© Carlos Barria / Reuters The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters in Washington, U.S., March 28, 2017.
"My administration is putting an end to the war on coal," Trump said, adding that he wants to "reverse government intrusion and to cancel job-killing regulations."
"I made my promise and I keep my promise," he told a delegation of coal miners assembled behind him on the stage at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), before he signed the document.
"We're ending the theft of American prosperity and rebuilding our beloved country," he announced, to applause.
Comment: To hell with the environment, it's all about jobs. If emissions aren't controlled, we could have China-like smog.
EPA chief Scott Pruitt, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Vice President Mike Pence also spoke at the ceremony on Tuesday afternoon.
"The war on coal is over," Pence declared.
Zinke praised Trump's "decisive action" on energy independence, adding that "our nation can't run on pixie dust and hope - and the last 8 years showed that."
Trump does not believe in manmade climate change, PBS reported, citing White House officials who briefed reporters on the upcoming executive measure.
Tuesday's order takes aim at the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, which placed carbon emission restrictions on coal power plants. It also lifts the moratorium on new coal exploration on federal lands, imposed by Obama in 2016, eliminates the language in federal regulations about the "social cost" of greenhouse gases, and revokes Obama's executive orders treating climate change as a national security issue.
Trump also intends to review regulations intended to reduce the methane emissions from oil and gas drilling, and the Bureau of Land Management's rules on hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking.
While the US is still officially party to the Paris Agreement on man-made climate change, the Trump administration is discussing the possibility of withdrawing from the treaty, according to PBS.
Reader Comments
Natural gas killed coal off in my country, it is far cheaper and safer to extract and transport. What they should be looking into is using geothermal energy. Geothermal can be harnessed anywhere on the planet as the temperature deep beneath the surface is a constant anywhere on the planet.
But who cares... It's all about the money.
Corporate bigwigs will be a-ok just so you know... raking in the cash, maintaining good health and living in clean cities.
But who cares... It's all about the jobs this will create.
Oh yeah... lets not think about the environment. Pollution? What the hell is that.... some notion that is designed to hold back progress.
But who cares... It's all about the money... and jobs too.
Are these really the only options left?
As an interesting aside, read Gavin Mendes' book on Atlantis where he shows the world turned on copper and tin. Gives the movie Moses by Russell Crowe an entirely new interpretation. The trees were cut then to smelt the copper for war and we replaced the trees with nuclear and now our only hope is to push the acceleration of radioactive decline with super critical fluids or our only concept of Earth the future generations will have is the view of the beautiful poisoned planet thru the arid sky of Mars.
We used fossil fuel till about the 1800s . But then most countries evolved into the industrial era. Industry requires vast amounts of energy that you can't extract from fossil fuel . Plus fossil fuel energy production power plants both pollute and ruin the environment. Practically they are outdated. So we switched to nuclear power plants because we needed more power worldwide. After Chernobyl and Fukushima
it was proven (again) that even nuclear power plants aren't safe. I mean there's no such thing as safety. It's a relative term. To make matters worse, in all our greed, power consumption worldwide rises every year and it's going to continue to rise. Every time you add an electrical appliance in your house , you ask for more power. Someone has to produce it and I can assure you it's neither easy nor safe and clean.
Eventually we are switching to the next generation of nuclear power plants, the first currently constructed in France, that use water as fuel.
They are very efficient, yet more dangerous. A glass of water is enough fuel for the lights of Paris for a year. With fifteen to twenty such power plants around the globe , problem solved. However, you pray to God there's no accident or any of these power plants blow up , otherwise kiss this planet goodbye.