As the Trump administration's first 100 days draws to a close this week, the White House is planning another flurry of executive orders as it scrambles to prove it’s done stuff. The EOs we’re interested in take aim at Obama's protections on public lands and restrictions on offshore drilling, both basically selling out the public's interest to corporate polluters.
But this last-ditch effort to show competency isn't fooling anyone, and even misrepresenting past president’s records doesn't change the administration's inability to govern. Yes, Trump has issued more EOs than any modern president, but what have they actually accomplished? Not much, really. From the AP: “many of Trump's executive orders signed with great fanfare have had little immediate impact.”
Two new analyses covered by InsideEPA come to similar conclusions. According to a report by the Center for American Progress and attorney Denise Grab writing at The Regulatory Review, this suggestion of little impact may be true for at least the Social Cost of Carbon aspect of Trump’s Energy Independence EO. The order instructs agencies to (among other things) follow a George W. Bush-era guidance for the SCC, in an attempt to toss out Obama-era updates to the figure.
The catch is that the Obama figure already adheres to the guidance provided in the Bush document, called Circular A-4. Trump’s instruction that regulatory bodies comply with the A-4 would mean that they wouldn’t have to change at all: they’ve always complied with the A-4.
There are two main points of contention on which the deniers in NGOs, Congress and the White House have focused their attacks: the discount rate used, and global vs. domestic damages.
On the issue of discount rate, deniers say the A-4 requires the use of a 7 percent discount rate. But it allows for a range of figures depending on the situation, specifically issues with intergenerational impacts. This flexibility, argue both CAP and Grab, makes the current SCC rate completely justified. Same story for the second major issue: the Circular guidance suggests that if there are global impacts, they shouldn’t be ignored, so that there’s both a domestic and a global SCC figure.
A number of Trump’s EOs pull the same trick of asking agencies to review existing policies and then report back with recommendations. It gives the illusion of an accomplishment, in that Trump gets the photo-op demonstrating he can sign his name, without any of the hassle and embarrassment of trying to make a (questionably legal) change in policy. Many of these EOs are then invariably blocked by some guy sitting on an island in the Pacific Ocean or on the Pacific coast.
We’re wondering if Trump recognizes that the broken promises in his EOs might come with a social cost to his reputation. Then again, he may simply have written off this possibility as a problem for future Trump --a problem that, like so many other failures, he’ll sell as a success.
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