The Climate War That Trump Is Winning

Lacking any knowledge of climate science, President Trump nevertheless persists in calling global warming a “hoax”, a “scam”, a “con job” advanced by climate scientists who are “stupid people”. Fittingly, on taking office again, he immediately set about cancelling all climate initiatives, hyping oil and gas with his infantile "drill, baby, drill" mantra, hobbling wind and solar, and slashing regulations.

On his first day he set in motion the yearlong process that removes the United States from the Paris Agreement, the treaty to combat climate change. Adopted by 195 parties at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015, the U.S. is the only country to withdraw, with the White House calling it “restoring American sovereignty” in keeping with "America First". It is just one of a long list of United Nations organizations that he simultaneously, on his own, chose to cancel by executive order that day.

Halo Mustafa Al Askari, the environmental minister of the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, threatened by rising oceans caused by climate change, spoke directly:

”Tragically, the world’s [second] largest emitter of greenhouse gases has withdrawn...Mr. President, this is a shameful disregard for the rest of the world”.

Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is an ardent deregulator. Just weeks ago he celebrated what he called “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States”. His agency has worked to unravel the over 200-pages of peer-reviewed evidence that led the a 5-to-4 Supreme Court’s Massachusetts v. EPA decision in 2007 that agreed carbon dioxide is a pollutant that, under the Nixon-era Clean Air Act, must therefore be regulated as a threat to public health. That paved the way for the Obama administration to impose a tight schedule of progressive emission reduction for the auto industry, and to force the shutdown of coal-burning power plants.

In February, the Trump administration put an end to this, which is what prompted Zeldin's euphoria. Trump threw out what came to be called the “endangerment finding", decreeing that carbon dioxide is to longer a public health hazard. The auto industry can discard emission restrictions, utilities will be free to pollute, abandoned oil and gas wells can be left to leak methane unchecked. Reacting to the announcement, a New York Times headline read “Trump Allies Are Near ‘Total Victory’ in Fight Against Climate Rules”.

A coalition of over 160 civil rights, environmental, faith, health, and labor groups have banded together to call for Zeldin’s ouster for actions the opposite of the agency’s mission of protecting human health and the environment. Zeldin has instead made the EPA business friendly, more concerned to “deliver economic prosperity”. A much smaller EPA will see to its ineffectuality. Some 3,000 of the agency’s 15,000 employees took early buyout offers. Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget calls for a massive 54.5% funding cut.

Zeldin didn’t wait for the lengthy regulation reversal process that nullified the “endangerment finding”. He had put out the word that all companies needed to do to avoid compliance with environmental rules was to send an e-mail to the EPA to ask for an exemption. In response, at least 15 coal-burning power plants, four steel mills, four chemical facilities, and two mines did so. The coal plants did not have to retrofit controls of toxic pollutants such as mercury which can cause developmental problems in infants and children. The chemical plants needn’t curb their pollutants such as ethylene oxide, a gas linked to several types of cancer.

All this is in concert with Trump again moving to revive the coal industry. “Beautiful clean coal" he absurdly calls the dirtiest of the greenhouse gas emitters. He has even had the Energy Department order that five coal-burning power plants, due for retirement, stay on line; ordered the Pentagon to enter into long-term contracts to buy mire electricity from coal-burning utilities; and awarded $175 million to upgrade six coal-fired plants in four states.

That won him a trophy that read "Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal" from an industry group wearing hard hats in the White House. "The goal is to stop the political closure of coal plants" says Energy Secretary Chris Wright, evidently unaware that a nationwide switch to more economical natural gas is what's been driving the retirement of coal plants. But Trump is winning. Coal use increased 13% last year. Emissions rose 1.9%.

The EPA has been erasing dozens of Biden-era regulations that sought to limit the pollution spewing from automobile tailpipes, power plant smokestacks, and oil and gas wells. For their part, Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress have peeled back the climate initiatives in President Biden's Inflation Control Act as part of the "Big Beautiful Bill". By last September, renewable energy projects worth $18.6 billion had already been cancelled. Investment in clean energy had dropped by 20%, said The Financial Times.

