Environmental groups file lawsuit over Trump climate actions

Environmental groups that have hired extra lawyers in recent months are prepared to go to court to fight a sweeping executive order from President Donald Trump that eliminates many restrictions on fossil fuel production and would roll back his predecessor’s plans to curb global warming.

But in Florida and across the country, it’s doubtful the rollback will have much impact – positive or negative, says University of Miami economist David Kelly.

“With the new Executive Order and the budget proposal, Trump has shown that he does not believe in climate change and has chose to go back on his nation’s worldwide commitments to reduce emissions and provide funding”.

Another part of the President’s Executive Order does take effect immediately: lifting an Obama moratorium on leasing coal on federal public lands. It also calls for a new analysis of the social cost of carbon which was fundamental to the cost-benefit analysis of climate change regulations including the Clean Power Plan. “It is very simple”, an unnamed senior administration official said.

Morrisey was among the 27 state attorneys general challenging the Obama plan in the case West Virginia v. EPA.

“If they, at the moment, lose all the tools they have in order to achieve those targets, it’s pretty clear they will not achieve those targets”, he said. Trump asked to the coal miners gathering around him as he signed the executive order.

“I suggested that he temper his expectations”.

“They’re ramping up production and bringing on employees who have been laid off, both in the metallurgical as well as the steam market”, said Raney.

“That transition already began before the Clean Power Plan and will continue with or without it”, he says.

“We risk throwing away decades of hard work growing the clean energy economy and connecting our nation’s workers to the jobs of the future with this partisan and misguided action”, said Indian-American Congressman Ami Bera, who is a Ranking Member of the Space Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

“There is a shift going on for reasons beyond the Clean Power Plan”, Charles Patton told a West Virginia energy conference audience last spring. Finally, given that renewable energy will soon be cheaper to produce than coal, businesses may have little incentive to revert to the polluting energy source.

“As long as natural gas is cheaper than coal to produce electricity, it will capture larger and larger shares of the market, and that will drive Carbon dioxide emissions down”, Ringel said. Climate change is the most pressing issue of our time – one that we can not wait to address – and the United States can not afford to cede its leadership in addressing it.