As the People's Climate March was getting started over the last weekend of April, President Trump "greeted" the march with another executive order that reverses former President Obama's environmental protections on areas in the Arctic and the Atlantic Oceans. Trump's reason -- of course -- is because those restrictions do great damage to creating American energy jobs.
Trump's job-saving measures for special interests
The way President Trump puts it is that this will "clear the way for thousands and thousands" of high-paying jobs. This also adds to the pile of executive orders Trump has signed since being in office and before hitting his 100-day mark.
When signing the new orders at the White House, he said that the United States was blessed with natural resources, offshore oil, and natural gas reserves that he wants to give energy companies permission to drill for. According to Trump, he said that 94 percent of these areas were closed off by the federal government.
Before former President Obama left the Oval Office, he banned offshore drilling in order to protect marine life from oil spills in all areas of the Arctic that are under U.S. control. The Secretary of the Interior (Ryan Zinke) said that his department will work with the Commerce Departments to review those regulations. The opposition that President Trump is facing is obviously from environmental groups who feel that his executive order threatens these Protected Areas and gives more power to fossil fuel executives.
The Trump administration has already been targeted by watchdog groups since day one for conflicts of interest and empowering special interest groups.
Deregulation issues and environmentalists
Trump's executive order -- referred to as the America-first Offshore Energy Strategy -- is surprising, given that Obama officials said when those restrictions were put on protected areas, President Trump would not be able to reverse it without Congress.
The President feels that he is keeping his promise to dismantle Obama era regulations, consistently claiming that they prevent job growth and are destroying the country.
Environmentalists feel that the Trump administration is at war with them since this administration has said that climate change is a hoax. After his inauguration, it was reported that the White House's website removed all references to climate change which appeared to indicate that they would continue to deny it.
While climate change is seen as another matter, they go hand in hand with drilling for fear of polluting protected areas. In another executive order which Blasting News reported on, he gave powers to his new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, to also roll back President Obama's Clean Air Act.
