Trump finally ends the undemocratic autocracy of Obama’s climate crusade – by Lawrence Solomon (Financial Post – October 13, 2017)

http://business.financialpost.com/

The Trump administration this week announced it would repeal the Clean Power Plan, former president Barack Obama’s signature global warming program.

The end of the Clean Power Plan — designed to reduce power plant emissions by one-third and establish the Obama administration’s climate bona fides prior to the opening of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015 — represents more than another nail in the coffin of the climate change mission. More profoundly, it is another sign that the global warming tyranny that has been compromising the rule of law is coming to a close.

The Clean Power Plan and other global warming reforms could have been legitimate, and Obama wanted them to be. But the global warming bill that he pushed in his first term — the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 — couldn’t muster the necessary votes in Congress.

Following that failure — and with the public ambivalent at best about global warming representing a meaningful threat — all understood that future attempts at global warming legislation would go nowhere.

Thwarted by the legislative branch of the U.S. government, Obama then decided on one-man rule. Using his administration’s ability to enact regulations, which are meant to refine not replace legislation, he bent the law out of shape in order to do through executive actions and technical regulations what he couldn’t accomplish through legislation.

For the rest of this opinion column: http://business.financialpost.com/opinion/lawrence-solomon-trump-finally-ends-the-undemocratic-autocracy-of-obamas-climate-crusade