Yes, US President Donald Trump acted audaciously on Mar. 28 when he signed an executive order gutting environmental policies of his predecessor. But former President Barack Obama acted audaciously, too, when he made affordable energy subservient to the mitigation of climate change.
Obama governed as he believed. And his beliefs went on famous display in an Atlantic interview published last April. The Islamic State poses no existential threat to the US, he told the writer. "Climate change," on the other hand, "is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don't do something about it."
Trump, too, governs as he believes. He believes Obama was wrong. Election results indicate he's not alone.
CPP doomed
The headline casualty of Trump's executive order is the Clean Power Plan, which requires generators of electric power to slash emissions of greenhouse gases. Unraveling the CPP will take time. The Environmental Protection Agency must issue a finding that the program should be changed or revoked. Environmental groups will sue. But the CPP is doomed.
Its future already was cloudy. The Supreme Court last year stayed the program in a case challenging federal authority over state-level energy choices. The case, which the Department of Justice last week sought to suspend, underscores the Obama administration's readiness to strain legality for initiatives consequential far more to cost than climate. Even under climate models assuming high temperature sensitivity to greenhouse-gas loading of the atmosphere, says Bjorn Lomborg, Danish critic of standard political approaches to climate change, the CPP would have slowed the projected increase in global average temperature through century's end by only 0.023° F.
Trump's executive order also targets mechanisms that exaggerate rewards of climate policies in relation to always-lowballed costs. Gone is the social cost of carbon (SCC), which came under suspicion in 2013 after controversial EPA adjustments that raised the estimated value of carbon-dioxide abatement. The agency drew further criticism for skewing benefit-cost relationships when it projected benefits globally but costs domestically.
Because of these and other political manipulations, the SCC lost credibility. So did the Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, which made the recommendation about projecting benefits globally. It, too, is now history. Regulatory analysis reverts to Office of Management and Budget procedures published in 2003.
Trump also rescinded lawsuit bait installed by the White House Council on Environmental Quality last year in guidance about including climate effects in National Environmental Policy Act reviews. And he ordered EPA to review its final rule controlling emissions of methane from new or modified oil and gas sources.
EPA based that and other assaults against natural gas on methane's potency as a greenhouse gas. Yet methane is sparse in the atmosphere, and emissions of it already are falling. What's more, growing use of gas for power generation explains much of the recent flattening of carbon-dioxide emissions in the US and world. With its contradictory methane rule, EPA seems mainly to have wanted to impede gas development.
In these and other ways, Trump dismantles a legally questionable framework designed to make climate mitigation the priority of policy-making. If the electorate shared Obama's anxiety over climate change and thought the threat warranted constitutional compromises, Hillary Clinton would be president.
The question remains whether Trump will withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change, to which Obama committed the US by executive signature. With CPP aflame, that commitment now means little. Trump can quit the agreement as easily as Obama entered it.
Genuine problem
But the Paris summit addressed a genuine problem. It produced an agreement worth little more than photo opportunities because it accommodated only narrow prejudices and extreme remedies. Climate change deserves better. Candidate Trump called the issue a hoax. President Trump would perform valuable service if he surprised everyone by reviving debate within the Paris framework while insisting the discussion encompass all views.
His negotiating perspective is clearer than ever. And he's said to be quite the deal-maker.
