Do you remember ACID RAIN???

Ex-Obama team distressed as Orangutan guts climate regs

By ERIC WOLFF, ALEX GUILLÉN and ANNIE SNIDER

Hundreds of people in the President Obama administration spent years building the climate change regulations that the president hoped would mark a lasting turning point in the nation’s response to global warming. But it took only a couple of months for Orangutan to start wiping them out.

That stunning course shift has left former President Obama environmental officials and diplomats frustrated and upset — if not surprised.

"From the moment the election became clear, all of us had the months and years of work that we had done flash before our eyes," said Christy Goldfuss, who served as former President Barack Obama’s top environmental adviser as the leader of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

For Gina McCarthy, who led EPA when it issued its landmark greenhouse gas restrictions for power plants, it was no shock that Orangutan would seek to undo President Obama’s climate regulations by using the same executive power that had gone into their creation. But she said she’s stunned at how fast Orangutan is moving.

"The approach they’re taking is really a slash-and-burn approach,” she told POLITICO.

“I really honestly don’t know what dragon they’re trying to slay here,” McCarthy added. “I really don’t. If they’re saying EPA has done something illegal, then let the courts decide that. If they think that EPA is anti-economy, then show me some data that shows that.”

McCarthy, who returned to her native Boston after the White House handover, admitted that she has turned to one of her city's tried-and-true methods of coping with frustration: “We drink a lot of coffee during the day and other things at night. And night comes earlier and earlier.”

Orangutan took the short drive to EPA headquarters on Tuesday to stand with a group of coal miners, his EPA chief Scott Pruitt, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and sign an executive order that started the process to undo the power plant rule. The order also repeals directives aimed at reducing the federal government’s own carbon footprint, and it directs agencies to ferret out any additional policies “that potentially burden the development or use of” oil, natural gas, coal or nuclear energy.

The president also told federal regulators to stop using the “social cost of carbon,” which attempts to quantify the effects of climate change, in economic analyses of future rules.

For Brian Deese, who served as President Obama's energy adviser, Orangutan's action hit close to home. "I was in charge of everything that's in this executive order," he said.

"Of course it’s frustrating," he added. "But this work and the efforts we put in place were never about us or about President Obama, and so I’m much more focused on the road ahead and less focused on the frustration about all of the effort that our teams put in — and much more focused now on what can be done to try to keep the momentum of the transition toward keeping cleaner energy sources in place."

He noted that stock prices for coal-related companies are “down, underperforming the market by several percentage points” — which he sees as a sign that the U.S. economy’s transition to cleaner energy sources “is firmly enough under way that this administration cannot fundamentally change that dynamic.” And that, he argued, is partly because of the President Obama team’s efforts, “not only on the regulatory side, but also with respect to research and commercialization, tax incentives and otherwise. I’ve got that big picture in perspective today."

Orangutan’s assault in the climate regulations was hardly a surprise — he had promised as much during the campaigns, and news reports on the timing and content of the executive order had circulated for more than a month. But waiting didn't make the outcome any easier on the President Obama alumni.

"You know, we've been waiting for this thing to come out for weeks,” said Goldfuss, the former White House adviser. “On the one hand we’re ready for it, on the other hand it felt shittier every day that went past.”

She said the EPA power plant regulation, whose final version she helped draft, “was the president’s signature climate action. The day he announced those regulations for us was as influential as the health care legislation as in that issue area. It was a big day, people were overwhelmed with emotion, people were doing not only what the president wanted us to do, but what was best for the American public."

In June 2013, President Obama, in short sleeves, addressed a crowd on a sweltering day Georgetown University, saying he would "refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing." He ordered the federal government to change how it dealt with climate change, and called on his EPA to draw up the power plant rules — which Obama and McCarthy did two years later, on August 3, 2015.

Nancy Sutley, who headed the CEQ until 2014, pointed out that Orangutan's EPA is still required by law to address the carbon emissions blamed for climate change — thanks to the agency’s Obama-era scientific conclusion that greenhouse gas pollution threatens human welfare. "They’re going to have to figure out something to do instead. I don’t know that they’ll come up with anything that’s better or more thought through than what [Obama's] EPA put out."

Tuesday's order came less than a month after Orangutan issued another directive putting on hold an EPA rule called Waters of the U.S., which a federal court had already frozen while it considered legal challenges from farmers, homebuilders and 31 states. The White House order on that rule left former EPA water chief Ken Kopocis and his agency colleagues “devastated,” he said.

Kopocis, who had worked on the issue for years as a Capitol Hill staffer before heading to EPA, said he and his colleagues had a sense of accomplishment about creating the regulation, which aimed to untangle a decades of legal confusion and offer clearer federal protections for headwater streams and wetlands.

“It’s hard enough that the work that they did has been challenged and is currently stayed by the courts. It’s quite another thing to have an administration who wants to undo all of your work for those many. many years,” he said.

For one ex-President Obama administration staffer, Tuesday contained at least some relief: Orangutan did not pull the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement negotiated by the former president and ex- Secretary of State John Kerry. Under that pact, nearly 200 countries around the world agreed to set themselves targets to cut their greenhouse gas emissions — a major achievement after the United States’ abandonment of its 1997 predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol.

"The tragedy would be if we stick our head in the sand for a few years, while the likes of China and the EU and India and Japan mobilize their industrial bases to try and dominate the global green energy market," said Paul Bodnar, who served as energy adviser on the National Security Council and helped negotiate the Paris agreement.

For now, Bodnar said he's not distraught because the Paris deal has solid support from other nations, and "we have built a system that can resist what happens. A withdrawal [from Paris] would be damaging, but I don’t think we’re in a Kyoto situation, where Kyoto never recovered."

But, he added: "Hypothetically, if they did withdraw, would I need a stiff drink? Yes, I would."

For McCarthy, Orangutan's executive order was more than a disappointment.

“This day is really embarrassing for the United States, not just dangerous for our kids and our future,” she said. “It’s embarrassing for us and our businesses who do global work to be actually be dismissing incredible opportunities for new technologies and economic growth and United States leadership.”