Dirty Energy is now the goal.
“There are a number of policies from the Obama administration that the president believes should be reviewed,” a senior White House official said during a press call on Monday night. “Some of them should be taken off the books immediately, to the extent that we can.”
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In the order, the president asks for more than just a repeal and rework of the Clean Power Plan, Obama’s signature domestic climate policy and Trump’s preferred scapegoat for the declining coal industry. The order also seeks to repeal rules regarding fracking on public lands, and coal leases on federal lands. It orders agencies to reconsider the Social Cost of Carbon and rescinds an Obama-era order requiring agencies to consider the impact of climate change in their environmental permitting process. And it undoes key executive actions meant to make the federal government — and communities — more prepared to handle the consequences of climate change.
Continued.
While the order is being touted as a job creator by the Trump White House, it’s important to note that it sends a clear signal to agencies across the federal government: climate change is no longer something that should be considered a priority when making decisions.
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That’s evident in the order’s directive to repeal a number of Obama-era executive actions aimed at promoting energy efficiency in federal buildings, establishing a federal flood risk management standard, mandating that climate resilience be factored into international development strategies, and requiring federal agencies to take steps to prepare for climate impacts.
“We believe a number of those orders have run their course, we also believe those orders simply don’t reflect the president’s priorities when it comes to dealing with climate change,” a senior White House official said on Monday.
So let’s have wasteful energy use in federal buildings, let’s not worry about flood risks or the impacts of climate change but also more fracking on public lands. Awesome.
All of that completely ignores fact and science, particularly the “Hockey Stick” which is the chart of the increase in temperatures over the last 1000 years.
Back in 1998, a little known climate scientist named Michael Mann and two colleagues published a paper that sought to reconstruct the planet's past temperatures going back half a millennium before the era of thermometers--thereby showing just how out of whack recent warming has been. The finding: Recent northern hemisphere temperatures had been "warmer than any other year since (at least) AD 1400." The graph depicting this result looked rather like a hockey stick: After a long period of relatively minor temperature variations (the "shaft"), it showed a sharp mercury upswing during the last century or so ("the blade").
The report moved quickly through climate science circles. Mann and a colleague soon lengthened the shaft of the hockey stick back to the year 1000 AD--and then, in 2001, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changeprominently featured the hockey stick in its Third Assessment Report. Based on this evidence, the IPCC proclaimed that "the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years.
The industrialization of the last hundred years has a clear impact on the climate, we’re far beyond arguing about this — accelerating this impact to make a few short term dollars is exactly the wrong path for the nation and the world.
Ironically the truth is that there are currently more clean energy jobs than fossil fuel jobs in America and Trump’s executive order is likely to put that job growth in jeopardy.
Nationally, clean energy jobs outnumber fossil fuel jobs by more than 2.5 to 1, according to a new Sierra Club analysis of Department of Energy jobs data. And when it comes to coal and gas — two sectors President Donald Trump has promised to bolster through his upcoming executive order on energy regulation — clean energy jobs outnumber jobs dealing with those two fossil fuels by 5 to 1.
“Right now, clean energy jobs already overwhelm dirty fuels in nearly every state across America, and that growth is only going to continue as clean energy keeps getting more affordable and accessible by the day,” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said in a statement. “These facts make it clear that Donald Trump is attacking clean energy jobs purely in order to boost the profits of fossil fuel billionaires.”
Unfortunately this isn’t about creating jobs, Drumpf is a climate denier who is only out to shovel more money toward people like the Koch Brothers, so we have to grin a bare these dangerous decisions until he can be removed. The sooner the better.