The decree, dubbed the "Energy Independence" order, will seek to undo former President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan requiring states to slash carbon emissions from power plants—a critical element in helping the United States meet its commitments to a global climate change accord agreed by nearly 200 countries in Paris in December 2015.Less the direction of trying to save the planet and more the direction of destroying it for corporate profits.
It will also rescind a ban on coal leasing on federal lands, reverse rules to curb methane emissions from oil and gas production, and reduce the weight of climate change in federal agencies' assessments of new regulations.
"We're going to go in a different direction," a senior White House official told reporters ahead of Tuesday's order.
This is just a sweeping devastating of climate protections that were already insufficiently robust. And this is the kind of policy that has effects that can't just be unwound with the stroke of a pen sometime down the road.
The time we lose waiting for a court to overturn this executive order, or for a Democratic governing majority, is time we cannot get back.
Hillary Clinton's campaign was "the first major presidential campaign ever to make combating climate change a central issue." She was the only presidential candidate to speak frankly about environmental racism, issuing a factsheet dedicated to detailing her "Plan to Fight for Environmental and Climate Justice." When the first two presidential debates failed to meaningfully broach climate change, she dedicated an entire speech to it, with Al Gore alongside her.
Anyone who still believes there was "no difference" between the two candidates is being willfully ignorant. That narrative was always mendacious, dangerous trash—and nothing makes that more plain than what is about to happen on climate change.
Relatedly: Arctic researcher Victoria Herrmann details at the Guardian how the data critical to her research is being deleted by the Trump administration.
Which is no less than any of us should have anticipated from a man who declared climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.
The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012
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