TRUMP AND CLIMATE POLICY

Idag lånar jag en text från amerikanska Heartland Institute. Det är Sterling Burnett som anger några sätt som Donald Trump stoppa klimathotspolitiken i USA.

In his Contract with the American Voter, President-elect Donald Trump’s “100-day action plan to Make America Great Again,” Trump outlines a number of measures he says he will undertake to create jobs and economic growth. I’d like to suggest three actions Trump could take to jump-start the economy.

In a September 21, 2015 appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Trump said, “I’m not a believer in man-made global warming. I mean, Obama thinks it’s the number one problem of the world today. And I think it’s very low on the list … we have much bigger problems.” If this accurately reflects Trump’s views, the first step he could take to undo the damage done by the Obama administration’s vainglorious attempt to control the weather would be to reverse the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) determination carbon dioxide is a pollutant endangering public and environmental health (the “endangerment finding”).

The endangerment finding came about following a five to four decision in the 2007 case Massachusetts v. EPA. A majority of the Supreme Court ruled, if EPA found carbon dioxide emissions were causing global warming and global warming may reasonably be expected to endanger public health or welfare, EPA had the authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and indeed was required to do so unless it could provide a reasonable basis for not undertaking regulation.

Relying upon unsubstantiated projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, EPA determined carbon dioxide emissions from cars and industry threaten human welfare, and it thus began to adopt regulations limiting emissions from cars and power plants.

The endangerment finding is the basis for the ratcheting up of automobile fuel economy standards to levels that may soon rob consumers of choice in the vehicles they drive, either by forcing all but the smallest cars off the roads or, at the very least, making larger cars and trucks too expensive for all but the relatively wealthy to drive. In addition, the endangerment finding underpins various Obama administration regulations requiring utilities, oil and gas producers, and others to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. If these rules are not overturned by Trump, Americans will pay much more for energy and their supplies will be less reliable.

Trump can’t undo the endangerment finding with the stroke of a pen. Instead, he must charge EPA to demonstrate through independent, validated research that carbon dioxide emissions are toxic (they aren’t at any foreseeable levels) or that global warming is causing measurable amounts of sea level rise, increased hurricane numbers or intensity, the spread of disease, or other harms attributable directly to carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. If EPA can’t directly link such problems to U.S. carbon dioxide emissions (it can’t), or if EPA can’t show such problems can be alleviated or dramatically reduced by cutting U.S. carbon dioxide emissions (it can’t), EPA should withdraw the endangerment finding.

Withdrawing the endangerment finding would end the legal justification for a range of climate regulations. In the process, it also would end the ability of radical environmental activists to use the courts to impose climate policies on an unwilling public whose elected representatives have repeatedly rejected climate policies.

Trump recognizes to fully reverse President Barack Obama’s harmful climate policies America must withdraw from international climate agreements driving many domestic climate actions and cease diverting billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money from important domestic concerns to United Nations climate programs. As a result, in his Contract with the American Voter Trump pledges to “cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs, and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure.” Trump can unilaterally cease the Obama administration’s illegal shift of state department funds, funds directed by Congress for use in other diplomatic programs, to the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund.

Finally, the easiest way for Trump to end the United States’ participation in all international climate agreements would be for him, on day one, to remove the country’s signature from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), signed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. Article 25 of the UNFCCC allows any state party to the convention to withdraw, without further obligation, upon giving one year’s notice. Withdrawing from the UNFCCC would cancel the United States’ obligations to all other U.N.-brokered climate agreements subsequent to it, because they are all built upon it.

These three actions – requiring EPA to justify its endangerment finding, cease diverting funds to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund, and withdrawing the United States from the UNFCCC – would be great first steps to putting America first during Trump’s first 100 days in office.

— H. Sterling Burnett

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