There is a lot less to U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempt to unravel Obama’s climate legacy than advertised, which is good news for Canada and the world.

Make no mistake: Trump’s latest executive order is unconscionable because any delay in the transition to clean, renewable energy translates into more extreme weather damaging our crops and communities, faster rising seas swallowing coastlines, more species going extinct and human lives lost. And it will embolden oil and gas lobbyists on this side of the border.

Yet, much like his Muslim ban, executing this order could prove harder than tweeting about it as these measures will face fierce resistance in the streets and in the courts.

Unlike a Canadian prime minister with a majority in Parliament, a U.S. president can’t simply eliminate or change a regulation. Thanks to the system of checks and balances built into the American system of government, he or she must propose a new regulation and then convince a court the change is not “arbitrary or capricious.” And since environmental groups (like the opponents of the Muslim ban) will be able to use the President’s tweets and public statements as evidence, arbitrary and capricious will be a tough test for Trump to pass.

This legal hurdle is likely behind the early surrender on a key piece of the fossil fuel lobby’s political agenda: today’s order doesn’t challenge the 2009 “endangerment finding” wherein the Environmental Protection Agency, building on a 2007 Supreme Court ruling, found that climate change resulting from the combustion of coal, oil and gas threatens the public health and welfare of current and future generations.

By leaving that finding in place the climate deniers now occupying key positions within the Trump administration are effectively admitting that there’s no solid scientific case behind their policy agenda, only subservience to the powerful oil and gas lobbies.

So what is in the order?

There are a number of measures to promote coal. These are likely doomed to failure because coal is getting killed by the declining costs of wind, solar and gas, not Obama’s climate regulations (many of which are still being contested in court).

Killing the Clean Power Plan and lifting restrictions on coal mining would at most slow the decline of this 19th century fuel. This is still a terrible outcome because it means more unnecessarily polluted air and water in the U.S., but the impact on coal use in Canada would be limited because coal is a minor, and rapidly declining, source of power in this country.

More concerning from a Canadian perspective is Trump’s assault on the federal regulation of methane emissions from the oil and gas industry. The Canadian oil and gas industry has claimed that such a move in the U.S. should put Canada’s plans to enact similar regulations on hold, but this doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

First, there will be legal challenges of any federal move to deregulate methane. And second, more oil and gas production is already subject to state-level regulation of methane in the U.S. than would be covered by the proposed Canadian regulation. Fixing methane leaks is also one of the lowest-cost ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, so oil lobbyists’ concerns over competitiveness are overblown.

The order also seeks to change how the federal government includes climate change in environmental assessments of projects such as pipelines and in cost-benefit analyses of proposed regulations. These obscure rules are really important in terms of how government works, and Trump’s attempt to change them will inevitably face legal challenges.

From a Canadian perspective, however, there’s no reason we need to follow the U.S. lead in this area as our officials are quite capable of doing their own analyses.

Finally, Trump is telling all federal agencies to review their policies to see if there’s anything that inhibits the development of domestic energy production, and report back to him. So stay tuned.

One would expect the Government of Canada, as a friend and neighbour, to speak out against the measures because the harms they cause won’t stop at the border. But if our elected representatives can’t find it in themselves to be courageous, then let their caution include taking the dire warnings from oil and gas lobbyists with a grain of salt.

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For when it comes to implementing climate denial, President Trump’s bark will prove to be worse than his bite.

Keith Stewart is a senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada and teaches a course on energy policy at the University of Toronto.

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