On March 28, President Trump signed his Energy Independence Executive Order. The order does several key things, including:
1. Reversing the Clean Power Plan regulations as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will begin to “unwind these regulations” over the next several months though this order does not reverse the endangerment finding, which was upheld by the Supreme Court and requires the EPA to regulate CO2 emissions as a pollutant;
2. Rolling back several prohibitions to mining and drilling on federal land;
3. Reversing the EPA and Bureau of Land Management regulations on methane emissions;
4. Eliminating President Obama's Climate Action Plan requiring federal agencies to consider how a potential policy and regulations could impact climate change;
5. Eliminating the previous Administration’s Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) calculation and their impact to potential rules and policies, which will have the biggest impact on APGA members.
In regard to the last point, over the last several years, agencies have used the dollar savings associated with the SCC calculation to justify more restrictive rules that would have diminished the role of direct use of natural gas.
This Executive Order and its impacts will most likely face many legal challenges so APGA will continue to watch how these issues proceed. For questions on this article, please contact Dan Lapato of APGA staff by phoneat 202-464-2742 or by email at
dlapato@apga.org.