Trump to sign executive order undoing Obama's clean power plan

United States President Donald Trump on Tuesday will sign an executive order to unveil former president Barack Obama's plan to curb global warming, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency said on Sunday, claiming the move would be "pro-growth and pro-environment."

"The president is keeping his promise to the American people," Scott Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general, who questioned accepted climate science, said.

Pruitt said the Trump order would undo the Obama administration's clean power plan, which restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants, as reported by The Guardian.

"With respect to this executive order that's coming out on Tuesday," he said, "this is about making sure that we have a pro-growth and pro-environment approach to how we do regulation in this country."

Pruitt also called the Paris climate accord a "bad deal" and said Obama-era standards on auto emissions were "counter-helpful to the environment."

Pruitt argued that the Obama administration "had a very anti-fossil fuel strategy - coal, natural gas and the rest", and that it made "efforts to kill jobs across this country through the clean power plan".

Trump's intention, he said, was to bring back coal mining jobs and reduce the cost of electricity.

"For too long, over the last several years, we have accepted a narrative that if you're pro-growth, pro-jobs, you're anti-environment," he added.

Earlier this month, Pruitt said he did not believe the release of carbon dioxide, a gas produced by the burning of fossil fuels, was pushing global temperatures upward - as scientists have known for decades.

The clean power plan, which aims to cut emissions of CO2 and other emissions and was implemented in 2015, has been on hold since last year while a federal appeals court considered a challenge by Republican-led states and more than 100 companies. Pruitt sued to halt the order while in Oklahoma.