The order, which Trump will signed at the officers of the Environmental Protection Agency shortly after 2 p.m. on Tuesday, will suspend or completely rescind several measures President Obama enacted to foster the use of renewable energy, scale back reliance on fossil fuels and to encourage other steps to tamp-down on the human contribution to global warming.
The order signed by Trump today is expected to direct the EPA to pull back and review the Obama Clean Power Plan, that placed greenhouse gas emission restrictions on coal-fired power plants.
Among those cheering Trump's actions Tuesday is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which released a statement saying the president had taken "bold steps" in the direction of regulatory relief and energy security.
But former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy fired back in a statement of her own saying the Trump administration wants the United States "to travel back to when smokestacks damaged our health and polluted our air, instead of taking every opportunity to support clean jobs of the future."
Meanwhile Thomas Stocker, a former co-chair of the U.N.'s scientific panel on climate change, said Tuesday morning that the United States is ceding leadership on climate change to China.
Trump, who famously called global warming a "hoax" invented by the Chinese while campaigning for president, has repeatedly criticized the power-plant rule and other climate-change initiatives as job killers that have been particularly harmful for the coal industry.
The order will also lift a 14-month-old moratorium on new coal leases on federal lands. The Obama administration imposed the three-year moratorium on new federal coal leases in January 2016.
The rule has been on hold since last year to give a federal appeals court time to review a challenge by a number of coal-dependent states and more than 100 companies who claim the plan is unconstitutional.
Trump criticized the policy as nothing short of a declaration of "war on coal" that threatened the livelihoods "of our great coal miners."
The administration has still not said whether it intends to withdraw from the Paris Agreement -- something Trump at one point threatened to do -- but the mandates of the executive order appear at first blush to make it all the more difficult for the U.S. to meet its goals.
According to an Energy Department analysis released in January, coal mining now accounts for fewer than 70,000 U.S. jobs. By contrast, renewable energy now accounts for more than 650,000 U.S. jobs.
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