By James Osborne of the Houston Chronicle
(Aug. 24) – Steve Milloy, a regular on Fox News and publisher of the blog JunkScience.com, has long railed against a culture within the U.S. government of pseudo-scientific research and overregulation that has held back America’s energy industries.
With President Donald Trump in the White House, promising to roll back the Obama administration’s efforts to slow climate change, Milloy and his tribe of conservative, pro-fossil fuel thinkers and writers should be ecstatic. But seven months into the new administration, Milloy is not exactly enthusiastic.
“They’re doing the best they can given the circumstances,” Milloy said. “The way the whole regulatory system is set up, it’s not designed to be rolled back. Washington is a swampy place.”
Since taking office in January, Trump has signed a multitude of executive orders rolling back environmental regulations and he has proposed slashing the budgets of government agencies tasked with addressing climate change. But many of the administration’s most high-profile actions are being held up in a slow-moving legal and political system that Trump’s team of Washington newcomers is still struggling to navigate.
Getting rid of the Obama administration’s signature Clean Power Plan, which would force a shuttering of coal plants to be replaced with electricity from natural gas, wind and the sun, is on hold as Trump’s team debates a solution to the fact that carbon dioxide is considered a pollutant under federal law and must be regulated by the EPA. And similar roadblocks face Trump’s efforts on everything from rolling back methane pollution regulations for the oil and gas industry to getting the final leg of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline built.
At present, there are close to a dozen Obama-era environmental regulations that remain on hold in the courts while the Trump administration determines what course of action to take, said Jeff Holmstead, a Washington-based energy attorney who served in the George W. Bush administration.
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