New Documents Show the Trump Administration Cut Climate Change Impacts from its Energy Plan
Thus far, the Trump administration has seemed to make it a point to ignore the very real threat of global warming in its policy and unabashedly censor climate science on government websites, reports, and speeches. It should come as a shock to no one, then, that the administration’s recent rollback of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, has been no different—and gives even more cause for alarm among environmentalists.
Introduced in 2015, the Obama administration’s ambitious environmental program would have regulated coal-burning power plants and heavily reduced carbon emissions in the coming decades. But, in October 2017, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency announced its intention to repeal the Clean Power Plan, and in late August, it had a replacement: the dramatically weaker “Affordable Clean Energy” proposal.
Now, a draft version of the proposal released Friday reveals the Trump administration has removed mentions of climate science that were included in earlier iterations of the plan.
Aaron Lavinsky/ZUMA