WASHINGTON — Declaring an end to what he’s called “the war on coal,” President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday that eliminates numerous restrictions on fossil fuel production, breaking with leaders across the globe who have embraced cleaner energy sources.
The order makes good on Trump’s campaign pledge to unravel former President Barack Obama’s efforts to curb global warming, eliminating nearly a dozen measures in an effort to boost domestic energy production, especially oil, natural gas and coal.
Environmental activists, including former Vice President Al Gore, denounced the plan. But Trump said the effort would spark “a new energy revolution” and lead to “unbelievable” American prosperity.
“That is what this is all about: bringing back our jobs, bringing back our dreams and making America wealthy again,” Trump said during a signing ceremony at the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters, where he was flanked on stage by more than a dozen coal miners.
The order initiates a review of the Clean Power Plan, which restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants. The regulation, which was the former president’s signature effort to curb carbon emissions, has been the subject of long-running legal challenges by Republican-led states and those who profit from burning oil, coal and gas.
Rewriting the Clean Power Plan and other regulations is likely to take years to complete and will face legal challenges from environmental groups and Democratic-leaning states.
In Massachusetts, Attorney General Maura Healey on Tuesday announced the state would join a group of 23 states, cities and counties in likely legal action against the dismantling of the Clean Power Plan.
“We won’t hesitate to protect those we serve — including by aggressively opposing in court President Trump’s actions that ignore both the law and the critical importance of confronting the very real threat of climate change,” read a joint letter, also signed by the attorneys general of 15 other states and Washington, D.C.
Trump has called global warming a “hoax” invented by the Chinese, and has repeatedly criticized the power-plant rule as an attack on American workers and the struggling U.S. coal industry.
In addition to pulling back from the Clean Power Plan, the administration will also lift a 14-month-old moratorium on new coal leases on federal lands.
The Obama administration had imposed a three-year moratorium on new federal coal leases in January 2016, arguing that the $1 billion-a-year program must be modernized to ensure a fair financial return to taxpayers and address climate change.
Trump accused his predecessor of waging a “war on coal” and boasted in a speech to Congress that he has made “a historic effort to massively reduce job-crushing regulations,” including some that threaten “the future and livelihoods of our great coal miners.”
But Trump’s promise runs counter to market forces, including U.S. utilities converting coal-fired power plants to cheaper, cleaner-burning natural gas. And Democrats, environmental groups and scientists said the executive order ignores the realities of climate change.
“Gutting the Clean Power Plan is a colossal mistake and defies science itself,” California Gov. Jerry Brown said. “Erasing climate change may take place in Donald Trump’s mind, but nowhere else.”
While Republicans have blamed Obama-era environmental regulations for the loss of coal jobs, federal data shows that U.S. mines have been shedding jobs for decades under presidents from both parties as a result of increasing automation and competition from natural gas.
Another factor is the plummeting cost of solar panels and wind turbines, which now can produce emissions-free electricity cheaper than burning coal.
According to an Energy Department analysis released in January, coal mining now accounts for fewer than 75,000 U.S. jobs. By contrast, renewable energy — including wind, solar and biofuels — now accounts for more than 650,000 U.S. jobs.
The order will also chip away at other regulations, including scrapping language on the “social cost” of greenhouse gases. The administration is still in discussion about whether it intends to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency chief, Scott Pruitt, alarmed environmental groups and scientists earlier this month when he said he does not believe carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming. The statement is at odds with mainstream scientific consensus and Pruitt’s own agency.
The overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed studies and climate scientists agree the planet is warming, mostly due to man-made sources, including carbon dioxide, methane, halocarbons and nitrogen oxide.
The Trump administration’s plans drew praise from business groups.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas J. Donohue praised the president for taking “bold steps to make regulatory relief and energy security a top priority.”
“These executive actions are a welcome departure from the previous administration’s strategy of making energy more expensive through costly, job-killing regulations that choked our economy,” he said.
Former Vice President Al Gore blasted the order as “a misguided step away from a sustainable, carbon-free future for ourselves and generations to come.”
Marty Nathan, of Northampton, who sits on the steering committee of the local group Climate Action Now, said the administration’s moves are antithetical to combating climate change at a time when major reductions to carbon emissions are crucial to staving off climate change’s worst impacts.
“They can be fought,” she said of Trump’s executive actions. “However, the situation that we’re in right now — we’re in a climate crisis, a climate emergency, and we have to decarbonize right now in order to prevent disastrous global warming.”
Gazette staff writer Jack Suntrup contributed to this report.