HE SIGNED IT! Trump Just Overturned…

03 Apr, 2017 by Cassy Fiano

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Barack Obama did a lot to fight so-called man-made climate change. He imposed burdensome regulations and attacked the coal industry. Now, with Donald Trump as president, some of those things are starting to be overturned.

Long before the presidential election, Trump has been speaking out against Obama’s overbearing environmental regulations.

Now that he is president, Trump is in a position to do something about it. And since he took office in January, Trump has been slowly chipping away at Obama’s legacy, including Obama’s climate change efforts. And Trump just signed a new executive order repealing many of Obama’s climate change plans — in fact, he’s repealed seven pieces of Obama’s environmental legacy.

First, Trump eliminated the Clean Power Plan (CPP). “We fully expected the Clean Power Plan to be overturned, but were surprised at the breadth of the Executive Order,” Kathleen Sgamma, vice president for government at the Western Energy Alliance, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “It comprehensively clears out some of the regulatory overreach of the Obama Administration that was about greater federal control in the guise of environmental protection.”

The CPP was estimated to cost $41 billion annually, while only lowering 0.019 degrees Celsius of global warming by the year 2100.

Trump also eliminated the Department of Interior’s Stream Protection Rule, which made it more difficult to mine coal on federal land. Since Trump has taken office, coal production has already begun rising. In addition to these two steps, Trump changed how the federal government interprets the National Environmental Policy Act, making it easier for companies to get environmental permits. The way Obama had set up the act made it easier for environmental lawyers to sue the government. The Obama-led Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Planning 2.0 rule was also eliminated. The Trump administration also eliminated an Obama regulation, passed in the final months of his campaign, that limited hunting and fishing in Alaska.

Scott Pruitt, Trump’s EPA administrator, also rejected a request to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that Pruitt said would cripple the agricultural industry if banned. While environmentalists claim it would contaminate drinking water and food, the EPA’s studies found that it was safe for humans and that there did not appear to be any risks from exposure.

The Keystone XL Pipeline, which the Obama administration was staunchly against, is also finally a go, thanks to Trump.

Do you support Trump’s decision to eliminate these regulations?