Farcical Environmental Rollback Will Do Zero On "Energy Independence": "We Don't Import Coal"
President Trump is expected to sign an executive order on Tuesday to roll back most of President Barack Obama’s climate change legacy, celebrating the move as a way to increase the nation’s “energy independence” and to restore thousands of lost coal mining jobs.
But energy economists say the expected order falls short of both of those goals — in part because the United States already largely relies on domestic sources for the coal and natural gas that fires most of the nation’s power plants. “We don’t import coal,” said Robert Stavins, an energy economist at Harvard University. “So in terms of the Clean Power Plan, this has nothing to do with so-called energy independence whatsoever.”
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The executive order is not expected to address the United States’ participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement, the landmark accord that committed nearly every country to take steps to reduce pollution. The aim of the Paris deal is to ensure that countries reduce emissions enough to stave off a warming of the planet by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the level at which, experts say, the Earth will be irrevocably locked into a future of extreme droughts, flooding, and food and water shortages.
But experts say Mr. Trump’s order signals that the United States will not meet its pledges to cut its emissions about 26 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.
“Meeting the U.S. terms of the Paris Agreement would require full enforcement of the current regulations, plus additional regulations,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University. “It takes a comprehensive effort involving every country doing what they committed to and more.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/climate/planned-rollback-of-climate-rules-unlikely-to-achieve-all-trumps-goals.html