“What you’re going to see next week is he’s going to take this power plan that we know isn’t going to work anyway and he’s going to run that over,” Inhofe said.
The 2015 Clean Power Plan is a set of regulations on new and existing power plants that forces states to meet targets, established by the EPA, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Inhofe said former President Barack Obama’s plan was a “dismal failure.”
“Now, Obama said we will reduce [carbon dioxide] emissions by 27 percent by 2025,” Inhofe said. “We immediately, cause I was chairing the committee, had the EPA come in to say, ‘How is he going to do that?’ Well, he couldn’t do it, so obviously that wasn’t going to happen.”
Instead of passing legislation, Obama acted through regulation, Inhofe said.
“The things he couldn’t do through legislation, he’d do through regulation,” he said. “That’s where all the regulations came in.”
In the blueprint for his budget, Trump will cut 3,200 jobs from the EPA, slashing the agency by 31 percent. Under the blueprint, the agency’s budget will be reduced from $8.3 billion to $5.7 billion.
The Obama presidency was an eight-year-long assault on business
Global warming - er, sorry . . . "climate change" - was perhaps the biggest area of policy in which Obama simply bypassed Congress and issued edicts via the administrative state. He knew he had zero chance of getting congressional support for his environmental agenda, because it was really about creating global warming hysteria and using that as an excuse to impose heavier costs and regulations on industry. That was always the real goal. Global warming was never anything more than a pretext by which to do it.
Doing all this via the administrative state was an egregious abuse of Obama's power as president, but the one silver lining to his having done so is this: What can be done by executive order can be undone by executive order. All Trump has to do is sign his name to new orders reversing these policies, and they are gone. Unlike with ObamaCare, he doesn't have to go to Congress to kill Obama's climate policies because Congress never approved them in the first place.
And while the fight to repeal and replace ObamaCare gets more attention for understandable reasons, it would be a mistake to overlook how harmful his climate policies were, and what a significant achievement it is for Trump to get rid of them. We talked a lot about the costs ObamaCare imposed on employers, and they were significant. But Obama's climate policies were often even more costly, not only in terms of real actions they required businesses to take but also because of legal and regulatory protections they had to seek in the event they came under attack by the EPA or another federal agency.
The Obama presidency was an eight-year-long assault on business, and the effort came at a major cost in terms of job creation and economic growth. Trump can do a lot to bring the economy back simply by ending the regulatory and legal harassment of companies who are simply trying to operate in this country. The reversal of Obama's climate policies is an excellent place to start. This announcement, when it happens later this week, will be a most welcome one.
