About To Undo
Obama’s Legacy
On Climate Change
The White House plans to scrap a rule on power plant emissions, kneecapping U.S. participation in the Paris climate accord.
By Alexander C. Kaufman - 03/27/2017
By Alexander C. Kaufman - 03/27/2017
Business & Environment Reporter, The Huffington Post
Trump plans to sign an executive order on Tuesday rolling back Obama-era policies to curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said Sunday.
Trump plans to sign an executive order on Tuesday rolling back Obama-era policies to curb planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said Sunday.
In
an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” Pruitt said the order will be called
the “Energy Independence Executive Order.” It is expected to undo
former President Barack Obama’s
signature program to deal with climate change, the Clean Power Plan,
which limited greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
“We have made tremendous progress on our environment. We can be both
pro-jobs and pro-environment,” Pruitt said. “The executive order will
address the past administration’s effort to kill jobs throughout the
country through the Clean Power Plan.”
The
executive order will likely take other measures to protect the coal
industry, such as instructing the Department of the Interior to lift a
temporary ban on coal leasing on federal lands that the Obama
administration put in place last year. The order is also expected to scrap federal guidances instructing agencies to factor climate change into policymaking, and to disband a team tasked with calculating the “social cost of carbon.”
Undoing The Clean Power Plan
Trump’s
executive order will likely kneecap the federal government’s most
important policy for reducing carbon emissions. Doing so would also
hamper U.S. efforts to meet the commitments made more than a year ago in
the 195-country Paris Agreement ― the first global climate deal to include the U.S. and China, the world’s biggest polluters.
The long-expected order would give teeth to Trump’s America First Energy Plan, a vague policy outline he issued after his inauguration to eliminate Obama’s Climate Action Plan.
Obama’s
plan, launched in 2013, set a strategy for combating climate change by
cutting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The utility sector
accounts for the greatest portion of the U.S. carbon footprint,
producing 30 percent of all emissions, according to 2014 data from the EPA. That’s largely because coal, by far the dirtiest-burning fossil fuel, has long served as the country’s primary source of electricity.
The
core of Obama’s initiative was the Clean Power Plan, a sweeping EPA
rule that aimed to reduce carbon emissions from existing power plants by
32 percent below 2005 levels. The policy set new standards for
new natural gas-burning power plants, and put stricter limits on
coal-fired, steam-based plants. By implementing the plan, the U.S. hoped
meet its emissions reduction goals as part of the 2015 Paris climate
agreement. (The failure of
previous global deals, such as the 1992 Kyoto Protocol, hinged partly on
the United States’ refusal to implement emission cuts.)
The
president’s elder daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, White House
senior adviser Jared Kushner, convinced the president to remove language
from his new order that was critical of the Paris accord, according to The Wall Street Journal. It’s unclear how the U.S. can meet its commitments without the Clean Power Plan in place.
Last
year, a coalition of Republican-controlled states ― led by Pruitt, who
was then Oklahoma’s attorney general ― filed a lawsuit to stop the
emissions rules, prompting the Supreme Court to grant a stay suspending
implementation. Pruitt launched at least 13 lawsuits against the EPA
before he became the agency’s administrator last month.
Repealing
those rules could prove expensive and deadly, costing the U.S. economy up to $600 billion by removing critical incentives to increase energy
efficiency, according to the research firm Energy Innovation. The CCP’s repeal could lead to billions of tons of carbon being released into the
atmosphere, which in turn could contribute to more than 120,000 premature deaths, according to a writeup of the study in Forbes.
Still, another Supreme Court decision may hinder the Trump administration’s
efforts to completely scrap the plan. In 2007’s Massachusetts v. EPA, the court ruled that greenhouse gas emissions constituted pollution, requiring the EPA to take action. Plus, courts work both ways: Environmental groups are widely expected to sue over attempts to stop cutting emissions.
“In order to make policy change, it’s going to need to be supported by the science, and that’s where I think ultimately the effort is going to founder,” Pete Fontaine, a veteran environmental lawyer who worked at the EPA, told The Huffington Post. “Yes, you can cut programs and you
can go about it with your fiscal authority to try to change policy, but in order to modify regulations, you have to be able to withstand an
arbitrary-and-capricious standard.”
