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Yesterday President Trump issued his latest and loudest attack on climate and public health. In his first-ever trip to the EPA, Trump unveiled his so-called “Executive Order on Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth,” a sweeping action actually aimed at dismantling this country’s policies to tackle global climate change. Ignoring the compelling science and severe risks of climate change, Trump’s demolition effort starts by revoking President Obama’s Climate Action Plan, a broad-based plan to cut climate pollution, lead international efforts to combat climate change, and prepare the United States for its impacts. The Order also begins an attempt to roll back our most important climate standards, metrics, and guidance. It follows on the heels of the Trump administration’s earlier move to reopen the fuel-economy and greenhouse gas standards for light-duty vehicles and his approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Collectively, these climate protections have created substantial momentum toward meeting our international commitments to reduce climate pollution and avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Fortunately, Trump’s anti-science climate bashing is likely to fail, as people pour into the streets, flood the administration with calls and comment letters, and go to court to challenge this misguided assault on our climate.
What does this Executive Order do?
The Executive Order tells the EPA to review the Clean Power Plan (CPP) and the Carbon Pollution Standards, the country’s first-ever limits on carbon dioxide pollution from power plants and, “if appropriate,” to begin the process to “suspend, revise, or rescind” those rules. Since both rules are currently being litigated in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the Order instructs the Attorney General to ask the court to put the litigation on hold while the EPA’s review is pending, which he’s already done.
The Order also attacks critical pollution safeguards for the oil and gas industry: the EPA’s methane performance standards for new oil and gas infrastructure, and a suite of Interior Department rules covering hydrofracking, venting, and flaring of natural gas on public and Indian lands, and the development of oil and gas resources in national parks and wildlife refuges. As with the power plant rules, the Order anticipates the delay of the pending litigation over some of these rules.
But it does not stop there. Over a year ago, the Interior Department issued a temporary moratorium on coal leasing on public lands pending its review of the federal coal leasing program to consider impacts on climate and on taxpayers. The Order directs Interior to lift that moratorium. Today, Interior Secretary Zinke canceled both the moratorium and the environmental review, and the Sierra Club and its allies went to court to reverse that decision.
The Order also eliminates key tools for evaluating the climate impacts of federal actions. These include the social cost metrics for greenhouse gases, which help agencies quantify the climate benefits of their rules, as well as the guidance to agencies on incorporating climate change considerations in environmental review of major federal actions. Furthermore, the Order revokes a series of executive orders issued by President Obama geared toward increasing resilience and preparing federal agencies for adaptation to climate change.
So, what’s wrong with this Order?
Relying on “alternative facts” provided by the coal industry, President Trump has falsely portrayed these crucial climate policies as job-killing regulatory burdens. A White House “fact sheet” cites a coal lobby–funded “analysis” that claims that the Clean Power Plan would significantly increase electricity prices. As our colleagues at NRDC and UCS have explained, this unsupported PowerPoint presentation is flat wrong. It exaggerates the cost of clean energy measures while entirely ignoring the health and climate benefits of reducing carbon pollution. The EPA’s own analysis found that, through efficiency savings, the Clean Power Plan will ultimately save consumers money on their electric bills, and that the rule’s climate and health-related benefits will outweigh its modest compliance costs by billions of dollars per year. It will also help create jobs in the clean energy and energy efficiency sectors, which already employ far more workers than the fossil fuel industry. And the Clean Power Plan commits the federal government to continue providing transition assistance to workers in the coal industry who are losing their jobs owing to coal’s decline, which predates the Clean Power Plan by well over a decade and which will continue under any realistic forecast.
Trump cannot bring coal industry jobs back, as coal baron Robert Murray himself has warned. Coal companies are filing for bankruptcy, exports are down, and the capital flight toward other generation resources will continue unabated. Coal cannot compete with cheaper and cleaner renewable energy that is rapidly coming on line. Trump’s Executive Order will not reverse any of these trends. Trump should instead focus on programs that ensure the benefits of the clean energy economy extend to communities that have relied on fossil fuels, in the form of good-paying, family-sustaining, long-term jobs.
As for the litigation, the Trump administration aims to delay a decision in the power plant cases by the D.C. Circuit. The Clean Power Plan case was fully briefed over a year ago, and the full D.C. Circuit Court heard an entire day of arguments from both sides last September. The Carbon Pollution Standards case has also been fully briefed, and oral argument is scheduled less than three weeks from today. These rules stand on a rock-solid legal foundation, and the new administration’s political priorities should not delay these rulings.
Neither President Trump nor his political appointees can undo safeguards such as the Clean Power Plan, the Carbon Pollution Standards, and the EPA and Department of Interior’s oil and gas regulations by executive fiat. Any changes that this administration wants to make to these rules will have to go through a legally mandated process, including publishing a proposed rule, soliciting public comments, and publishing a final rule that both addresses those comments and justifies any major change in the agency’s positions.
The agency will have a very difficult time justifying a departure from the existing standards, which were the result of the most thorough and extended public comment process the EPA has ever undertaken. In the case of the Clean Power Plan, the agency spent months reaching out to a wide range of stakeholders, conducted three public hearings around the country, and considered input and responded to 4.3 million comments. The agency cannot simply rescind these regulations without issuing a legally adequate replacement that makes meaningful reductions in climate pollution. Indeed, the Supreme Court has held on three separate occasions that the EPA has a duty to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
We are confident that the public will rise up and speak out to stop the rollback of our climate safeguards. Large majorities of Americans in red and blue states alike support reducing carbon pollution. The Sierra Club and its allies will use every tool at our disposal to ensure that the Trump administration’s efforts to cripple these essential climate safeguards go exactly as far as its failed efforts on health care did: nowhere.