Trump Signs 'Energy Independence' Order Dismantling Clean Power Plan, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Federal Government Was Asking Coal Plants Not To Kill Roughly 3,600 Americans Per Year

WASHINGTON. President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order at Environmental Protection Agency headquarters directing the agency to begin dismantling the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration regulation that would have reduced carbon emissions from American power plants by an estimated 32 percent by 2030, resolving a long-standing administration concern that the federal government was actively trying to prevent the premature deaths of approximately 3,600 Americans per year.

Surrounded for the signing ceremony by coal miners assembled as visual signifiers of an industry the President had repeatedly characterized as the foundation of American energy, Mr. Trump described the order, titled "Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth," as the end of a "war on coal" he attributed to the previous administration, and as the beginning of "a new era in American energy production." Officials at the EPA, where the order was countersigned by recently confirmed Administrator Scott Pruitt, declined to explain how the mercury, particulate matter, and ground-level ozone reductions associated with the Clean Power Plan had qualified as wartime aggression against the United States.

The order also lifted the Obama-era moratorium on new coal leases on federal lands, instructed federal agencies to reconsider the "social cost of carbon" methodology used to evaluate climate impacts in regulatory analysis, and rescinded several executive memoranda directing the federal government to consider climate change in long-term planning. Officials present at the ceremony characterized this final provision as a course correction returning the federal government to the position, broadly held until roughly 1965, that the climate of the planet on which Americans lived was not necessarily a concern of the United States government.

Mr. Pruitt, who in his prior role as Attorney General of Oklahoma had personally filed 14 lawsuits against the agency he now led, told reporters the order represented "an honest assessment" of where federal regulation had gone too far. He did not specify which federal regulations had gone too far in the specific direction of reducing premature death, but said the agency was "looking at all of them."

Independent energy analysts noted that the decline in American coal employment, which the President's order was framed as reversing, had been driven over the preceding decade primarily by cheap natural gas and by automation within the coal industry itself, factors the executive order did not address. The miners who had stood behind the President during the signing returned to states where coal employment continued to decline at the same pace it had been declining before the order, after the order, and during every subsequent year of the President's term.

At press time, the President had moved on to a Rose Garden event commemorating Small Business Week, leaving behind a Clean Power Plan that the courts would spend the next several years asking whether could actually be repealed, a coal industry that would continue contracting regardless, and an EPA staff that had begun a four-year period of being asked to enforce regulations the agency's leadership was simultaneously trying to dismantle.