How to Think About Climate and Environmental Policies During a Second Trump Administration

From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Jenni Doering and Steve Curwood with Inside Climate News’s Washington bureau chief Marianne Lavelle and executive editor Vernon Loeb, about what the election of Donald Trump may mean for the environment. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

STEVE CURWOOD: What’s your view of how the world is going to look at us now that we have chosen a leader who denies climate change when we’ve been seeing temperatures going up and storms and such are getting worse and worse?

VERNON LOEB: Well, I think the world has seen this before. When Trump was in office the first time, one of the first things he did was take the country out of the Paris Agreement. Clearly, the world is expecting he’ll do that again. 

Climate action didn’t stop when he did that the first time. It won’t stop this time. But I think clearly, world leaders feel like progress on climate is going to be a lot harder to achieve with Trump in office and with the U.S. out of the official agreement. It’s not a good moment for the climate. I don’t think progress is going to grind to a halt, but it’s not a good moment.

MARIANNE LAVELLE: Next week, climate negotiations begin in Azerbaijan and U.S. negotiators—the Biden administration’s negotiators—were going to argue that more nations should be giving to the fund to address loss and damages in developing countries that did so little to cause the climate crisis, but are feeling the brunt of the climate crisis. 

It is going to be very hard for the U.S. negotiators to have leverage or credibility when everyone there knows that policy is going to change completely on January 21 of next year. It makes our role as a leader on these issues much smaller going forward as the rest of the world continues to grapple with climate change. 

JENNI DOERING: President Biden was able to pass some pretty significant climate legislation with the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. To what extent will Trump potentially roll back some of that legislation, given what he said about these laws? 

CURWOOD: Inside Climate News reporter Bob Berwyn said recently that if the U.S. falls behind on developing electric vehicles, it’ll be like we’re a “rusting locomotive on a side track” while the rest of the world, i.e. China and many others, proceed in this area. What are the risks and possibilities there? What are we up against if incoming President Trump does succeed in pushing back on progress for electric vehicles?

DOERING: I want to ask about Project 2025, which President-elect Trump has attempted to distance himself from, but it’s broadly seen as a playbook of what might happen in terms of cuts at EPA, NOAA and the Department of the Interior when Trump comes back into the White House. What’s your perspective, Marianne, on what might happen to agencies like EPA?

LAVELLE: The important thing to watch is who the president-elect appoints to these key agencies. In many cases, it may well be that some of the authors of Project 2025 are going to be top of the list to really take over those agencies, and that’s because all of these folks who wrote Project 2025, they worked in the Trump administration, they know the agencies really deeply, and they know what programs they want to cut. That is very in line with what Trump has said he wants to do. He wants massive cutbacks in the agencies. And as much as he has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, they’re right in line on what they see, which is a smaller role for the federal government, and that includes the environmental and science agencies.

LOEB: There’s a long description in Project 2025 about how the EPA’s enforcement capability should be pulled way back. And instead, the agency should move to something called “compliance assistance,” which is working more closely with corporations. 

Project 2025 also talks about dismantling NOAA, which is the National Weather Service—the agency that tracks hurricanes—and the National Hurricane Center. Project 2025 even calls for the repeal of the EPA efficiency ratings for appliances, the Energy Star efficiency ratings. So Project 2025 could be a real disaster for environmental protection, if it is indeed the Trump blueprint. 

CURWOOD: What do you see coming up in terms of environmental justice now? The Biden administration set up a White House Advisory Council on Environmental Justice, and wanted to set aside 40 percent of certain funds for environmental justice communities. What might we expect under the next Trump administration? 

LAVELLE: One of the things Project 2025 says to do is to eliminate EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice. It definitely is in the sights of the team around Trump to really redirect this initiative to address environmental justice. 

