NEW YORK (Diya TV) — For a moment in time it appeared Donald Trump, having denounced global warming as a hoax, swore to dismantle Barack Obama’s environmental legacy, might have had a rethink.
Now, it seems not.
The president-elect on Friday nominated Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general, to head the Environmental Protection Agency. A candidate political commentator’s immediately said would be employed as an agent to destroy the environmental rules that are perhaps the main achievement of Obama’s second term.
To navigate an obstructive Republican-controlled Congress, Obama’s environmental policies were almost all filed as regulations, mostly by the EPA. His marque order, issued last year, is a scheme known as the Clean Power Plan (CPP), designed to force the states to curb greenhouse-gas emissions from coal- and gas-fired power stations.
While on the campaign trail, Trump denounced the plan as a “war on coal,” and made promises to scrap it. Pruitt, who has sued the EPA unsuccessfully on multiple occasions, is leading a legal challenge to the CPP by 27 states and some firms in the federal appeals court in Washington, DC. The challengers say it infringes states’ rights.
Because the CPP is still locked in litigation, it should be fairly easy to kill. That would make it hard for America to meet the emissions-cutting targets it set for itself at the UN climate summit in Paris last year — the president-elect has also promised to cancel the Paris agreement.
The move is almost completely contrary to the recent hints that Trump might be taking a more serious view of the environment. During an interview with the New York Times, he acknowledged some “connectivity” between human activity and climate change. On December 5th he discussed the issue with Al Gore, who was said to have been invited to Trump Tower, in Manhattan, by the president-elect’s daughter, Ivanka. One of Trump’s most trusted advisers, she has let it be known that climate change is an issue she cares about.
