New Executive Order on Energy Proves Fossil Fuel Industry is Calling the Shots
This week, the Trump administration continued its assault on our climate and shared public lands. The executive order the President signed is the latest in a series of moves that only seem to benefit the fossil fuel industry, while hurting the American people.
This executive order seeks to roll back progress the Obama administration made in combatting the causes and consequences of climate change.
The targeted policies and regulations had something in common: they upset the oil, gas and coal lobbies who want to pollute and drill with little oversight or public protection. With a single signature, the Trump administration is trying to ensure that the fossil fuel industry gets what it wants. A majority of Americans, 59 percent, want to prioritize protecting the environment over energy development, for the first time in the Gallup poll’s history. Yet, President Trump continues to clear the way for the fossil industry to wreak havoc.
This is in concert with the recently released budget from this administration that cuts the Environmental Protection Agency by 31 percent, ramps up spending on oil, gas and coal development on our public lands, and slashes climate research and research and development of renewable energy technology.
In its efforts to ensure the fossil fuel industry has unbridled access to our natural resources and complete ability to pollute as it wishes, the Trump administration has called for the roll back of several different climate policies:
- The Clean Power Plan: Finalized in 2015, it was put in place by the Obama administration to reduce pollution from power plants, the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. A multi-year plan, the Clean Power Plan would allow states to craft strategies for reducing pollution individually to help them figure out what is best considering their own energy sources. It is estimated that the Clean Power Plan would reduce greenhouse gases by 32 percent by 2030.
- Pause on federal coal leasing: As part of the review of the severely outdated federal coal program, the Department of the Interior placed a pause on new coal leasing until the program was modernized to meet the needs of the 21st century. Federal coal is a significant contributor to climate change, responsible for 12 percent of all greenhouse gases in the United States.1 It is imperative to ensure the agency considers climate at the outset of leasing and planning. The pause was initiated to ensure the agency had the breathing room to make those changes before resuming leasing.
- Environmental analyses that incorporate climate change: As a matter of procedure, all major infrastructure projects, including roads, bridges, energy development and many others, go through a process to analyze the environmental consequences of the project, ensure that the public has a say in how the project proceeds, and whether there are alternative ways for the project to be accomplished. During the Obama administration, there was a push to incorporate potential climate change consequences and climate change resiliency into all environmental analyses for large projects. The Council on Environmental Quality finalized guidance last year on how all federal agencies should include climate change consequences in environmental reviews of projects.
- Social cost of carbon: As we know, climate change has many adverse consequences, from drought to wildfires, from more severe storms to flooding. While these consequences cannot be traced to a single molecule of carbon emitted into the atmosphere, the accumulation of carbon increases the likelihood of these events. In order to determine the true fiscal cost of carbon emissions on society, economists and scientists developed the social cost of carbon. It is a figure, in terms of dollars, to help policymakers and everyday people understand the true cost of carbon pollution.
- Methane Pollution: The Obama administration put forward guidelines to help reduce methane pollution from oil and gas development. The Environmental Protection Agency finalized protections on methane pollution from new oil and gas pollution and the Bureau of Land Management put forward their regulations on all oil and gas development on public and tribal lands. The BLM’s regulations were put forward to reduce waste, although one of the benefits would be to reduce the pollution from methane. The EPA’s would be based purely on the fact that methane pollution contains many other volatile organic compounds and reducing it is important to improve air quality. Furthermore, methane is 84 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Limiting methane pollution would help our climate in the short-term immensely.
- Offsetting impacts from development: while not focused on climate impacts, Obama’s 2015 Presidential Memorandum on Mitigation played a key role in balancing development and conservation. While we’ve done mitigation in some form for nearly 100 years, the Presidential Memorandum ensured that mitigation funds would be spent in ways that really made a difference. For example, the loss of big game habitat and hunting opportunities from drilling could be offset by protecting and restoring habitat within key migration corridors. The Memorandum also offered more predictability for developers and efficiency for permitting by using science to inform decisions and making mitigation requirements clear up front.
As you can see from the list, this administration is working overtime to help rid the oil, gas and coal industries of any oversight or the need for transparency. Taken together, if all of these policies were to be rolled back, the United States would be unable to meet its commitments made in Paris last year.
During that historic summit, the United States and 174 other countries signed an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a worldwide effort to combat the effects climate change. Now, if these policies disappear, the United States will be letting the rest of the world know that it will no longer honor those promises.
It is imperative that we continue to fight back against the idea that climate change is not a problem worth addressing. This administration and Congress need to continue to hear that policies to combat climate change are a priority for the American people. Yale’s most recent study found that American’s overwhelmingly support policies to address climate change. Eighty-two percent support funding research into renewables. Seventy-five percent support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Sixty-nine percent support setting strickter limits on existing coal-fired power plants. It is clear that what this administration is trying to do is out of touch with what Americans actually want for the environment.
While they might believe that the voices of the fossil fuel industry are more important than ours, they are wrong. Our planet is not something that can just be discarded. It needs to be protected for us and for future generations and to do that, we must work hard to meet our carbon reduction goals.
