Published: July 29, 2016 |

[Click image to enlarge]

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump for years only half-jokingly insisted that global warming was “a hoax invented by the Chinese” aimed at weakening the U.S. economy through tough anti-pollution rules on utilities and manufacturers.

Trump has voiced serious doubts about the threats of global warming throughout the campaign and has threatened to eliminate or significantly downgrade the Environmental Protection Agency if he becomes president.

While stopping short of fully embracing Trump’s skepticism of climate change science, the new platform approved by the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this week would go far towards dismantling the Obama administration’s historic initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while opening the door to expanded oil, gas and coal production on federally protected land.

The 66-page document approved by delegates on a voice vote Monday night makes the startling claim that coal is a “clean” fuel, when in fact coal and other fossil fuels are the chief contributors to climate change and public health problems including asthma and heart problems.

“The Democratic Party does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource,” the platform states. “Those who mine it and their families should be protected from the Democratic Party’s radical anti-coal agenda.”

The platform, which has received scant attention in the early days of the convention, contains a cornucopia of energy industry-inspired provisions that would shred much of what Obama has achieved over the past seven years in trying to slow the rate of growth of carbon emissions. The platform, for example, vows to somehow reverse a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that expanded the EPA’s power to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the federal Clean Air Act.

At the same time it hailed the high court’s recent action to hold in abeyance Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which aims to sharply reduce power plant emissions, pending the outcome of a lower court challenge. It strongly opposes a proposed carbon tax to discourage the production of coal, oil and other fossil fuels, saying such a tax would invariably lead to higher utility costs, to the detriment of lower-income families.

And the platform would torpedo the latest international effort to control climate change by demanding an immediate halt to funding U.S. participation in a United Nations-sanctioned global climate change agreement, a document negotiated last December in Paris and ratified in April by President Obama and 170 other world leaders. The sweeping agreement commits most countries to slowing global warming in the coming decades and assisting poorer nations most seriously affected by climate change.

“We firmly believe environmental problems are best solved by giving incentives for human ingenuity and the development of new technologies, not through top-down, command-and-control regulations that stifle economic growth and cost thousands of jobs,” the GOP platform document states.

The Republican platform devotes just four pages of the overall document to global warming and energy production issues. But those few pages bring into sharp focus the huge stakes for Republicans and Democrats alike in the outcome of the presidential contest in November.

Obama has declared climate change one of the most pressing national security threats of our time, and has expended huge amounts of his political capital in forging a domestic and global strategy for slowing the growth of greenhouse gas emissions and heavily promoting alternative sources of energy, including solar and wind power. Even after Congress rejected a cap and trade program for encouraging industry to reduce carbon emissions early in his first term, Obama has made alternative energy efforts a capstone of his presidency.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has embraced many of the president’s initiatives, at times to her political disadvantage. She suffered serious political setbacks in Kentucky, West Virginia and other coal-producing states during the primary season by vowing to accelerate the closing of coal mines and encouraging the development of cleaner alternative sources of energy.

Source: (July 20, 2016) Yahoo.com

Be in-the-know when you’re on-the-go!