The repeal of climate regulations and cancelled funds for clean energy could pump between 22 billion and 32 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2055, according to Environmental Defense Fund.

An example is the Solar for All program of the Inflation Reduction Act. It was to help 900,000 households get access to solar energy, saving them about $400 a year and reducing fossil fuel consumption. But Trump considers renewable energy a "green new scam", mocking the Green New Deal espoused by progressives, so the EPA killed the program with Zeldin calling it a "boondoggle" that would waste "billions of green slush fund dollars".

As soon as he was sworn in, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy ordered the reversal of fuel economy standards — the miles per gallon goals for cars and pickup trucks — in keeping with Mr. Trump's desire to increase the use of gasoline and diesel fuels. Add to that Congress's huge spending bill doing away with Biden's and earlier subsidies the consumers could tap to reduce the cost of electric vehicles.

The auto industry got the word. Honda, Ford, General Motors, Stellantis (Chrysler and Jeep) have all scrapped plans for EVs and taken multi-billion dollar hits to their profits from writing off electric auto investments. The whiplash of Trump's Iran war driving up the price of gasoline might have them taking another look.

These reversals have left climate and environment activist groups adrift and demoralized. Ramon Cruz, a former head of the Sierra Club, said to The New York Times, "I won't try to sugarcoat it. This is a generational loss."

Tax breaks and subsidies for the oil and gas industry continue unabated, as they have for decades. During his run for the White House, Trump hosted oil and gas company executives for dinner at Mar-a-Lago and told them if they were to pool $1 billion for his campaign, he assured them they would save more than that in taxes. They must have ponied up. Last year the biggest companies reaped nearly $6 billion from last summer's sweeping tax bill. Over the next ten years oil, gas, and coal industries are projected to get $18 billion in subsidies and tax breaks.

The Trump administration has cut research on climate even to the extent of removing reference to terms such as "global warming" and "climate change" from exhibits and websites across the government.

  Last July Zeldin ended the updating of a database that hundreds of companies use to calculate their greenhouse gas emissions. It's the third most viewed database of some 281,000 data sets on data.gov. The reason is that the database’s creator, Dr. Wesley Ingwersen, elected to leave the agency when he was suspended along with 139 others who had signed a letter charging that Trump’s policies “undermine the E.P.A. mission of protecting human health and the environment”.

  Elon Musk's DOGE fired hundreds of employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) along with cancelling dozens of the agency's contracts and leases. Trump proposed eliminating the the agency's scientific research divisions. The administration has proposed a $2 billion cut — 28% — to NOAA's budget. But in a bipartisan move Congress's spending bill would maintain funding for NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which the administration proposed eliminating entirely due to its climate change portfolio.

  Trump and removed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have floated eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) altogether. They proposed that the states take over the job of responding to disasters in a time of storms of ever-increasing intensity such as Hurricane Helene that tore apart western North Carolina in late August 2024. It is a wildly impractical idea which we covered in this short piece but it's under review nonetheless.

  In December, the Trump administration announced its intention to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Located in Boulder, Colorado, it is one of the world’s leading Earth science research institutions, but it is to be dismembered because, according to Russell Vought, Trump's budget director, who is in no position to pass judgment on climate science, the center is “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country”.

As for alarm, Julie Lundquist, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Wind Energy at Johns Hopkins University, says,

"This is a terrible move to make at any time, particularly now that we've just had the third hottest year on record….Like many atmospheric scientists in the U.S., I consider NCAR the single-most vital resource for scientists working to understand and predict Earth's atmosphere and weather."

A publication at her university says this action…

"comes at a time when severe weather is becoming more frequent, disruptive, and expensive, with billion-dollar disasters striking the U.S. roughly every two weeks."

Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Brown University, calls NCAR "The beating heart of our field" for its research aircraft, inventions, and computer models that forecast hurricanes, track wildfire smoke, and project rising sea levels and floods "to inform "airlines, farmers, maritime shippers, city planners, construction workers, local governments and communities, and emergency preparedness systems."

