Donald Trump may significantly alter nation's environmental policies
WASHINGTON -- From statements on the campaign trail and his very own tweets, President-elect Donald Trump has left little doubt where he stands on the issue of climate change.
He wants a dramatic increase in the production of coal and oil, which he says will create jobs. And his EPA transition team is being led by Myron Ebell, a leading climate change skeptic.
Ebell, who is not a scientist, disagrees with the overwhelming majority of climate scientists who say the driving force behind the warming planet is the burning of fossil fuels.
“We believed that the so-called global warming consensus was not based on science, but was a political consensus,” Ebell said in a 2012 appearance on PBS’s “Frontline.”
“Three feet of sea level rise and Miami is Venice. New Orleans is gone. The Everglades are underwater,” countered the Natural Resource Defense Council’s Bob Deans.
“Three feet of sea level rise is at the lower end of what scientists expect by the end of this century,” Deans said.
Trump wants to cancel the Paris Accords, an agreement signed last year by 190 nations, including the U.S., that commits them to reduce fossil fuel emissions.
“History may well judge it as a turning point for our planet,” President Obama said of the accords.
Ebell, who did not respond to CBS News’s request for comment, also wants to repeal Obama’s Clean Power Plan, regulations intended to turn the nation away from coal and toward wind and solar power.
But Deans says he is far from giving up, and is holding out hope that Trump will moderate his views from what he said on the campaign trail.
“If he doesn’t, we are going to be in a world of hurt,” he said.
