President Trump will sign an executive order this week to undo President Obama’s 2015 clean-power plan, EPA secretary Scott Pruitt revealed in an interview with ABC’s This Week. The plan was designed to reduce carbon emissions in the U.S. by 30 percent from 2005 levels before 2030, in part by targeting carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants.
“This is about making sure that we have a pro-growth and pro-environment approach to how we do regulation in this country,” Pruitt said.
While Pruitt was attorney general of Oklahoma, he joined officials from several other Republican-led states and more than 100 companies to sue the EPA over the plan, successfully stalling the order while a federal appeals court reviewed the case, says the The Guardian.
“We have made tremendous progress on our environment,” Pruitt said. “We can be both pro-jobs and pro-environment.” He claimed that the Obama administration “had a very anti-fossil fuel strategy,” and that it made “efforts to kill jobs across this country through the clean power plan.”
In the same address, Pruitt took on the Paris climate treaty, saying it let India and China off too easily while taking jobs from the U.S. And he said that the administration would “evaluate” whether to oppose California, which has said it will not lower its fuel emissions standards to match those of the federal government.