Perez: Trump climate order helps ‘the worst polluters’

Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Tom Perez is blasting President Trump’s reversal of Obama-era climate change efforts, calling the move unscientific and terrible for the environment.

“Every year for the last three years, we’ve broken the global temperature record,” Perez said in a statement Tuesday.

“At a time when we should be urgently investing in clean energy jobs and technology, Trump is giving the worst polluters free reign and pretending it’s all about the economy,” added Perez, who served as former President Obama’s Labor secretary.

{mosads}Trump earlier Tuesday signed a broad executive order aimed at starting the rollback of Obama’s climate change strategy and creating more jobs in the fossil fuel industry.

“I am taking a historic step to lift the restrictions on American energy, to reverse government intrusion and to cancel job-killing regulations,” Trump said at the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) headquarters.

The most significant portion of Trump’s order instructs the EPA to formally consider repealing the Clean Power Plan, a key piece of Obama’s second-term climate agenda, setting a 32 percent cut in the power sector’s carbon dioxide emissions by 2030.

Environmental groups have challenged the White House’s assertion that rolling back Obama’s policies will expand the number of available jobs or decrease U.S. reliance on foreign energy sources.

Perez said Tuesday that Obama’s progress on climate change could not be starker from the changes under Trump.

“True leadership is a president who had the political courage to move aggressively on carbon polluters, while leaving office with the longest streak of private-sector job growth on record,” he said.

“Instead we have a president who has called climate change a hoax, picked an ExxonMobil CEO as his Secretary of State, put a climate science denier at the head of the EPA, and gives a disgraceful handout to his rich friends in the fossil fuels industry.”