One thing I noticed is that House Republicans this week put out a report on environmental justice grants by the Biden administration, and they’re very critical of those grants because they’re going to groups that, for example, oppose the natural gas export terminals on the Gulf Coast. What this report does is kind of gives a blueprint for the incoming Trump administration on what grants to withdraw, and also kind of a basis for withdrawing the program altogether. That report came out very much with an awareness that Trump is coming into the White House with an eye to cutting back the support for these communities that are overburdened with pollution, and have been for a long time. 

DOERING: What do you think is going to happen now that the Trump administration is coming back in and has 20-something natural gas projects which it can potentially give the green light to? 

LOEB: The Biden administration put a hold on those projects as it considered the climate implications. My hunch is that that will be one of the first things Trump does away with and basically gives those plants the green light as part of his energy dominance, “drill, baby, drill” approach. Of all the industries, none has fared better under Trump than the fossil fuel industry. I would expect a real explosion of LNG exports over the next four years under Trump, too.

DOERING: Remind us why are climate activists so concerned about those terminals?

LOEB: The terminals just lead to more fracking. We’re already the leading oil and gas nation in the world, and if we can continue to frack and start exporting our natural gas as liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe, which is still somewhat smarting from the loss of Russian natural gas, it just means more fracking. And when you’ve got more fracking, you’ve got more air pollution, more greenhouse gas emissions, more produced water piling up with no place to dispose of it. LNG exports means more fracking across the nation.

CURWOOD: I’ve seen some research that says that the actual carbon footprint of exported natural gas can even exceed that of burning coal. 

DOERING: So how do you both feel about this outcome? 

LOEB: I tend to look at climate change as a matter of fact in science and not as a partisan issue. So through that lens, I don’t think the outcome is good here at all. We have a president-elect who’s said that the first thing he’s going to do is remove the nation from the Paris Agreement. Once again, that can’t be good for the climate picture. Climate change comes down to cutting the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and we haven’t, as a global community, succeeded in doing that since the Paris accord was negotiated in 2015. There’s more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than any other point in human history. The planet is warming faster now than in any other point in human history. We have a president now coming in who says climate change is something of a hoax, and he’s not even going to be part of the global process to deal with it. I just don’t see that as a good outcome. 

LAVELLE: As somebody who’s been writing about this for a long time, I usually focus on the stories I’m telling and what I’m working on, not looking out at the big picture that much. This forces you to look at the big picture. And anyone who has young people in their lives, you think, what kind of world are we leaving for them? The way I deal with it is just focus on the importance of the work we’re doing, trying to explain the science and tell people really that there are things that can be done to address climate change, and we know what they are, and it’s going to take all of us to do something about it.

CURWOOD: Talk to me about what some people call the glimmer of hope: the states and localities. 

LOEB: Voters in Washington firmly rejected a measure on the ballot that would have overturned the state’s signature climate law. In California, the voters approved a $10 billion bond fund for projects that focus on resiliency and coastal adaptation and response to floods and wildfires. And similarly, in Honolulu, voters also approved a climate resiliency fund there. So kind of a mixed result, right? While the national vote was going for Trump, who’s someone who’s sort of avowedly almost a climate denier, you’ve got majorities in these states clearly voting for climate change measures to fund things like adaptation and resiliency.

LAVELLE: States always have been at the forefront of setting goals on clean energy that have been very effective over the years. I am sure that environmental activists are going to be focusing on getting those goals strengthened and continuing to go forward in the transition to renewable energy and policy at the state level to make that happen.

CURWOOD: The founders of the United States did give states rights, and here’s an interesting case where they will be employed.

DOERING: I think I hear both of you saying that even with journalism at sort of this perilous time, you’re not backing down, and you’re going to follow these stories. 

LOEB: Journalism is one of the most powerful civic forces in America. Without journalists, how would people know? So no, we’re not backing down. If anything, I think our work is more essential than ever right now to tell the story of what I think is the most important story on the planet, which is climate change. For the rest of our lives, every other story is going to play out on the stage of climate. And if anything, the reelection of Donald Trump accentuates that fact.