Trump signs order to roll back Obama’s climate moves

President Trump on Tuesday signed a wide-ranging executive order to start the process of rolling back former President Obama’s aggressive climate change agenda. Trump signed the order in a ceremony at the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — the agency responsible for many of the major policies being targeted. The most significant piece of the order instructs the EPA to formally consider repealing the Clean Power Plan. It was the central piece of Obama’s second-term climate agenda, setting a 32 percent cut in the power sector’s carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. Federal regulators are also asked under the order to consider repealing the EPA’s carbon limits for newly-built power plants and methane emissions standards for oil and natural gas drilling from the EPA and the Interior Department. It also has some immediate effects. The order stops Interior’s moratorium on new coal-mining leases on federal land, something Obama instituted to study how to charge coal companies for the climate impacts of the fuel they mine on federal property. It also stops policies asking federal agencies to consider climate change in environmental reviews, a government-wide accounting method for climate change regulations called the Social Cost of Carbon and Obama executive orders on climate, like one asking that infrastructure be built to withstand a future climate affected by global warming...more

Also see the White House background briefing.