President Trump has signed an executive order to start the process of reversing the Obama administration’s climate-change policies and regulations. Terminating the Clean Power Plan has been a Trump goal since his campaign, but completing it will require months of review because in its present form, the plan is the result of an extended process of public input. It can’t be killed by executive fiat.
Environmental advocates and other supporters of President Obama’s climate programs fear, and the Trump administration hopes, that the end of the CPP will relieve the regulatory pressure on the power-generation sector to abandon fossil fuels. Environmentalists fear that outcome because it could lead to increased use of fossil fuels for power plants with consequent increases in greenhouse-gas emissions driving climate change. The Trump administration wants to restore fossil-fuel use to save jobs in the petroleum and coal industries and to preempt further investment in power generation with solar and wind energy, which it views as small-bore, unproved technology, costly and exotic.