Trump’s climate order a good first step toward ending war on coal

Last year’s major electoral changes took place throughout working-class areas of coal country, where President Trump was able to flip large numbers of 2012 Obama voters due in part to promises to reverse the Obama administration’s war on coal.

True to his word, one of Trump’s first actions in office was to use a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to undo the Office of Surface Mining’s Stream Protection Rule, which he dubbed a “job-killing rule”; this week, the president issued an executive order to review and potentially repeal the worst of President Obama’s anti-energy rules that were instituted under the Climate Action Plan and Clean Power Plan (CPP).

For the most part, the coal industry and its workers have been optimistic about the Trump administration’s promises. In the wake of the November election, coal prices on Wall Street skyrocketed, and have remained high ever since. Analysts have projected that the industry will experience a revitalization as Trump continues to walk back the Obama administration’s war on coal.

That’s good for American workers. As West Virginia Coal Association President Bill Raney said in a recent interview, “Our miners, we’ve lost about 8,000 jobs over the last eight years right here in West Virginia … [but] there is more hope here in West Virginia today than there has been for a long, long time.”

{mosads}Without a doubt, the fracking-led natural gas boom created more competition in the energy industry than existed previously, but that alone wasn’t what put tens of thousands of American workers out of work. (Indeed, towards the end of 2016, the natural gas industry was facing its own problems.)

Rather, what wrought the most damage was that both the federal government and environmental activists were bent on undermining all forms of fossil fuels for the last eight years.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama acknowledged that his climate change policies would cause energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket” — that was, after all, the point.

To that end, the most high-profile policies that Obama passed while in office were the Clean Power Plan and the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (which the Supreme Court later struck down); however, a number of other smaller policies also proved onerous, including the coal ash rule and a moratorium on new coal leasing.

Governing magazine documented that the Obama administration’s policies caused the closure of 32 power plants, and that 36 more were being threatened by the regulations.

Although some progressive claim there’s been no war on coal, others fully embraced the endeavor. While on the campaign trail in 2016, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton announced at a CNN town hall, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” And Slate magazine admitted that “there’s no doubt there is a war on coal and the industry is suffering … this war has many combatants. One of them is certainly the federal government.”

Fortunately, there’s a lot that the Trump administration can do to end this punitive war on coal. Repealing minor rules is all well and good, but today’s executive order could signal one of the most significant pro-energy policies yet. The Trump administration has promised to lift a moratorium on federal leases for coal and order the Environmental Protection Agency to revise downward their climate-impact estimates when reviewing new proposals.

The review and potential repeal of the Clean Power Plan may be the most significant order yet from the Trump administration. The CPP, the signature energy regulation of the Obama administration, was put into effect over the legal objections of dozens of American states.

In a shocking violation of federalism, the CPP forced each state to meet climate emissions targets; thus far, the plan has been allowed to stand by the courts. But with this new executive order — and the fact that the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt, led one of the state lawsuits against the Obama administration on the CPP — some of those job-killing regulations can be overturned.

It’s a good thing that the Trump administration has started reversing the Obama-era policies that decimated America’s fossil fuel industry. Once these harmful regulations have been stripped away, market forces can take over, which will benefit all consumers.

There’s a lot more work to do, but the White House is off to a good start.

Nicole Neily is the president of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, a nonprofit that publishes public interest journalism at Watchdog.org. Follow her on Twitter @nickineily.

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