Trump Rescinds Clean Power Plan In Ceremony At EPA, Resolves Long-Standing Concern That Regulation Already Stayed By Supreme Court Might Someday Take Effect

The Filing

WASHINGTON. President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order beginning the formal rollback of the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, a regulatory framework limiting carbon emissions from existing power plants that the Supreme Court had stayed in February 2016, that had not in the year and a half since produced a single ton of emissions reduction, and that the President pledged would no longer threaten to do so under his administration.

Mr. Trump, who signed the order at Environmental Protection Agency headquarters surrounded by a group of coal miners brought to Washington for the occasion, called the action "the end of the intrusion into your lives" and "the start of a new era in American energy production," referring to a sector in which natural gas had already overtaken coal as the largest single source of U.S. electricity, owing chiefly to a glut of cheap shale gas no executive order would alter in either direction.

The order, formally titled "Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth," also rescinded a moratorium on new coal leases on federal land, withdrew Obama-era guidance instructing federal agencies to weigh greenhouse gas emissions in environmental reviews, and disbanded the interagency working group on the social cost of carbon, a figure developed by federal economists to put a dollar value on the future flooding, drought, crop loss, and wildfire damage attributable to each additional ton of emissions, which the Trump administration would shortly revise from approximately $50 per ton to between $1 and $7.

Reporters at the signing noted that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who as Oklahoma attorney general had sued the EPA more than a dozen times over rules he was now charged with either enforcing or dismantling, stood directly behind the President for the duration of the ceremony. Mr. Pruitt, speaking briefly before the signing, told the assembled coal miners that the agency he now ran would be "getting back to its mission," which he did not further specify, and that power was being "returned" to the states.

Coal industry analysts contacted after the ceremony confirmed that the executive order would have essentially no effect on the trajectory of U.S. coal employment, which had been falling since 2011 because of competition from natural gas rather than from federal regulation, but acknowledged that the order would meaningfully assist Mr. Trump in producing a televised image of a President personally and visibly assisting coal miners. The U.S. coal mining sector at the time of the ceremony employed roughly 50,000 workers, fewer than were employed by the Arby's restaurant chain.

At press time, the Supreme Court continued to maintain its stay on the regulation the President had just spent the morning ceremonially repealing, leaving the practical effect of the executive order substantially indistinguishable from the practical effect of doing nothing at all.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump personally, who collected a campaign-promise-fulfilled photo opportunity with coal miners on his ninth Tuesday in office, suitable for indefinite reuse at future rallies.
§Scott Pruitt, who advanced from suing the EPA from outside Oklahoma to dismantling it from inside Washington, a career trajectory he would continue until being forced out the following year amid roughly a dozen federal ethics investigations.
§Robert Murray and Murray Energy, the coal magnate and company that supplied the miners for the ceremony and had personally lobbied the President for the order, receiving federal validation for a business model already being overtaken by gas.
§Coal industry executives generally, who acquired federal political cover for what were otherwise ordinary market-driven layoffs, allowing the industry's continued contraction to be attributed to anything except the natural gas its donors also produced.
§The natural gas industry, which continued displacing coal under an order ostensibly issued to help coal, and which by the end of the first Trump term would supply more than 40 percent of American electricity.
§Oil and gas industry donors, who saw the elimination of the federal social cost of carbon working group, a body whose only product had been a number that made their permits harder to issue.
§Fossil fuel exporters in Russia and Saudi Arabia, whose long-term market position improved with every U.S. action that slowed the domestic transition to renewables.
§Future operators of power plants permitted between 2017 and the rule's eventual judicial unsticking, who were spared compliance costs in exchange for emissions the American public would absorb on the back end as heat waves, hurricanes, and uninhabitable acreage.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment