Trump rollback of energy standards could cost SC money, critics charge

Declaring “the start of a new era” in energy production, President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday that he said would revive the coal industry and create jobs.

The move makes good on his campaign pledge to unravel former President Barack Obama’s plan to curb global warming. The order seeks to suspend, rescind or flag for review more than a half-dozen measures in an effort to boost domestic energy production in the form of fossil fuels.

Trump said the effort would allow workers to “succeed on a level playing field for the first time in a long time.”

Environmental activists, including former Vice President Al Gore, denounced the plan.

In South Carolina, environmentalists said the state was on track to comply with the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan and make money at the same time. South Carolina could have seen an economic boost of up to $1 billion by selling carbon credits to states that were having a harder time complying with the plan, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center.

“It’s a terrible outcome for South Carolina,’’ said Blan Holman, a law center attorney in Charleston. “I don’t think he will succeed in turning back the clean energy momentum in the country and in South Carolina. But it just adds uncertainty. It makes planning harder. And it is shortsighted.’’

Trump’s order initiates a review of the former administration’s plan, which restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants. The regulation has been the subject of long-running legal challenges by Republican-led states and those who profit from burning oil, coal and gas.

In addition to pulling back from the Clean Power Plan, the Trump administration also will lift a 14-month-old moratorium on new coal leases on federal lands. But just as Obama’s climate efforts were often stymied by legal challenges, environmental groups are promising to fight Trump’s pro-fossil fuel agenda in court.

Trump has called global warming a “hoax” invented by the Chinese, and has repeatedly criticized the power-plant rule as an attack on American workers and the struggling U.S. coal industry.

The Obama administration had imposed a three-year moratorium on new federal coal leases in January 2016, arguing that the $1 billion-a-year program must be modernized to ensure a fair financial return to taxpayers and address climate change.

The new order also will rescind Obama-era executive orders and memoranda, including one that addressed climate change and national security and one that sought to prepare the country for the impacts of climate change.

The administration is still in discussion about whether it intends to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change.

This story was originally published March 28, 2017 at 4:55 PM with the headline "Trump rollback of energy standards could cost SC money, critics charge."