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On January 20, 2025, climate change denier Donald Trump began his second term as President of the United States. With a history of unfriendly environmental policies in his first term, what are we likely to see over the next four years?
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During this first presidential term (2016-2020), Donald Trump, a climate change denier, rolled back over 100 environmental regulations. What follows are just some of the most significant.
The Clean Power Plan, originally announced in 2015, was the first ever proposed nation-wide standard to reduce carbon emissions and air pollution from power plants. In 2019, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under President Trump proposed a replacement, the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule. However, this rule was struck down by a District of Columbia circuit court as Joe Biden took office in 2021, due to its arbitrary method of calculating and reporting power plant emissions. Although the ACE rule was never enacted fully, its replacement of the Clean Power Plan significantly delayed the process of regulating carbon emissions in America.
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is a foundational piece of environmental policy in the US. As the implementing tool for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the ESA protects species threatened with extinction in America and provides funding for threatened species internationally.
In 2019, the Trump administration issued three key strikes against the effectiveness of this act:
Considered to be one of the first and most influential pieces of modern environmental policy, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has been assuring accountability for the federal government’s impact for over 50 years. During Trump’s first term, NEPA was “slimmed down” significantly.
Under his imposed changes, projects considered to have “minimal federal involvement” no longer required a review under NEPA. This would theoretically allow large and impactful projects like an oil pipeline to forego the NEPA review process if federal agencies had limited involvement in the building of a pipeline. The time required to be proved for public comment and review was also shortened to a maximum of two years, while the requirements for public comments to be considered were increased.
This dual-impact change could create challenges for communities with limited resources to be able to submit satisfactory remarks on a high-polluting project in time. Following a trend seen in similar Trump-led rollbacks, “cumulative” and “indirect” impacts of projects were barred from consideration.
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While Biden was able to reverse numerous rollbacks when he took office, it is already evident that President Trump intends to return to a period of environmental “undoing.”
On Inauguration Day last month, Trump took action against the climate. Among the first executive orders he signed was one ordering the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. This action, which UN Secretary-General António Guterres said would undermine global efforts to curb climate change, was a campaign promise that Trump hammered at many of his rallies.
“I’m immediately withdrawing from the unfair, one-sided Paris climate accord rip-off,” Trump said as he signed the executive order at his rally at a downtown Washington arena ahead of his inauguration. “The United States will not sabotage our own industries while China pollutes with impunity,” he added.
It is the second time the US, the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter behind only China, withdraws from the deal. Months after taking office for the first time in 2017, Trump signed an order to withdraw from the pact, a move Biden promptly reversed in 2021.
Trump also signed an executive order to halt all federal projects for offshore wind farms and pause any land leases for on-and-off shore wind farm projects.
One of Trump’s main campaign promises – to “drill, baby drill” – will likely take form in several ways. While declaring a “national energy emergency” on Inauguration Day, the newly sworn-in president also signed an executive order that reopened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the country’s few remaining intact ecosystems, for oil and gas drilling. He also revoked a Biden move that banned new offshore oil and gas development across 625 million acres of US coastal waters, indicating his desire to open other federal lands to drilling.
The Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines are two long-battled fossil fuel projects that Trump pushed heavily for in his first term. Although a federal judge upheld a blocking of both projects in 2020, the president is likely to try and reopen the case in order to expand the production and transport of liquified natural gas (LNG). Many Republicans have pushed for LNG in the past as a “greener alternative” to more recognized fossil fuels of crude oil and coal. However, due to the amount of methane it contains as well as its collection process, LNG has been found to be a significantly worse contributor to climate change than coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels.This comes at a time when the US continues to increase oil and natural gas production and the consumption of fossil fuels globally reached its highest record ever in 2024.
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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a federal agency within the US Department of Commerce, with several offices that provide incredibly important services. The National Weather Service provides daily weather forecasts and is responsible for tracking major storms (tornadoes, hurricanes, and winter events) and issuing warnings for the entire country. The Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service contribute to research on human-driven climate change and its impacts around the globe. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) regulates marine fishing in US waters and is in charge of overseeing the enforcement of the Endangered Species Act for marine and coastal species.
Project 2025, a conservative political agenda to institute right-wing policies by reshaping the federal government that gained traction during the recent election campaign, states that NOAA “should be broken up and downsized.”
Primarily wanting to commercialize weather forecasting and warning data, this probable attack is harmful in multiple ways. Commercialization of weather forecasting would likely include putting storm warnings behind a “paywall,” leaving millions of citizens in lower-income communities blind and vulnerable to dangerous storms and flooding conditions in the future. Being a host of global data, the loss of the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service would significantly harm climate change research around the world. Lastly, without the NMFS overfishing would likely expand and lead to an even quicker depletion of seafood. This could leave millions of Americans who rely on the fishing industry and seafood for their livelihoods without jobs and searching for another protein source. Without the NMFS, enacting the ESA for marine species would likely fall to the Fish and Wildlife Service, another agency poised to face similar attacks from the Trump administration.
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It is clear that over the next four years, there will be a large need for the gap in funding and actions from the federal government towards environmental protection to be filled. Soon after Trump announced America’s second withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, announced a re-commitment from “America is All In.” The coalition of US donors, states, and businesses was set up to ensure that America continues to reach towards its previous commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
There are additional reasons to believe in the steadfastness of the US environmental and conservation organizations. After it was announced that Trump had won the 2024 election, groups specializing in environmental litigation like Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Center for Biological Diversity released statements on their readiness to defend the country’s natural resources. Having all won over 80% in hundreds of cases against the Trump Administration’s first term, the country’s best experts are ready to fight back once again.
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons.
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