Trump Signs Executive Order Directing EPA To Dismantle Clean Power Plan, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Country's Coal-Fired Power Plants Were Subject To Federal Limits On Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The Filing

WASHINGTON. President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order titled "Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth," directing the Environmental Protection Agency to begin the formal process of rescinding the Clean Power Plan, the Obama-era regulation that had required existing power plants to reduce carbon dioxide emissions roughly 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

The President signed the order during a ceremony at EPA headquarters, flanked by an honor guard of coal miners in hard hats and a small delegation of energy executives who had spent the morning being walked through the building's lobby like visiting dignitaries. Behind the President, charts displaying the rule he was about to begin dismantling had been respectfully covered.

"We're ending the war on coal," Trump said, signing the document on a small portable desk that aides had positioned in front of a wall reading EPA. "We're going to put our miners back to work." Sources within the administration confirmed the order also instructed federal agencies to review every other rule that might in any way burden domestic energy producers, a category which administration lawyers would, going forward, treat as encompassing nearly any regulation issued by the EPA since its founding.

The Clean Power Plan had never actually taken effect, having been stayed by the Supreme Court in February 2016 pending litigation. Tuesday's executive order, which initiated a multiyear administrative process to formally rescind and replace the rule, was therefore aimed at preventing a regulation that was not currently being enforced from someday being enforced. Administration officials described this as urgent.

Asked how the order squared with the President's prior assurances that he favored "crystal clear" air and water, a White House spokesperson explained that the rule being rescinded was the wrong sort of clean.

At press time, the EPA had begun drafting a replacement regulation, eventually unveiled as the Affordable Clean Energy rule, a federal program whose principal effect would be to allow coal plants to keep emitting carbon dioxide at the rate they were already emitting it.

Who Benefits

§Trump personally, who delivered the signature campaign promise made to coal-country voters and produced the photo op of miners standing behind him at a federal agency tasked with limiting their pollution.
§The coal industry, whose continued operation of aging, high-emitting plants was no longer subject to a federally scheduled drawdown.
§Coal executives and major Trump donors, whose deregulatory wishlists, circulated in writing during the transition, were closely echoed in the order's text.
§Utility companies operating older coal-fired plants, who avoided the capital costs of compliance with the rescinded rule.
§Oil and natural gas producers, who benefited from the broader signal that federal climate regulation was now a thing being undone rather than enforced.
§Industry-connected EPA appointees, who gained authority to dismantle rules their prior employers had spent years opposing in court.
§Republican state attorneys general, the lead plaintiffs against the Clean Power Plan, who were released from a multistate litigation campaign by the simple expedient of the federal government joining their side.
§The Russian and Saudi energy sectors, whose competitive position relative to U.S. clean-energy investment quietly improved each time the United States dismantled its own climate policy.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment