California, NY vow to fill climate-change void left by Trump

The presidential executive order sets in motion an effort to rescind the Clean Power Plan, which the Trump administration repeatedly said, in effect, amounts to a war on fossil fuels, particularly coal-fired units.

“Yes, there is going to be a countermovement”, Brown vowed, predicting Trump’s actions will mobilize environmentalists in a way President Obama never could. Trump’s order could make it more hard, though not impossible, for the U.S.to achieve its carbon reduction goals.

The move outraged environmentalists, scientists and climate-conscious politicians who warn that gutting America’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions is risky for the planet in the long run and could more immediately threaten an worldwide climate agreement the US signed with other countries. Some conservative groups have pushed to withdraw the so-called endangerment finding, but Trump’s EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, has said the finding “needs to be enforced and respected”.

But the consensus of scientists is that climate change is real. But it is in the financial interests of Trump to choose to disagree with them.

American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) welcomed the executive orders signed by Trump.

A coalition of 23 U.S. states and local governments has vowed to challenge in court President Trump’s latest Executive Order reversing a raft of President Obama’s climate change regulations. They were the first-ever national standards to address carbon pollution from power plants.

The rewriting of the Clean Power Plan could take over a year, as it requires the EPA to follow the same procedure of rule-making used when crafting the original plan. It means no more challenges to restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, especially from Republican-led states that profit from burning oil, coal and gas.

And veterans of the Obama administration played down the impact of Trump’s actions.

Disagreeing with the president on Tuesday was U.S. Sen.

Trump’s Tuesday order represents a reset of the federal government’s policies on climate change.

According to the EPA, the Clean Power Plan was designed with three building blocks. Twenty-seven states, including West Virginia, filed suit over the plan’s implementation.

Emissions from out-of-state coal-fired power plants have long had a significant impact on New Jersey, contributing to both the region’s poor air quality and a sea level rise in a state that has 127 miles of coastline. We are going to have clean coal.

But Trump is signaling that he wants to destroy the very idea of climate protection, to rip that approach out by its roots.

Webber said the only way to really end the trend against coal would be with market-intervening policies that are virtually impossible to envision in the United States, such as a mandate to use coal or a tariff on natural gas “to make it falsely expensive”. Eleven percent of survey respondents expected natural gas energy to decrease moderately or significantly, while 64 percent expected natural gas to increase moderately or significantly in the energy mix.

Critics in Texas, including Attorney General Ken Paxton, said the plan would inflate electricity costs and imperil the state’s power grid, while proponents said that market forces and existing policies alone would push Texas most of the way toward its emissions-cutting target. Coal isn’t coming back. These states recognize that, on such a crucial issue that is already costing taxpayers billions of dollars in storm response and other costs, state action alone will not be enough and strong federal actions like the Clean Power Plan are needed.

However, in rolling back Obama’s regulations, the Trump administration will also have to contend with years of established environmental law.

The estimate of a potential economic benefit from carbon reduction was used by the EPA and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 2010 and 2012 when the agencies crafted mileage rules that require automakers to produce vehicle and truck fleets averaging around 50 miles per gallon by 2025. The same goes for other rulings.

Environmental groups hurled scorn on Trump’s order, arguing it is risky and goes against the broader global trend toward cleaner energy technologies.