Editorial: Oil drillers want to overturn California’s new health protections. Don’t let them win
The Trump administration’s new plan to phase out climate change-related climate regulations and replace them with “America First” policies has left some of the most conservative members of the Senate — and some of its most staunch supporters — wondering, what the heck are they doing?
And what the GOP plan is doing is putting into effect a plan laid out by the White House that has already passed the House of Representatives and has been criticized as a far-right effort fueled by fossil fuel interests.
Yet, as the Trump administration pushes through policies that will continue to drive up energy costs, it’s become clear that there’s one way to win at this game: by overturning the federal government’s determination of which standards to put in place.
The Trump administration’s approach is a win for the coal industry and for the fossil fuel industry more broadly. It shows that the industry can’t be allowed to dominate America’s energy policies.
This is a moment of tremendous urgency: In an increasingly energy-poor world, America can neither develop or rely on oil, coal or natural gas. It’s time to recognize that, and to take actions to move our nation toward a less carbon-intensive energy system.
On Friday, the House passed a resolution to overturn Trump’s Clean Power Plan — the key initiative of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed regulatory rollback — with a resounding, bipartisan vote of 390 to 30. The Senate passed its own resolution, as well, with a vote of 50 to 49.
The resolution is now up in the hands of the House and Senate leaders, who will have to decide whether to consider these proposed rollbacks and whether to include them as part of the budget resolution, as they have in the case of the pending bill for President Trump’s border wall with Mexico. There’s no guarantee that they will.
But make no mistake: This is far from the first time that this government has attempted to roll back climate regulations that it didn’t like. Over the past 10 years alone, the Trump administration has proposed rollbacks of at least 17 regulations — an