Trump Signs Executive Order Repealing Clean Power Plan At Coal-Miner Photo Op, Resolves Long-Standing Concern That America's Largest Source Of Carbon Emissions Was Operating Under A Cap On Carbon Emissions

The Filing

WASHINGTON. President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order at Environmental Protection Agency headquarters Tuesday directing the agency to review and rescind the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration regulation that had attempted to limit carbon emissions from the nation's single largest source of carbon emissions, resolving a long-standing administration concern that the United States was still telling power plants what they could put in the air.

The President was joined for the signing ceremony by a row of coal miners in hardhats, a tableau press materials described as a return-to-work celebration, and that economists subsequently described as a return-to-work celebration of an industry that had been shedding jobs for a decade for reasons unrelated to the rule being rescinded. "My administration is putting an end to the war on coal," Mr. Trump said, gesturing toward the miners, several of whom were there because their employers had bused them in. "We're going to have safety. We're going to have clean coal. Really clean coal."

Executive Order 13783 also lifted the federal moratorium on new coal leases on public lands, rescinded climate change guidance for environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, disbanded the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon, and revoked the Obama-era executive order requiring the federal government to prepare for the climate change Mr. Trump's order had just made it more difficult to track. Senior administration officials confirmed the executive branch would proceed as if the Earth's atmosphere were a political opponent of the executive branch.

The Clean Power Plan had been stayed by the Supreme Court in 2016 and was already legally dormant. Sources within the administration acknowledged the rule had not been in effect long enough to cost a single coal job, but explained that the symbolic act of formally signaling that the federal government no longer cared was the entire policy. "We are communicating to the regulatory state that fossil fuels are back open for business," one official said.

Career scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, several of whom would receive separation notices over the following two years, told reporters that the United States would continue to warm under the executive order at approximately the same rate it had been warming before the executive order, with slightly more carbon added to the air.

At press time, the President was returning to the Oval Office through a coal-dust-free corridor, where staff prepared him for the next executive action on his calendar, a separate order directing federal agencies to identify additional regulations that had been protecting things.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump personally, who delivered on a campaign promise to a constituency that had voted for him by margins above 70 percent and could now point to the order through the 2020 reelection cycle as proof that he had personally restored coal, regardless of what coal employment actually did in the intervening years.
§The coal industry, particularly publicly traded firms like Peabody Energy, Murray Energy, and Arch Coal, several of whose executives had personally lobbied for the order and whose stock prices rose on the announcement.
§The oil and gas industry, which gained the lifting of the federal coal leasing moratorium as a precedent for opening federal lands more broadly, and which benefited from the dismantling of the social cost of carbon framework that had previously constrained future fossil fuel projects in federal cost-benefit analysis.
§Trump donors in the fossil fuel sector, including Continental Resources founder Harold Hamm, who had advised the Trump campaign on energy policy and whose recommendations were substantially reflected in the order.
§Russia and Saudi Arabia, both of whose economic models depend on sustained global demand for fossil fuels, and both of whose strategic interests are served by the United States slowing its commitment to a clean energy transition.
§Future polluters generally, who now operated under a federal permitting framework that no longer required agencies to count the cost of climate damage when deciding whether to approve a project.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment