Watchdogs criticize Perry’s Texas jobs record ahead of confirmation

ClimateWire discusses environmental regulations under the Trump administration with CEI’s William Yeatman. 

President-elect Donald Trump has multiple options to defeat potential lawsuits in the coming months and years from environmentalists to preserve Obama-era greenhouse gas (GHG) regulations that the new administration is expected to target, according to an analysis by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a free-market think tank.

In a Jan. 9 blog post, CEI’s William Yeatman outlines several strategies for the Trump administration to counter environmentalists’ legal actions to preserve and enforce regulations such as GHG limits for new and existing power plants, as well as first-time standards for the potent GHG methane for the oil and gas industry.

Trump’s EPA — under the potential leadership of his pick for administrator, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt– has long been expected to seek to roll back or scrap several high-profile Obama climate rules, though advocates have pledged to fight those efforts in court.

For example, in response to lawsuits alleging that revisions or rescissions of such rules are an “unreasonable about-face” and that the rules are “indispensable to public health,” Yeatman says Trump can argue that subsequent administrations can “alter or undo” almost anything a previous administration has done unilaterally.

Read the full article at ClimateWire.