Trump Administration To Drop Climate Change From Environmental Review
Sources close to the Trump administration have reportedly said that the President is set to sign a sweeping order that would dramatically reduce the role climate change plays in decision making across the US government.
According to Bloomberg, reporting on sources familiar with the administration’s plan, US President Donald Trump is intending to drastically reduce the role climate change plays in decision making across a range of government branches, and is designed to roll back the Obama-era fight on climate change.
The order, which could be signed as early as this week, is an attempt to initiate a wide-ranging, far-reaching attack on Obama-era measures aiming to mitigate the United States’ impact on climate change. Beyond just rolling back several of Obama’s major policy initiatives — such as the Clean Power Plan — the new order would reduce just how much attention and concern is paid to climate change in policy and administrative decisions made across the whole of the government.
For example, an Obama-era policy required government agencies to factor climate change into environmental reviews of projects such as the review for the Keystone XL pipeline. This would no longer be necessary, under Trump’s new plan. Further, the new order would apparently threaten the use of a metric known as the “social cost of carbon” in decision making — a metric used to estimate the potential economic damage from climate change.
The move is yet another to dramatically change the course of America in an age where countries all across the world, from economic behemoth’s like China, to European giants like Germany, and developing nations like those in South America, are all looking to mitigate their impact on climate change and anthropogenic global warming, and transition to low-carbon economies.
Donald Trump seems hell-bent on not just changing course, but out-and-out reversing America’s course, driving it back into the 80s.
We’ve heavily covered the numerous policy moves and personal appointments that have signaled this shift in American policy. From reversing Obama’s tightening of future vehicle emissions limits, cutting funding for everything from the EPA and NOAA to the Coast Guard, and last week’s not-so-much-of-a-revelation that the EPA’s new chief doesn’t believe carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming.
Of course, the big move we’ve all been waiting for is the expectation that Donald Trump will order his government to dismantle the Clean Power Plan — a move which has been hailed as disastrous by all and sundry, including the World Resources Institute.
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