Washington (CNN) The executive order President Donald Trump signed Tuesday afternoon at the Environmental Protection Agency is an unambiguous move by the President to halt the United States' government's attempts to curb carbon dioxide emissions with the goal of encouraging American business. Trump’s order calls for a review of the Clean Power Plan, allows coal mining on US federal lands and lets federal agencies “identify all regulations, all rules, all policies … that serve as obstacles and impediments to American energy independence.” Signing the order brings fears to the forefront about the Trump administration’s attitude toward climate change. Specifically, the order will rescind at least six Obama-era executive orders aimed at curbing climate change and regulating carbon emissions, including Obama’s November 2013 executive order instructing the federal government to prepare for the impact of climate change and the September 2016 presidential memorandum that outlined the “growing threat to national security” that climate change poses. It’s a hoax.”

But in an interview with the New York Times shortly after the election, he seemed to moderate: “I have an open mind to it.”

Pence, the president’s influential No 2, has appeared to question climate science, although his aim was less to question the existence of climate change as to stand up for the coal-fired power plants that provide his home state, Indiana, with most of its electricity. The changes, the official said, do not mean the Trump administration will not look to protect the environment any longer, the official said, but when pressed about the human impact on climate change and Trump’s beliefs, the official was reluctant to say whether all government officials in the Trump White House believe humans cause climate change. But the story was about intelligence agencies monitoring Russian officials — and how, through that regular surveillance, they may have discovered contacts between those officials and Trump associates. Trump made this a key promise during his 2016 campaign especially during primaries in states with a number of coal jobs, and in Ohio and Pennsylvania during the general election. The official said that Obama’s regulations “were not helpful” to the coal industry and these reversals are the President honoring “a pledge he made to the coal industry.”

“We are going to put our coal miners back to work,” Trump said at a March 2017 event in Kentucky.
U.S. President Trump signs an executive order undoing former President Obama's climate change policies.