President Trump’s executive order on climate change

Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt is expected to sign a proposed rule on Tuesday that would roll back a key piece of President Obama’s climate legacy. But what’s largely been lost in the conversation is how much the attempt to repeal the regulation on carbon dioxide emissions will impact people’s health.

Pruitt wants to repeal Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the signature Environmental Protection Agency policy that aims to cut emissions from existing US power plants — a big driver of climate change — 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Last month, President Trump issued a long-promised executive order dismantling President Obama’s restrictions on carbon pollution — part of his broader assault on Obama’s environmental legacy. Today, the People’s Climate March is happening in DC — and in sister rallies around the world. So it’s a good time to have another look at public opinion on climate change.

As I have written before (see here and here), there is a deep and abiding partisan divide in opinion on global warming. That divide has held steady for decades now, through shifting weather, political administrations, and cultural moods.

On Saturday, the People’s Climate March will take to the streets because “everything we have struggled to move forward in the United States is in peril,” according to the march’s organizers. But how much progress has there really been, in the United States, to reduce the impact of human activities on the climate?

What are these great accomplishments that are “in peril”? Fewer than many activists on the left, particularly supporters of President Obama, would like to admit.

UPDATE March 29, 1:40 p.m.: According to a press briefing with Interior Secretary Zinke, the formal review of the federal coal leasing program launched by the previous administration has in fact been scrapped (contrary to what the post below anticipated). It is a much more significant change than the lifting of the moratorium. Here’s a post on what it means.

In January 2016, the Department of Interior placed a temporary moratorium on the leasing of federal land to private companies for the purposes of coal mining.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order rolling back a number of policies put in place by the Obama administration to combat climate change.

As Vox’s Brad Plumer explained in detail, the order includes these key instructions to the federal government:

One of the big justifications the Trump administration is using to dismantle US climate policies is that these moves would reverse the collapse of the coal industry and bring back coal jobs lost under President Obama.

“Will it bring back coal jobs? I think absolutely it will,” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said on Sunday, of Trump’s new executive order.

The executive order on climate change President Donald Trump announced Tuesday afternoon is an explicit attack on President Barack Obama’s efforts to fight climate change.

But it also implicitly denies we’re at risk from climate change in the first place.

Now that the GOP’s effort to repeal and replace Obamacare has crashed into the rocks, President Trump really needs to find some achievements — things he can actually get done that won’t split the Republican Party.

The lowest-hanging fruit out there that fits that description? Deregulation.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that will begin the long, hard process of dismantling President Barack Obama’s climate policies — including, most prominently, the Clean Power Plan.

Trump’s executive order won’t, by itself, repeal the Clean Power Plan, which is a major Environmental Protection Agency regulation that aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants 32 percent below 2005 levels. Instead, Trump will ask his new EPA head, Scott Pruitt, to replace Obama’s rule with … something else.

Donald Trump has long talked about reining in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is in charge of enforcing federal laws on air and water pollution. It’s a top priority for his supporters in the fossil-fuel industry.

But there’s still a lot of uncertainty over what, exactly, this will look like. Trump himself has been all over the map on the agency’s future. In Congress, there are bills floating around that would do everything from abolish the EPA to merely curb its powers at the margins. And, while Trump’s pick to lead the EPA, Scott Pruitt, was an ardent foe of Obama’s environmental policies, he’ll face serious legal hurdles in trying to dismantle them all at once.

Donald Trump has given every sign that he wants to dismantle the multitude of environmental rules President Obama has put in place over the past eight years. He’s vowed to tear up major climate regulations like the Clean Power Plan. His top pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has sued to block nearly every pollution regulation the Obama administration has enacted. Pruitt will no doubt come in looking to make sweeping changes.

That said, it’s not yet clear how far Trump and Pruitt can actually go here. Overhauling the EPA is a surprisingly difficult task that involves navigating a complex bureaucracy bound by powerful laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both came into office hoping to take apart key EPA environmental rules, yet were often stymied by the courts, by green groups skilled at litigation, by career officials, and by sheer inertia.