President Donald Trump will sign a broad executive order today intended to realign the nation’s energy priorities away from renewable sources and back to fossil fuels. Administration officials describe Trump’s “Energy Independence” executive order as part of a long-term strategy to promote coal-mining jobs and make energy prices cheaper, in spite of widespread evidence that the Obama climate policies the order is targeting would spur jobs in the fast-growing green energy sector and actually lower, not raise, electricity costs for consumers. Meanwhile, there is little evidence that Trump’s order will bring back jobs in the lagging coal sector. 

The executive order instructs the EPA to begin the process of unwinding the Clean Power Plan (CPP)—an Obama-era rule for reducing hazardous carbon dioxide emissions generated from the U.S. power sector. It also initiates a review of the Department of Justice's defense of the rule in court, and for a working group to “reconsider” the social cost of carbon. In addition, the order brings to an end the moratorium on new and modified coal leasing on public land. 

The action effectively halts a years-long historic effort to clean up the nation’s aging coal- and gas-fired power plants, which account for approximately 40 percent of the CO2 emissions produced in the United States. Carbon pollution is one of the primary causes of climate change. 

The Clean Power Plan has been on hold since the Supreme Court granted a stay on the rule in February 2016 to allow time for a review of its legal merits. More than two dozen states—joined by companies and industry groups—have sued to block its implementation, although many other states also support it. The D.C. Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals opened oral arguments in the case, West Virginia v. EPA, on September 27, and has yet to deliver a ruling. 

Before the Clean Power Plan, the United States had no uniform guidelines for regulating carbon emissions from the nation’s power sector. Without a national standard in place, aging power plants across the country have emitted unlimited amounts of CO2 into the air. The Clean Power Plan was created to finally establish a national framework for reducing carbon pollution caused by the power sector. 

Thanks to President Trump—who told the New York Times last November that “clean air is vitally important”—the plan’s future is now in doubt. 

“An executive order alone will not be able to make the Clean Power Plan go away. That’s the good news,” Vicki Arroyo, director of the Georgetown Climate Center, said in an interview. “The bad news is that elections matter.” 

The Clean Power Plan was the capstone initiative in the Obama administration’s climate policy, an unprecedented first step toward cleaning up the nation’s aging power sector. The EPA designed it to be a flexible, market-based approach in how states meet their emissions-reductions targets, which are phased in over time and crafted to suit the particular mix of energy-generation needs and market conditions in each state. Under the rule, states and utilities must achieve those targets by 2030 with a short-term 2022 checkpoint, and may do so through a variety of programs and incentives—such as by increasing investment in renewable energy or decreasing consumer demand. 

Opponents of the Clean Power Plan characterize it as regulatory overreach that will kill jobs and raise electricity rates on consumers, often citing it as an example of an EPA out of control. Current EPA administrator Scott Pruitt used the same framing this past Sunday on ABC’s This Week. “We can be both pro-jobs and pro-environment,” he said. “And the executive order is going to address the past administration's effort to kill jobs across this country.” 

But Pruitt cited no evidence supporting this view, nor do many of the climate action opponents who share it. The rule itself, however, resulted from years of judicial review and scientific findings related to the environmental and public health impacts of greenhouse gases, of which carbon dioxide is one of the most consequential. 

The Clean Power Plan was issued under the EPA’s established legal authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions via the Clean Air Act—an authority affirmed by three Supreme Court decisions, including Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), which determined that such gases are “air pollutants” covered by the act. Following that decision, in 2009, the EPA issued the “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases are a danger to human health. The CPP is just one outcome of that determination. The plan was finalized in August 2015 after extensive outreach to state leaders, utilities, and other stakeholders, as well as a public review period that produced millions of comments. 

The EPA has identified numerous public health benefits to reducing carbon emissions. More so than burning natural gas, burning coal for power produces not only carbon dioxide but other air pollutants such as mercury and soot. If power plants emit less carbon dioxide by using less coal, either through switching to an alternative power source such as renewable energy or using coal less often, they decrease the emissions of these other air pollutants as well. That has direct benefits to human health. Heart disease, respiratory disease, and stroke are among the conditions that experts have linked to exposure to air pollution. 

Meanwhile, the Sierra Club issued a new analysis of Department of Energy jobs data this week that shows clean energy jobs from industries such as solar and wind actually outnumber fossil fuel jobs nationally by over 2.5 to 1 and exceed all jobs in coal and gas by 5 to 1. According to the analysis, 41 states and Washington, D.C., have more jobs in the clean energy sector than in the fossil fuel industry. Trump’s executive order therefore amounts to a possible job killer for a fast-growing green energy sector that has become a viable alternative to replace the nation’s reliance on dirty fossil fuels. 

