Rep. Huffman Slams Trump For Executive Order Attempt to Derail Climate Progress

March 28, 2017

Washington, D.C.- Today, President Trump signed an Executive Order that will reverse years of American progress on climate, undermine the clean energy industry, threaten public health, and jeopardize the United States’ ability to meet its climate commitments under the global Paris Agreement. Included in the Executive Order are an expansion of coal, oil, and gas leasing on public lands, direction to federal agencies to ignore climate impacts when planning major actions, and the beginning of a rollback of the Clean Power Plan to allow for additional pollution from power plants.

“Future generations will pay the price of President Trump’s costly Executive Order, which fulfils a fossil fuel industry wish list at the expense of clean energy jobs and public health,” said Rep. Huffman. “The President’s radical actions today reaffirm yet again he will do anything to line the pockets of our country’s biggest polluters, regardless of the impacts to America’s public health, the economy, and the environment. This is just the latest example of President Trump saying one thing and doing the opposite: last month he told Congress that he planned to ‘promote clean air and water,’ but – as we suspected – today we learn he was just blowing hot air.

“Today’s Executive Order is just the first salvo in a battle that will last as long as President Trump and his cabinet of polluters are in office. Now we must meet this assault on the environment, taxpayers, and public health head-on. Remember that it was on his first day in office that President Trump signed a health care Executive Order that he declared would be the beginning of the end of the Affordable Care Act. Yet two months later, after unprecedented pushback from the American public, that effort failed conclusively. We will not go back to the days before clean energy and pollution controls, and I know that we can defend against today’s pro-pollution Executive Order with the same level of effort that greeted health care repeal.”

Last year, Rep. Huffman led 208 current and former members of Congress and Senators in filing a bipartisan “friend of the court” brief in support of the Obama Administration’s final Clean Power Plan in the case West Virginia v United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Today’s Executive Order contains several dangerous environmental provisions, including:

  • Requires the agency to begin unraveling the Clean Power Plan;
  • Lifts a moratorium on federal coal leasing; and
  • Direct federal agencies to end the use of the metric known as the “social cost of carbon”  in federal decision-making.

The Clean Power Plan would lead to many health benefits including avoiding 3,600 premature deaths, 1,700 heart attacks, 90,000 asthma attacks, and 300,000 missed workdays and schooldays.

A recent analysis from the Center for American Progress found that today’s Executive Order could have significant costs to the American taxpayer, as the order would undo public health gains from the Clean Power Plan and methane pollution controls, and would allow the fossil fuel industry to mine and drill without fairly compensating the taxpayer.

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