Week 10: Trump’s Climate Denial Hits the Fan
Published by the Natural Resources Defense Fund
Welcome to our weekly Trump v. Earth column, in which onEarth reviews the environment-related shenanigans of President Trump and his allies.
The coal-fired Big Bend Power Station, Apollo Beach, Florida
Walter/Flickr
Climate Change Denial’s Day in Court
President Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order to repeal the Clean Power Plan, President Obama’s ambitious effort to cut carbon pollution from U.S. power plants. This, however, is just the beginning of a long and uncertain process to repeal the CPP.
The problem for Trump and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is that the repeal process is roughly the same as the long and arduous process of adopting a regulation. It will be months, and possibly years, before the Clean Power Plan can be repealed.
But Trump faces an even greater challenge: He’s demonstrably wrong on both the science and the law, and courts will hold him accountable. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide fall within the Clean Air Act’s definition of an air pollutant. Five years later, the D.C. Circuit upheld the EPA’s thoroughly researched conclusion that carbon dioxide endangers public health and therefore must be regulated.
If the administration repeals the CPP, it must either adopt a meaningful replacement plan to limit carbon emissions or make a reasonable case that carbon dioxide is not a threat to public health and welfare. In other words, Trump and Pruitt will, for the first time, be forced to produce evidence to support their claim that human-induced climate change is a fraud. That should be interesting.
China reaffirmed its intent to uphold its end of the Paris climate accord, even though Trump’s apparent abandonment of the Clean Power Plan challenges the likelihood that the United States will meet its own commitments. This puts into an especially tight spot those opponents of climate action who have long argued that the States had no obligation to limit emissions until China moved first. Well, China’s moving. When will we?
Indefensible?
In addition to directing the EPA to begin rolling back the Clean Power Plan, President Trump’s executive order asked the U.S. Department of Justice to stop defending the rule in court. (The Clean Power Plan is currently on hold, pending a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.)
The move puts congressional Republicans in an uncomfortable position, because many of them have argued in the past that the DOJ is obligated to vigorously defend all federal laws. In 2010, for example, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder offered a less-than-robust defense of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which resulted in a federal court enjoining its enforcement. A year later, Obama and Holder determined that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional and decided not to defend the law.
Republicans were furious. After Obama decided not to defend DOMA, Texas congressman Lamar Smith said, “This is the real politicization of the Justice Department—when the personal views of the president override the government’s duty to defend the law of the land.” Wisconsin representative James Sensenbrenner argued that “an attorney general or president can’t willy-nilly decide” not to enforce a law. Writing in the conservative Weekly Standard, George W. Bush–era DOJ official Edward Whelan said that until a law is no longer on the books, the administration must “defend the law with vigor.” He called the Obama administration’s abandonment of antigay federal policies “a dereliction of duty.”
The Clean Power Plan is a federal law. While it is not a statute passed by Congress, as the Defense of Marriage Act was, it has more force of law than the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which was simply a U.S. Department of Defense directive. The CPP underwent the usual process for promulgating regulations as prescribed by the Administrative Procedure Act, including extensive public notice and comment. If anything, the case for enforcing the CPP is stronger than for DOMA and “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which undercut fundamental constitutional rights.
To criticize the Obama administration for failing to defend antigay policies, and then applaud the Trump administration for failing to defend environmental laws, is hypocrisy. If your bedrock principle is that the president must defend the laws on the books, the Trump administration must defend and enforce the Clean Power Plan until it completes the repeal process―if in fact it can.
Saving Coal Industry, Not Coal Communities
Helping the coal industry is one thing. Helping coal communities is something entirely different. In his first budget proposal, Trump made it abundantly clear that his focus is on the industry itself.
iStock
Trump’s budget would eliminate all federal funding to the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) and 18 other agencies that help communities in the region, according to a report this week in Ohio Valley ReSource. The groups use the money for physical infrastructure projects, job training, health care, and improvements to local small businesses. The Appalachian Regional Commission has been working in coal mining communities since the Johnson administration—yet more evidence that Trump intends to reverse decades of social progress. Throughout its history, the ARC has leveraged $3.8 billion in federal dollars to acquire $16 billion in private investment—just the sort of public–private cooperation that the federal government should be expanding rather than ending.
Even Trump’s allies have balked at these proposed cuts. Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, a Republican and staunch public supporter of President Trump, reportedly called White House budget director Mick Mulvaney to complain about the decision. Congressman Hal Rogers, a Kentucky Republican, called the proposed elimination of the ARC “careless,” illustrating how everyone likes budget cuts until they affect one’s own constituents, communities, and families.
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