“Right now, clean energy jobs already overwhelm dirty fuels in nearly every state across America, and that growth is only going to continue as clean energy keeps getting more affordable and accessible by the day,” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said in a statement about the new analysis. “These facts make it clear that Donald Trump is attacking clean energy jobs purely in order to boost the profits of fossil fuel billionaires.” 

Trump can’t repeal the Clean Power Plan simply by executive order. But the action is likely to trigger a lengthy court review process that could effectively paralyze it. Also, because of the recent Supreme Court decisions, the EPA has a duty to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. An effort to repeal the Clean Power Plan would potentially run afoul of that, triggering years of delay and litigation. 

There are however some aspects of the order that can be implemented without delay, such as an instruction that agencies no longer consider climate change when engaging in reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act.

“With the election, and the statements made during the campaign, many of us who have followed the development of the Clean Power Plan have felt like it was very vulnerable,” Arroyo says. “It’s disturbing, given that the EPA had an unprecedented amount of outreach, including listening sessions for years, and public notice and comment that drew millions of comments on the need for this.” 

Few stand to benefit from the unraveling of the Clean Power Plan—that is, beyond the fossil fuel industry responsible for the hazardous air pollution the plan was created to regulate. That includes state regulators and utilities nationwide, many of which supported the rule and began deploying plans for compliance after it was finalized. While Trump’s executive order can’t stop states and utilities from continuing that process, it will keep in place a skewed playing field, where some states and utilities are cleaning up their existing power grid while others are not. The executive order could potentially throw into chaos years of efforts to bring clarity to the nation’s electricity markets. 

Dr. Marilyn Brown is a professor in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech and author of the report “The Clean Power Plan and Beyond.” “In the short term, I think we’ll continue to see good progress on the utility industry front in terms of decarbonizing the grid,” she says. “But in the long term, I don’t think we’ll be able to make the kind of advances we need without signaling to the industry a national goal like the Clean Power Plan. Without that, we’re going to see competing patchworks of approaches used around the country. That doesn’t lead to good policy. Uncertainty is bad for business. Even the utilities want to know: What’s the long-term plan for the country for pricing carbon? Once they have that plan in place, they can optimize their business model. But in the meantime, they’re putting shareholder resources at risk if no one knows what their return on investment will be. So having these clear standards help industry risk while at the same time delivering the other benefits of a cleaner environment and public health.”   

As Oklahoma attorney general, Scott Pruitt sued the agency he is now leading to block the Clean Power Plan from taking effect, calling it an “executive fiat” that violates states’ rights. His views, however, bear little resemblance to the reality of how the plan was crafted. The EPA made a good-faith effort to try to estimate what degree of carbon reductions were achievable over a certain period of time given the market conditions that were already in play in individual states across the country. This led to the CPP’s customized state-by-state goals. Because the energy sector has gradually been moving away from coal, and because so many states have embraced renewable energy, many are already on track to meet the short-term benchmark set forth by the plan. 

The CPP also allows energy-efficiency improvements to count toward the reductions goals, and that, according to Brown’s research, would mean not only a cleaner environment, but also lower utility bills for consumers. By reducing the demand for electricity, states can constrain the inflation of electricity rates. 

“Most of the modeling I’ve seen suggests that meeting a very strong carbon goal, one that even goes beyond the Clean Power Plan, would put pressure on rates,” Brown says. “It would be a very big disappointment if the regulation is gutted, because it’s a big step forward in allowing demand side, on the customer side of the meter, to be equivalent to the utility side of the meter.”   

Brown doesn’t think the industry will welcome the dismantling of the plan. “Executives at utilities I talk to would prefer to have a standard,” she says. “If they were given a choice, I don’t know that the policy they would pick is the Clean Power Plan. But they definitely want to have policies in place so that they can have greater certainty about future investments.” 

According to Vicki Arroyo, the order will create an atmosphere of regulatory uncertainty for years. Before she worked at the Pew Center on Climate Change and the Georgetown Climate Center, she was an attorney in private practice with a firm advising clients on Clean Air Act compliance. She says what she heard most often from the regulatory community during that time was, “Give us some certainty. Try to harmonize some of these standards coming out piecemeal so that we can make investments, not just for four years or one president’s term, but for 40 years.” 

There are other, more global ramifications of Trump’s order. The CPP is one of the key pillars to the U.S. pledge under the Paris climate agreement. A freeze on the Clean Power Plan would erode the United States’ standing as a global leader in the fight against anthropomorphic climate change. If the United States walks back or dismantles the plan altogether, only to rely on market forces and state and local initiatives for dealing with carbon emissions without a federal guideline for doing so, it’s unlikely the U.S. could meet its pledge under the agreement. 

“I think it sends the message that a key pillar of our national targets has been undermined by this change in administration,” Arroyo says.