Donald Trump has underscored that he is actively jettisoning any policy that appears to account for climate change or as Trump derisively calls it, “the Green New Scam.”
He has withdrawn for the second time from the Paris Agreement, is attacking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) staffing and programs, abandoning regulations to capture methane, turning away from solar and wind power to double down on oil and gas drilling and freezing money even for existing contracts for hydroelectric dams and congestion pricing plans in New York City.
Lee Zeldin, administrator of the EPA, is recommending abandoning the 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare, a move that would wipe out the key legal basis for the government’s climate laws touching pollution or auto manufacture or power plant regulation.
The EPA said it is canceling $20 billion in grants for climate and clean energy programs extended under a greenhouse gas fund set up under Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The money had been frozen for weeks and is being challenged in court. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order on Tuesday blocking the EPA from removing $14 billion in climate grant funding from Citibank, where it has been held.
For Trump, it’s both a matter of personal belief — like most things he opposes, Trump thinks climate change is a hoax — and objection that international accords and regulations put too much burden on U.S. financial support and business growth. His antipathy for science and experts grates against his preference for his own “common sense” and, of course, control to define success in profitable ways that benefit his inner crowd.
In the next week, Zeldin is preparing to recommend cutting 65% of the EPA budget, dropping lots of science-trained employees, enforcement duties, and grants for a wide assortment of projects. Businesses, nonprofits, startups pursuing clean energy projects are likely to find their support cut off, and only a sea of uncertainty ahead.
A Republican-majority Congress has mostly just gone along, though The New York Times highlighted the effort by a small group of Republicans and business leaders who keep trying to remind Trump that electricity from wind, solar and alternative sources are important to the overall goal of energy self-sufficiency, and trying to save tax credits that started under Joe Biden.
Mother Nature, of course, is not paying attention to any of this or halting inexorable heating of the planet as a result of human behaviors.
A Speedy Anti-Climate Agenda
Cutting federal environmental dollars is coming while Trump wants tariffs likely to set off trade wars that will tax supply chains and the competition for basic economic building blocks. Cutting scientists for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service say we’re giving up on collecting the information to inform ourselves about climate.
The confused car manufacturing industry, already rigged to go all electronic, is in for a roller-coaster ride, even as Trump pulls away incentives for consumer purchase of electronic cars and trucks, chucks mileage requirements and insists that he can tell California what it can pass as a stricter set of statewide requirements. Mexico and Canada, now under tariffs, are heavily invested in auto manufacturing, and China is way ahead in producing lower-cost electric cars. But Trump thinks the answers will present themselves magically in foreign investment in American car production.
Similarly, energy industries are roiling, poised hesitantly towards opening new long-term drilling projects based on Trump executive orders and not congressional laws, and thus subject to override by some future president. The big turn to solar, wind and alternative source energy companies suddenly find themselves without certainty about how to grow and may well face shutdowns of sizeable number. Money for wind farms on public land and in the ocean have been frozen, and there are threats for projects on private land.
Last week, Congress voted to roll back the “methane fee,” a penalty on excess methane emissions that had not yet taken effect. That removed any incentive for polluters to reduce their environmental impact just as Trump is seeking to free more fossil fuel production — and more methane.
In short, as The New York Times summarized recently, “In a few short weeks, President Trump has severely damaged the government’s ability to fight climate change, upending American environmental policy with moves that could have lasting implications for the country, and the planet.” The news outlet described actions that are abandoning efforts to reduce global warming, rolling back pollution limits, boosting the very fossil fuels giving rise to greenhouse gasses.
The Effects Don’t Go Away
Meanwhile, we are witnessing deadlier hurricanes, floods, wildfires and droughts, as well as some species extinction — even as Trump also wants to dump the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Trump’s insistence on reduced regulations often short circuits normal protocols; he is seeking to drop periods of public comment, and he has declared an energy emergency with authority to fast-track construction of oil and gas projects. The U.S. already produced more oil than others and is the world’s biggest exporter of natural gas.
Much of this is ending up in court because the campaign is moving so quickly that matters of administrative law are being bypassed in the name of larger goals. At least two federal judges have ordered energy grants restored after they were cut.
But speed seems the order of the day and expanding the oversight of federal projects which have frozen billions approved by Congress to state and local projects. Congress is talking about a speedy legislative maneuver to overturn California’s own environmental rules for cars without going through public comment phases. The Trump administration also is investigating “mismanagement” of California’s high-speed-rail project and simply halting the congestion pricing project in Manhattan. The EPA wants to “claw back” $20 billion in grants awarded to eight organizations under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in low-income communities, a move that prompted a Justice Department prosecutor to resign.
It feels a runaway policy train hurtling down the deregulation track without a clear destination, all to underscore a political credo of leaving business alone to do what it will and ignoring the changing climate. But as Trump said this week, he’s just getting started.
