WASHINGTON, Feb 10 (Reuters) – In a sweeping rollback of climate change policy, U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday plans to formalize a move to overturn the Obama-era legal basis for federal greenhouse gas rules, the White House said on Tuesday.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Trump will be joined at an event by Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin to formalize the rescission of then-President Barack Obama’s 2009 findings.
The move, which the administration formally proposed in July, would mark the Republican administration’s most sweeping climate change policy rollback to date, and follows a string of regulatory cuts and other moves intended to unfetter fossil fuel development and stymie the rollout of clean energy.
Trump has said he believes climate change is a hoax, and has withdrawn the United States from global efforts to combat it.
Leavitt cast the move as a massive deregulatory action.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Steve Holland; editing by Michelle Nichols)