Trump wants the world to be awash in fossil fuels, sold by America. Using the threat of tariffs, Trump has coerced countries in Europe and Asia to buy America's liquefied natural gas under contracts that stretch for years to come. He has opened up millions of acres in Alaska to drilling, including the pristine and long protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

In November in London, the 176 countries of the International Maritime Organization were preparing to vote their agreement to a global tax that would penalize ships with emissions that exceed certain thresholds. The tax had already been provisionally adopted the preceding April; this was to be the final vote.

Enter Donald Trump, “outraged” at a carbon emissions tax, threatening countries with higher tariffs, visa restrictions, extra fees on their ships calling at U.S. ports, their sailors not allowed to disembark, should they vote for approval.

”The United States will NOT stand for this Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping and will not adhere to it in any way shape or form.”

…he fulminated. Enough countries caved such that the tax, long in the making, was put off for a year. This one man of gargantuan ego dictated that a global tax to reduce emissions from ships — they burn bunker fuel, the dirtiest of oils — must not happen.

In his zeal for the world to run only on oil and gas, Trump wants to abolish renewable energy. In October he pulled the plug on the largest solar project in North America, Esmeralda 7 in Nevada. It had undergone regulatory review and permitting under President Biden’s Interior Department and would have supplied power to two million homes.

Inexplicably peculiar is the animus Trump holds for wind turbines. Three days before last Christmas he had his Interior Department order a halt to all work on five wind projects in the oceans off the East Coast. Collectively the five come to a $25 billion investment expected to power 2.5 million homes and buildings and provide 10,000 jobs. All were vetted and issued permits by the Biden administration.

The pretext – with no testing or evidence put forward – is that the spinning blades of what Trump calls “windmills” interfere with coastal radar and are therefore a national security risk. Not an outlandish concern but the Defense Department has all along reviewed all five projects and raised no such concerns. Besides, the turbines aren't going anywhere; their location is known to operators. One of the companies, Dominion Energy, even put up $250,000 to upgrade radar facilities opposite the largest of the five undertakings off the Virginia coast.

This was not the first shutdown for the Danish firm Ørsted. Last August Trump stunned Connecticut and Rhode Island when he halted the company’s Revolution Wind off their shores, a $6.2 billion wind farm that is slated to power 350,000 homes. A federal judge had allowed construction to continue. This time around the work is almost completed, with 58 of 65 turbines installed yet Trump unaccountably called a halt.

Court orders have caused work to resume. The interruptions were costly, running to several million dollars a day for each project. Vineyard Wind is now completed. Dominion just sent a burst of power ashore from its first turbine with the project of 176 turbines 70% completed.

“My goal is to not let any windmill be built”, Trump has said. Nothing explains Trump’s action at a time when A.I. data centers that Trump himself wants in America's competition with China needs an enormous infusion of electric power. Just this week the Interior Department -(which is to say, Trump) announced that it will pay TotalEnergies, a French energy giant, almost $1 billion – our tax money, please note — to not produce energy, to abandon its plans to build two large wind farms off the East Coast.

The media has looked no further than Trump’s anger when in 2011 he could not stop an offshore wind farm that he thinks spoils the view from one of his golf courses in Scotland. How can that translate into a mania against the technology worldwide as if the wind turbines themselves have become demons in his psyche. He sees the thin, slowly turning blades gleaming white in the sun somehow ugly when viewed from his gaudy visual aesthetic – see the gold bric-a-brac slathered everywhere in the Oval Office. He says the whirring noise “causes cancer”. They “are driving the whales crazy”. The blades are killing “all the birds”. They do, but of course not all. A 2020 study reported in The Week magazine says 200,000 a year in the U.S. – so far – but there’s a long way to go to match the ”599 million that die in collisions with buildings and the 2.4 billion killed by cats”.

(Funny thing, though. When Virginia fretted in 2018 over what to do about nesting grounds of seabirds as it prepared for a major bridge and tunnel expansion in the tidewaters of the Chesapeake Bay, the first Trump administration said not to worry: it had done away with criminal penalties for “incidental” migratory bird deaths that came "in the course of normal business".)