China said Wednesday it is committed to honoring its pledges under the Paris climate change agreement, a day after U.S. President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order that would effectively dismantle environmental regulations put in place by his predecessor, Barack Obama.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said combating climate change is a challenge for the entire world, and that China will maintain its approach even if other governments change their policies.
Trump's order has rekindled the highly charged partisan debate about how human activity affects the earth's climate and deepened concern that decades of work on global climate treaties may be unraveling.
"We will put our miners back to work" and produce "really clean coal," Trump said during the signing ceremony Tuesday.
“Many agree that would be disastrous,” Dutch Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen told VOA in a telephone interview. “Whatever has been achieved could be destroyed, so I don’t think many scientists would be pleased with this,” said Crutzen, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for work explaining the depletion of the earth’s ozone layer.
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White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump believes he can balance twin goals of protecting the environment while promoting energy production in the U.S.
"The president strongly believes that protecting the environment and promoting our economy are not mutually exclusive goals," Spicer said during his daily White House media briefing. "This executive order will help to ensure that we have clean air and clean water without sacrificing economic growth and job creation.
Trump's order will seek to suspend, rescind or identify for review more than a half-dozen rules, in an attempt to increase domestic energy production in the form of fossil fuels. It directs federal agencies to identify rules the administration says impede domestic energy production, as a first step in a 6-month process to create a blueprint for the administration's future energy policy. Included in the review will be the Clean Power Plan, which restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants. The rollback also scraps many of former President Barack Obama's environmental initiatives and removes the requirement that federal officials weigh the impact of climate change when making decisions.
Trump has repeatedly signaled disdain for his predecessor’s climate policy. On the campaign trail, he called Obama’s Clean Power Plan "stupid," largely because it put in place what he called "job killing" regulations. The executive orders he signed Tuesday direct the Environmental Protection agency to thoroughly revise regulations outlined in the Clean Power Plan.
Trump’s 2018 budget proposal slashes EPA funding by 31 percent, including an almost total cut of climate research funds. Trump’s Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told a White House briefing, “We’re not spending money on that anymore.”
Less clear is the president’s commitment to international agreements such as the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, signed by Obama. Trump has an aversion to treaties that cede U.S. authority to global bodies, and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, speaking Sunday on ABC’s This Week, called the Paris treaty a “bad deal."
Leaked details of the executive orders ignited a firestorm among climate scientists.
Tim Barnett, emeritus research geophysicist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California says even he, a Trump supporter, would find it "unconscionable" to roll back regulations contained in the Clean Power Plan. “Global warming is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue,” he said. “If you look at what’s going on the Arctic, the Antarctic, by continuing to put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we’re making the oceans more acidic. It is thought that by 2040 half the planktonic creatures will be under stress.”
Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune called Trump's order "the single biggest attack on climate action in U.S. history, period." Brune said the action ignores the growing clean energy economy that serves as the best way to protect both workers and the environment.
In Washington, views on climate change generally split along party lines. With Republicans controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, the views of climate skeptics, largely marginalized during the Obama years, are finding fresh voice.