Conservative group pushes GOP to roll back Obama climate work

A conservative group is pushing the next Congress to take several steps to undo President Obama’s climate work. 

The Competitive Enterprise Institute — from which President-elect Donald Trump tapped his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition chief — on Thursday said the GOP-controlled government taking power next year should pursue an aggressive deregulation agenda domestically and pull the United States out of international climate change work. 

{mosads}In a memo outlining the group’s 2017 agenda, CEI’s energy team said lawmakers should repeal EPA rules and regulatory power, end the use of the “social cost of carbon,” a metric federal departments use to assess impacts on the climate, halt the federal renewable fuels mandate and oppose any proposal to tax carbon emissions. 

The U.S., the group said, should pull out of the Paris climate agreement reached last year and stop federal funding for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the underlying global climate treaty.

“Increasing the affordability of both U.S. and global energy is an important economic and humanitarian objective,” CEI officials wrote in their report. “Policymakers heeding the time-honored healer’s maxim, ‘First, do no harm,’ should reject policies to tax and regulate away mankind’s access to affordable energy.”

CEI’s proposals are an especially aggressive conservative wishlist for energy and environmental policy. The chances of getting some of their ideas through, however, is greatly increased by the GOP’s control of the House, Senate and White House next year. 

The group has Trump’s ear, as well. Myron Ebell, the director of CEI’s Center for Energy and Environment, is the head of Trump’s transition team for the EPA, giving him the chance to pitch the group’s agenda to Trump and his incoming nominee for EPA chief, Scott Pruitt. 

Environmentalists have vowed to fight Trump and the GOP on climate issues, gearing up for an aggressive battle in the courts over his agenda.