In the final six months of 2015, President Obama took some of his most significant steps in his energy and climate change agenda. He announced the Clean Power Plan to cut carbon emissions from power plants. He rejected the Keystone XL Pipeline. He negotiated the Paris Agreement to roll back the nation’s carbon emissions to slow the effects of climate change. In his first few months, President Trump has reversed many of his predecessor’s decisions.
Web Video: President Obama's 2015 Energy Agenda
Mar. 28, 2017 AT 6:20 p.m. EDT
TRANSCRIPT
Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.
MS. IFILL: Amy, what surprise struck you from 2015?
MS. HARDER: Well, you know, what surprises me is the last six months and everything has been accomplished on President Obama’s climate and energy agenda. Starting with August 1st, he announced the final Clean Power Plan, which is the big EPA regulation cutting carbon emissions from power plants. It’s really the architect of his – the architecture of his climate agenda to the Paris climate talks. And then several weeks later we had the final rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline. Now, it was an open secret by then among most that he was going to reject it, but the fact that he finally did it after seven years. And then a couple weeks later you had Paris. And you had him fly to Paris and strike that deal. And then just now he has this big spending bill which –
MS. IFILL: That’s a lot, actually, on his agenda, when you think of it that way.
MS. HARDER: In six months. I’ve been – I’ve been pretty busy. (Laughter.) And so it’s just all of that together is really – you know, after he didn’t do much on his – on this issue in the last six years, he’s really kind of turning up the volume. And so that surprises me.
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