President Trump is expected to ask EPA director Scott Pruitt to dismantle the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan today via an executive order.
The Clean Power Plan was part of the Paris climate agreement strategy to cut emissions. The rule aimed to reduce the carbon dioxide emitted by power plants.
The Washington Post calls Trump’s executive order “the most significant step yet in obliterating his predecessor’s environmental record.”
Coal supporters say Obama’s Clean Power Plan is overly punitive to the coal industry. But the rise of renewable energy sources has made coal less sustainable. One of Trump’s rallying cries is to bring back coal jobs, but most coal mining is now done by machines anyway. The Washington Post reports that there are currently about 75,000 coal jobs, and that number has been declining for decades. In comparison, The Solar Foundation’s 2016 Solar Jobs Census reported that solar jobs grew by over 51,000 last year for a total of 260,077 U.S. solar workers.
In The Washington Post article, a professor at Stanford University’s Wood Institute for the Environment, Christopher Field, said one of the long-term risks of Trump’s directive is “eroding the position of U.S. companies in the clean energy sector.”
When the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held a hearing on the Clean Power Plan in September 2016, SEIA urged the court to uphold it: “When it comes to fighting climate change—a grave environmental and national security threat—it’s critically important for the United States to lead by example. The Clean Power Plan does exactly that and should be upheld on its merits.”
But Trump’s executive order by no means indicates the reversal is a done deal. In order to remove the Clean Power Plan, the EPA must replace it with a new one. Before that, the EPA needs permission from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where the rule is being litigated, to revisit the plan. If they succeed in that effort, EPA officials must justify coming to the opposite conclusion of Obama’s EPA.