, arguing that clean energy has proved to be good business.
The Supreme Court narrowly ruled last year to temporarily block implementation of the plan amid challenges that it represented regulatory overreach. An appellate panel can still reach a decision and should do so.
Regardless, the Environmental Protection Agency remains compelled by law to reduce carbon dioxide. A 2007 Supreme Court ruling established the gas as a pollutant subject to reduction if EPA found it a danger to public health. The EPA did that two years later, after reviewing the scientific evidence.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s proposal for dismantling the Clean Power Plan mentions drafting a new method for reducing carbon dioxide. We’ll believe that when we see it.
If there’s any good news, it’s that the Clean Power Plan — or some similar action to significantly reduce greenhouse gases gushing from the nation’s electricity sector — is likely to survive this effort at sabotage. But that might take years of bureaucratic and legal wrangling, consuming precious time as the planet grows warmer.