One of the first moves that the new Donald Trump administration is prepared to undertake by executive order is to dismantle the Obama era climate change regime, according to the Washington Examiner. It will end the so-called social cost of carbon metric, a top secret standard that the Obama administration had used to justify the enormous cost of many of its environmental regulations. It will also end the State Department’s authority for approving transnational pipelines. The latter move will clear the way for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, the often delayed and now blocked pipeline designed to take oil from the Alberta tar sands in Canada to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast.
The impending series of executive orders is illustrative of how elections matter. The Obama administration was decidedly hostile to fossil fuels. The Trump administration sees oil, gas, and coal as essential for its strategy for jump-starting the American economy and raising money to pay for infrastructure construction.
Environmental groups are not going to take this change in energy policy lying down. They are raising money and getting ready to rumble, both with public protests and with lawsuits. How smoothly the Trump energy policy gets implemented will largely depend on the courts, even though the administration is closing off avenues by the environmental movement to obstruct projects such as pipelines.
Of course, if things get too sticky, the Trump White House has the option to seek legislative relief. Environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act can always be amended to make certain they cannot be used as easily to obstruct infrastructure projects. Trump can also use his mastery of social media to drum up support for job-creating projects and attack the environmental movement for opposing them.
Also, once the president’s cabinet picks are in place, particularly at EPA, the Interior Department, the Energy Department, and other parts of the government, they will use their executive power to remove obstacles to projects such as pipelines, drilling on federal lands, and other measures to create domestic sources of energy. Such are the many things that are happening while the media is obsessed by crowd sizes and women’s marches.
