https://secure.politico.com/story/2017/03/donald-trump-obama-climate-change-policies-236570
Today Trump signs an executive order directing federal agencies to stop reducing the carbon pollution of electric utilities, oil and gas drillers, and coal miners. It instructs:
1. The EPA to rewrite tough rules that now make it impossible to build a new coal-fired power plant.
2. The Interior Department to end Obama’s moratorium on new coal mines on federal lands, among other steps. Trump’s order will resume federal coal leasing.
3. All federal regulators to stop using the “social cost of carbon,” which attempts to quantify the effects of climate change, in economic analyses of future rules.
But hardliners and moderates in the White House couldn't agree on some things:
1. Trump won’t tell the EPA to reconsider the underlying policy that lets it regulate carbon emissions — the 2009 “endangerment finding” in which the EPA declared that greenhouse gas pollution threatens human health and welfare.
2. Nor does today's order address whether the U.S. will stay in the 2015 Paris climate accord.
3. And the order is silent on a carbon tax, another issue that has become a flash point in disputes between moderates and hard-liners in the White House.
Bottom line: Trump wants to destroy the planet's environment only partly. Perhaps we should be grateful?