UPDATE: Via Politico, President Trump has signed the order. It is done.
"You know what it says, right?" said the president. "It says you're going back to work.
“You’re going back to work,” Trump says at the EPA as he signs executive order to roll back climate regulations https://t.co/L9VkcJwoOq
— NBC News (@NBCNews) March 28, 2017
It’s refreshing to have a new sheriff in town. Today, President Donald J. Trump is expected to sign a sweeping executive order that rolls back much of President Obama’s job-killing climate change regulations, including the Clean Power Plan (via Time):
President Donald Trump will sign a sweeping executive order Tuesday intended to shift the direction of U.S. environmental policy and begin the process of undoing some of the most prominent Obama-era environmental regulations, according to a senior White House official.The executive order, billed as a measure to promote "energy independence" and create jobs, will target a slew of environmental measures aimed at combating climate change including the Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of President Obama's global warming efforts. Some directives take effect immediately, like the end to a moratorium on new leases for coal mining on federal land, while others, like the review of the Clean Power Plan, require a rule making process that could take years to complete.
[…]
The executive order also ends a moratorium launched under Obama on new leases of federal land for coal mining, scraps a measure of the economic impact of climate change used to justify regulation known as the "social cost of carbon" and changes how climate change is considered in federal policy-making.
The Clean Power Plan was an ambitious effort by the Obama administration to cut carbon emissions by nearly 30 percent from 2005 level by 2025. Both Democratic and Republican attorneys general opposed it, over half the states opposed it, and it targeted those living in rural America. Pretty much any state that voted for Romney in 2012 was going to get screwed over by this regulatory overhaul. In coal-producing states, like West Virginia, energy costs were projected to increase 20 percent.
The Supreme Court stayed one of the main provisions, the power plant regulation, last year. Such increases in energy costs also put fixed-income seniors in the crosshairs. The ozone regulations between 2008-2013 cost a projected $56.6 billion in lost wages, along with 242,000 jobs. If Obama had succeeded in the war on coal, 125,800 jobs would’ve been lost in total, along with $650 billion in GDP. Moreover, millions of jobs from the black and Hispanic communities could have been on the chopping block.
While coal mining jobs will never return to their full strength, Trump aims to stop the bleeding. Yet, for some coal miners, Trump’s presidency has allowed them to get back to work in the mines.
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