Such standards, which can be used to overturn previous court rulings, would need to stand the test of climate science, Fontaine said.
“Facts
will not be changed by people expressing beliefs in an alternative set of facts,” he said. “The science is well settled on climate change, and that science is based on literally more than a century of scientific inquiry and the laws of physics, which are going to govern here no matter what people say is contrary to their beliefs.”
Yet
a battle appears to be brewing in the Trump administration over the future of the endangerment clause, policy that spawned from the Supreme Court’s ruling categorizing carbon dioxide and methane emissions as a public health threat. David Schnare, an appointee from the EPA transition team, quit suddenly earlier this month in part because Pruitt refused to take on the clause, Politico reported.
“The backstory to my resignation is extremely complex,” Schnare told E&E News,
an energy and environment news wire. “I will be writing about it myself. It is a story not about me, but about a much more interesting set of events involving misuse of federal funds, failure to honor oaths of office, and a lack of loyalty to the president.”
King Coal’s Decree
By
lifting the temporary moratorium on coal leasing, the Trump
administration is ending a policy aimed at lessening the environmental
impact of mining and increasing the government’s yield on investment.
The
current rules grant coal companies the right to apply to schedule leases at times favorable to them, as well as to design the tracts and
control the terms on which they’re offered. Critics say the standards are lopsided, giving coal producers above-market-value cuts of revenue
generated from mining.
The
government levies an 8 percent cut of revenue from underground mining and takes 12.5 percent from surface mining, which includes environmentally destructive techniques such as mountaintop removal and open pit mining. That money is split between the federal government and the state where the coal is mined.
But Dan Bucks, former director of revenue for the state of Montana, a major coal producer, said the leasing program is “essentially broken,” with more than 90 percent of leases awarded without real competition.
“Lease payments, for those of us who have examined from outside can determine, have failed the market value standard test,” he said. “The American people have been shortchanged on the leasing side as well as the royalty side.”
“The Obama administration wanted to fix that,” added Bucks, who is not aligned
with either Democrats or Republicans. “They wanted to update the leasing program so public issues, namely environmental issues and climate change, could be taken into account before leases were offered.”
Trump vowed to resuscitate the coal business by axing environmental rules that he and the industry blame for years of decline and thousands of layoffs. Those promises won him big victories in coal country. But shrinking market demand has actually played a bigger role in coal’s
decline.
Cheaper, cleaner-burning natural gas has devoured coal’s share of the electricity market over the past decade. In response, coal companies have bet big on continued demand from China. But Chinese demand peaked in 2012, and has since plummeted due to the country’s slowing economy
and a move to suspend the construction of coal-fired power plants in favor of renewable energy.
A War On Environmental Protections
Trump has put numerous other environmental regulations on the chopping block since his inauguration. He and many Republican lawmakers argue that these rules created unnecessary and at times pricey hurdles for corporations and small businesses.
Last week, the White House proposed slashing the EPA’s budget by nearly one-third, a move that would eliminate popular programs like Energy Star and environmental justice initiatives, and would cripple the agency’s enforcement division. The EPA scrapped a rule earlier this month requiring oil and gas drillers to report leaks of methane, a greenhouse gas 40 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Last month, after House Republicans voted to overturn a rule protecting waterways from coal mining pollution, Trump signed an order instructing the
EPA and Army Corps of Engineers to overhaul the 2015 Waters of the
United States rule, which expanded federal control over wetlands and
other waterways by 3 percent. The
rule essentially provided guidelines on whether anti-pollution laws
would apply if, for example, a farmer dams a stream to make a pond for
livestock or a developer fills in a marsh to build a new house.
But
in the view of the country’s top environmental policymaker, the
pendulum swung too far in the direction of environmentalists under the
previous administration, and course correction is needed.
“We need a pro-growth and pro-environment approach for how we do
regulations in this country,” Pruitt said on Sunday. “For too long, we
have accepted a narrative that if you’re pro-growth, pro-jobs, you’re
anti-environment.”
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