By Emmanuel Yashim
U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday took gigantic steps to revoke immediate past U.S. president Joe Biden’s policies by signing executive orders.
Trump signed a few other executive orders in front of the crowd at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., just a few hours after being sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, including the revocation of nearly 80 executive orders from the Biden administration.
“I’m revoking nearly 80 destructive radical executive actions of the previous administration,” Trump told the crowd at the signing ceremony.
Trump signed an executive order to delay the TikTok ban imposed by the Biden administration by 75 days “to permit my Administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course of action with respect to TikTok.”
He also signed an executive order that will let the United States withdraw from the World Health Organisation.
Trump also declared a national energy emergency in an executive order with an eye on driving down energy costs.
As the first of this kind declared by the U.S. Federal Government, the emergency is expected to enable the government to crank up energy production by tapping emergency powers.
The United States is the largest producer of both crude oil and natural gas in the world and is also the top exporter of liquified natural gas (LNG) globally.
The incoming U.S. president also signed an executive order to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord.
The move means the United States will pull out of the Paris climate accord for the second time.
During his inauguration speech, Trump, who has long regarded clean energy as expensive and wasteful, also vowed to redouble the efforts to extract and utilise fossil fuels.
“I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill,” he said.
“We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have — the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth,” Trump claimed. “And we are going to use it.”
Adopted in December 2015, the Paris Agreement is an international endeavour to tackle human-caused global warming and related crises, which the United States formally joined in September 2016.
The first Trump administration officially let the United States, one of the world’s top emitters of greenhouse gases, exit the Paris climate accord in November 2020, dealing a major blow to international efforts to combat the climate crisis.
The latest executive order among many others by Trump will mark another round of back-and-forth moves regarding the U.S. commitment to dealing with climate change on the global stage.
Joe Biden, who succeeded Trump to become the 46th U.S. president in 2021, signed an executive order on Jan. 20, 2021 — his first day in office — to bring the United States back into the Paris climate accord.
(Xinhua/NAN)
