Global warming concerns go up in flames in Trump's America as jobs trump environment

USA

Decades of hard fought advances against global warming may start to go up in smoke as US President Donald Trump, a climate change skeptic, signed a sweeping executive order aimed at lifting a moratorium on federal coal leasing. He will effectively be asking US agencies to stop worrying about carbon pollution and focus on creating jobs.

The move, the second attempted rollback of his predecessor President Obama's exertions (after the failed attempt to repeal Obamacare health law), is Trump's reward for America's coal country, which voted overwhelmingly for him in the hope that he will bring back lost coal mining jobs.

''He's made a pledge to the coal industry and he's going to do whatever he can to help those workers,'' a senior administration official who briefed reporters on background on the upcoming executive order told the media.

''The previous administration devalued workers by their policies,'' the official added. ''We are saying we can do both. We can protect the environment and provide people with work.''

Officials said the President plans to ask the Environmental Protection Agency to rewrite Obama era rules that make it almost impossible to build a new coal-fired power plant, and he will direct the Interior Department to end the former President's moratorium on new coalmines on federal lands. The reversal comes on the heels of the Trump administration rolling back other Obama-era restrictions on mining, drilling and coal- and gas-burning operations, including approving two major oil pipelines, Dakota Access and Keystone XL, which Obama had halted.

More steps, including easing up of mileage metrics to spur the auto industry, is said to be in the works.

In warming up to the Trump treatise of jobs over (or alongside) environmental concerns, officials cited India and China, suggesting that the two countries had opted for strong economy over global warming fears, although both nations were dragged kicking and screaming into the climate change accord by previous Washington dispensations.
''To the extent that the economy is strong and growing and you have prosperity, that is the best way to protect the environment,'' the official argued.

The new order is not expected to explicitly withdraw U.S from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, under which Washington has pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions between 26 and 28 percent by 2025 compared to 2005 levels. The new administration is said to be split on the issue, but given Trump's views on the matter (he once called climate change a ''hoax'' and tweeted that global warming was ''created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive''), all bets are off about enforcing the Paris accord, which in any case is mostly non-binding.

The President's moves, largely expected, has outraged climate change activists, even as the skeptics have come of the woodworks saying it does not go far enough and demanding a total scrapping of the EPA, which they believe killed economic growth and jobs in Middle America that depended on traditional industries and occupations.

The coal mining industry itself has welcomed the relief although its leaders have expressed skepticism over whether jobs would return, given that much of it was lost to automation and the U.S energy paradigm moving to much cheaper gas.

US climate pundits meanwhile are worrying about how Trump will explain the changes to other global leaders when he meets them together for the first time at the G20 summit in Germany in June. But as far as his supporters are concerned, he doesn't have to. It's America—and American jobs - first.

Source: TImesofindi