Trump orders Obama’s climate change measures rolled back

This was expected all along. Keeping up with his ‘America first’ policy, US President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order to roll back his predecessor Barack Obama’s climate change measures.

The order also directs all agencies immediately to conduct a review of all regulations, rules, policies and guidance documents that put roadblocks to domestic energy production and identify the ones that are not either mandated by law or actually contributing to the public good.

The order directs the EPA to take several actions to reflect this president’s environmental and economic goals, including a review of the new performance standards for coal-fired and natural gas-fired plants that amount to a de facto ban on new coal plant production in the US. “The war on coal is over,” Trump declared.

Also, the US may have played a lead role in the hammering out of the Paris Climate Agreement in December 2015, but on Tuesday there were speculations on whether the country would pull out of the accord. Although there was nothing in the Executive Order that spoke of a pull-out, at least for now.

In his address, Trump said his measures would start a new energy revolution.

“We are going to start a new energy revolution, one that celebrates American production on American soil. We want to make our goods here, instead of shipping them in from other countries. All over the world, they ship in, ship in, take the Americans’ money, take the money, go home, take our jobs, take our companies, no longer folks, no longer,” he said.

“We believe in those really magnificent words—Made in the USA. We will unlock job-producing natural gas, oil and shale energy. We will produce American coal to power American industry. We will transport American energy through American pipelines made with American steel, made with American steel, can you believe somebody would actually say that?” he said.

Trump’s move was, expectedly, panned by the opposition Democratic Party and environmental groups.

“Trump’s attempts to kill the #CleanPowerPlan are a threat to our health, our jobs, and our future,” tweeted NextGen Climate, a San Francisco-based environmental advocacy organisation. “Killing the #CleanPowerPlan could trigger 3,00,000 missed school days and work days per year; 90,000 asthma attacks in kids per year; 3,600 premature deaths per year.”

“These are more than statistics, they’re American lives at risk because this administration willfully ignores the science (sic),” tweeted Hillary Clinton, Trumps’s Democratic rival in the presidential race.

NextGen also contended that if Obama’s Clean Power Plan was fully implemented, it would have substantial public health and economic benefits, including:

• Reaping up to $34 billion in health benefits from reduced exposure to fine particulates and ozone pollution;
• Saving Americans $155 billion on their energy bills.
• Accelerating the transition to clean energy will also create up to two million jobs by 2050.

“We risk throwing away decades of hard work growing the clean energy economy and connecting our nation’s workers to the jobs of the future with this partisan and misguided action,” said Indian-American Congressman Ami Bera, who is a Ranking Member of the Space Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, however, said Trump strongly believed that protecting environment and “promoting our economy are not mutually exclusive goals.”

“This executive order will help to ensure that we have clean air and clean water without sacrificing economic growth and job creation,” he said. That debate may have just started now.

With PTI inputs.