Trump’s Return to the White House Spells Disaster for Global Climate

The year is now 2025, and our planet’s carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere have surpassed 420 parts per million, a staggering milestone considering that levels only reached 280 ppm or less before the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s. The 2015 Paris Agreement posits that global greenhouse gas emissions must see a 45% reduction by 2030 in order to limit average temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius or less. Needless to say, our window of opportunity was about to be fully closed before the end of 2024 which, despite the extraordinary challenges of meeting it, we still had a chance to chart a new way forward. That was until Trump got re-elected.

The 2024 election was a long and grueling affair in of itself, but for the millions of us environmental scientists and activists, we understood that a Trump victory would lead to severe repercussions. His first term saw the appointment of officials whose environmental records were atrocious, including his first EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. Among his numerous acts that threatened key protections and regulations, he sided with President Trump on withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, argued for a smaller EPA budget, opposed the Clean Power Plan, and suspended the Clean Water Rule. Trump has already removed the U.S. from the Paris Agreement again by executive order although the actual process of this being carried out takes about a year.

These actions follow rhetoric Trump turned to on the campaign trail to drum up his base, frequently criticizing the Biden Administration’s policies to advance renewable energy projects and countering with one of his favorite slogans (“Drill, baby, drill!”). But it wasn’t just his speeches that strongly indicated what a second term could bring. Meeting fossil fuel executives behind closed doors at Mar-a-Lago, he asked for approximately $1 billion in donations and promised to provide beneficial tax and regulatory favors in return. With only five years left to meet the Paris Agreement’s deadline, we have no room left for regression, especially when the little progress that’s been made is on the verge of being rolled back.

In another executive order he signed on his first day back in office, he declared an energy emergency. This, in effect, requires procedures under the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to name the specific statutory authorities that he will rely on to address it. The listed statutes in this executive order include the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Defense Production Act. Like in his first term, Trump is once more trying to increase drilling in the Arctic where it’s now warming faster than the rest of the world.

President Trump meets with California Governor Gavin Newsom and other state officials to address devastating wildfires during his first term in office. There, he rejected climate change research and stated, “Well, I don’t think science knows, actually.” Source: Trump Again Rejects Science During California Wildfire Briefing — The New York Times

He targeted the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, opening the protected area for drilling through leases to fossil fuel projects. This resulted in a long legal battle that lasted for years until President Biden canceled the leases in 2023, but now another executive order signed by Trump seeks to restart those plans. Among other actions, the order aims to undo limits that were put in place by the Biden Administration on drilling activity in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska on the North Slope. The plans are certainly to be met with many legal challenges while the indigenous Gwich’in rely on the refuge for both sustenance and their culture. Despite Trump’s insistence that the U.S. is currently facing an “energy emergency,” there are statistics that show how fossil fuels still thrived under Biden.

Some of the positive outcomes that fossil fuels experienced during the Biden Administration are listed below.

1. A historic number of leases were approved for oil drilling in the U.S. in 2023.
2. Oil and gas production reached record highs in 2022.
3. The U.S. is the world’s largest producer of crude oil, producing a record-breaking average of 12.9 million barrels per day in 2023.
4. The U.S. is the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG).

President Biden, amidst all the successes that fossil fuels had while he was in office, signed into law critical pieces of legislation that included the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, better known as the bipartisan infrastructure law, and the Inflation Reduction Act. The IIJA appropriates over $60 billion to the EPA for a wide range of programs, including water sector infrastructure, land clean up, and electric school buses. The Inflation Reduction Act is the most significant climate bill in U.S. history by aiming to lower economy-wide CO2 emissions by 35 to 43% below 2005 levels by 2030. Now President Trump and other conservatives wish to undo some of the funding in those laws.

In an order he signed after taking office again, Trump directed that the disbursement of certain funds be paused, namely those that boost electric vehicles and discourage further fossil fuel projects. Those that are going to critical infrastructure projects like bridges, highways, and transits would not be impacted. It’s unclear what the future ramifications are for now, but the fact that he and other Republicans have been opposed to many of the renewable energy projects/funding should have everyone deeply concerned. If we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 45% by 2030, it’s imperative that major emitters like the U.S. transition to a clean energy economy as quickly as possible. However, Trump’s first administration targeted other aspects of the environment rather than just rolling back climate regulations alone.

President Trump signs a flurry of executive orders upon returning to the White House, many of which roll back Biden Administration policies. Source: Trump’s executive orders on health care reverse many of Biden’s moves: Shots — Health News: NPR

The Brookings Institution has extensively documented Trump’s environmental policy actions, cataloguing those from both his first term and those so far in his second. A few of these actions that aimed to reverse critical environmental protections outside of emissions are provided below.

1. The first Trump Administration tried to reverse a ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos on 9/29/2020. It ultimately did not go into effect, but, if it had been successful, many citizens would have been exposed to the toxic chemical and its potential health hazards.
2. The first Trump Administration’s Department of Labor proposed a rule loosening the standards for occupational exposure to beryllium in the shipyard and construction sectors. It went into partial effect on 9/30/2020.
3. The first Trump Administration reversed the banning of certain hunting practices in Alaskan national preserves that protected vulnerable species such as black bears, brown bears, and caribou. This went into effect before he left office.
4. The first Trump Administration proposed amendments to the rules governing the transportation of hazardous materials, loosening some restrictions that had been previously put in place. Some, but not all, of the proposed changes went into effect on 5/11/2020.

There were other actions he took in his first term to undo environmental progress. His second administrator of the EPA, Andrew Wheeler, perhaps did even more damage than Scott Pruitt. He reduced the role of scientists in the EPA’s policymaking process, proposed to restrict the use of scientific data, gutted the coal ash rule, recommended unsafe levels of drinking water contaminants, rolled back clean water protections, suppressed a formaldehyde report, ignored scientists’ advice to ban asbestos, weakened the mercury emissions rule, reversed vehicle emissions rules, and rescinded the Clean Power Plan. Past history demonstrates what we should expect from a second Trump term, if not even more.

With a great portion of the U.S. displaying an anathema to not just climate science but scientific literacy in general, we have entered an extremely dangerous time that puts climate mitigation efforts in jeopardy. Everyone across the country and world at large must stand more firmly than ever to resist the reversals to climate change policies by politicians and oligarchs alike. The trials are going to get even tougher, but none of us can afford to sit quietly and allow our planet to become increasingly uninhabitable for future generations. No one declared that the fight would be easy. In light of that truth, let’s dig deep and fight tooth and nail for a better world!