President Donald Trump is signing an executive order Tuesday that, if all goes as planned, will basically destroy the majority of the environmental protections put into place by President Barack Obama, The Washington Post reports.
The latest executive order isn’t the first time Trump has moved to undo the Obama's work on climate change, but it is biggest step by far. The Post notes that just two months into his presidency, Trump "nullified a regulation barring surface-mining companies from polluting waterways." He's also moved to restart construction on the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines—projects that were shut down due to environmental worries.
Like pretty much every other action the Trump administration has tried to push through so far, the goal with this executive order is to get it implemented as soon as possible. But Obama’s regulations aren’t going down without a fight. The main goal of the executive order alone—to get “the Environmental Protection Agency to begin rewriting the 2015 legislation that limits greenhouse-gas emissions from existing power plants"—is wrapped up in all kinds of legal issues that’ll take some serious time and detangling to undo. Even though Trump would probably like to just pull the plug on the Clean Power Act and move on, Jeffrey Holmstead, who is a lawyer against the Act, told the Post that the president simply “doesn’t have the legal authority to do that.”
There are some who stand to benefit from this order—mostly coal companies that have taken hard hits with the increasing focus on promoting clean energy and restricting fossil fuels. Trump made promises during his campaign that he would fight for coal workers' jobs. But right now, we don't know if any jobs will even be created as a result of this order.
Trump’s track record on pushing through complex policy makes us wonder if the Clean Power Act will also be left to "explode."