“A comprehensive agenda to combat climate change” unveiled on Tuesday by New York governor Andrew Cuomo, includes the setting of a state-wide energy storage deployment target of 1,500MW by 2025.
President Donald Trump’s executive order that promotes ‘Energy Independence’ and targets Obama’s Clean Power Plan went down a treat with fossil fuel interests, who praised Trump for making good on his promise to preserve coal jobs and avoid “regulatory burdens”. However, environmentalists took a different interpretation; viewing the order as a KO of the previous administration’s entire climate action legacy. Clean energy advocates stood somewhere in the middle, concluding that little will change in the long run.
Former Texas governor Rick Perry, secretary of energy nominee to head the very department he suggested should be scrapped, said in his Senate confirmation hearing yesterday that he regretted making that recommendation.
Rallying on the steps of the Maryland State House yesterday, clean energy supporters compared governor Hogan’s veto of a bill that would boost renewable energy to the views of the climate sceptic president-elect.
If Trump goes ahead with his threat to scrap the Clean Power Plan, legal action will ensue, according to 15 state attorney generals who penned a letter to the President-elect.
