The White House confirmed President Donald Trump will sign an executive order next week to rescind a major regulation that was the keystone of President Barack Obama’s “Climate Action Plan.”
Trump will order the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review the Clean Power Plan (CPP) rule limiting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. That same order is also expected to lift an Department of Interior moratorium covering new coal mining leases on federal lands.
Trump is set to sign the order next week, a White House spokesman told The Wall Street Journal, and it will be the president’s second executive action targeting EPA regulations.
Trump set to sign executive order next week rolling back Obama’s climate agenda. pic.twitter.com/PC9lCDomj7
— Amy Harder (@AmyAHarder) March 1, 2017
Trump signed an order Monday asking the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to review the “waters of the U.S.” (WOTUS) rule and repeal parts that don’t align with administration priorities.
Republicans, farmers and property rights advocates welcomed the order, while environmentalists said that rescinding WOTUS would endanger water quality. WOTUS was held up by the courts in 2015 after 32 states filed suit. It’s never gone into effect.
For weeks, sources have suggested Trump could order EPA to withdraw the CPP to meet his promise of repealing Obama’s climate agenda. Environmentalists and Democratic state attorneys general will likely file suit to keep the rule in place.
Obama planned to use the CPP to meet his pledge to the United Nations to cut U.S. emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025 as part of the Paris agreement, which now may be on the rocks.
Trump promised to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement, but his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, who is also a White House adviser, reportedly intervened to strip language critical of the climate deal from the president’s upcoming EPA order.
Kushner and Ivanka “intervened to strike language about the climate deal from an earlier draft of the executive order,” sources familiar with the matter told WSJ.
Ivanka and her husband “have been considered a moderating influence on the White House’s position on climate change and environmental issues,” WSJ reported.
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