Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) said Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s executive order rolling back former President Obama’s anti-climate change efforts was a “declaration of war” against renewable energy.
Among other actions, the executive order ordered a review of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which restricted greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants and placed a moratorium on leasing federal land for coal.
“This is not an executive order, this is a declaration of war against wind, against solar, against all renewables, against a clean energy technology revolution,” Markey told MSNBC’s Chris Jansing. “And it’s also a denial of the science of climate change.”
“The best way for us to create jobs would be, as your last analyst just said, is to move on to this new era,” he continued. “We have hundreds of thousands of jobs in wind and solar. We only have 50-60,000 jobs left in the coal industry, and that revolution is just going to continue, not only in the United States, but globally. What they, in this executive order, are saying is that we’re going to be the laggard. We’re not going to compete. We’re going to cede to Germany, to China, the ability to develop these new clean energy technologies, which will then proliferate and create jobs all across the planet, just not here in the United States of America.”
Watch below via MSNBC: