Donald Trump’s EPA Chief of Staff Says the Trump Administration Focused on Clean Air and Clean Water

From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by host Steve Curwood and managing producer Jenni Doering with Marianne Lavelle, a staff writer at Inside Climate News, based in Washington. 

STEVE CURWOOD: Let’s take a look now at the environmental record and plans of the Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump. Marianne Lavelle of our media partner Inside Climate News reported on climate and environmental policy throughout the Trump presidency and she joins us now from Washington, D.C.

JENNI DOERING: Hi Marianne, welcome back to Living on Earth.

LAVELLE: Thank you, great to be here.

DOERING: Donald Trump came into office in 2017 vowing to roll back various climate and environment regulations. So where should we begin?

LAVELLE: Well, let’s start with an especially memorable move, when he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement. I talked to Trump’s former chief of staff at the Environmental Protection Agency, Mandy Gunasekara, who described what it was like to be in “the room where it happened.”

CURWOOD: Sounds like the “pull out of Paris” camp was way outnumbered, so Marianne, what swayed Trump to pull out?

LAVELLE: Ms. Gunasekara said it came down to concerns about how the Paris Agreement could affect the economy. There was a study by an oil and gas industry consulting firm sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that estimated the agreement would cost the U.S. 2.7 million jobs by 2025. 

GUNASEKARA: It broke down the impact that the Paris climate accord would ultimately have on some key industries and industries that the president cared a lot about. He really focused on reinvigorating the life of the American worker, first with ensuring or growing the opportunity for a job, and then the affiliated community investments and growth alongside that. So, it really came back to what is this going to do to American jobs?

CURWOOD: Well, Marianne, that certainly plays right into the concerns of conservative voters.

SAMANTHA GROSS: The real fallout from former President Trump removing us from the Paris accord is that we really just lost our credibility internationally on climate issues. The U.S. was no longer a respected party in international efforts to combat climate change. I mean, we didn’t entirely fall off the face of the earth. We still sent delegations, but we weren’t considered in any way seriously during that time.

LAVELLE: Meanwhile, the administration was shifting to domestic concerns. Again, Mandy Gunasekara.

GUNASEKARA: At EPA, we had an affiliated agenda, what we called “back to basics,” which really was getting EPA back to focusing on cleaning up the air, cleaning up the water, addressing legacy pollution, and continuing to improve industrial efficiencies that lent itself to reduced greenhouse gases.

LAVELLE: And a couple of examples she mentioned were the updating of the Lead and Copper Rule and an action plan for PFAS, or “forever chemicals.” But Tiernan Sittenfeld of the League of Conservation Voters rejected this claim that EPA got “back to basics” under Trump.

TIERNAN SITTENFELD: That’s nonsense. The Trump administration was the most anti-environmental, anti-climate, anti-public health administration we’ve ever had, by far. It was just breathtaking, the extent to which they rolled back protections for clean air, for clean water, for public lands, that led to more toxic pollution into communities all across this country, especially the frontline and the fence line and the communities of color that have been hit first and worst by toxic pollution [for] decades.

DOERING: Marianne, let’s talk about those regulatory rollbacks. As I recall, they were a big focus of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

LAVELLE: That’s right, Jenni, so Michael Gerrard, founder and director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia, was ready.

MICHAEL GERRARD: On the day that Trump was inaugurated, we launched a website called the climate deregulation tracker to keep track of what he was doing. By the end of the administration, there were 176 entries on that tracker.

LAVELLE: There was everything from weakening methane emission rules for oil and gas, to amending coal ash regulations, to approving the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines. And a lot more. But Michael Gerrard says one rollback trumps them all.

GERRARD: The regulatory rollback under Trump that had the greatest impact on climate change was weakening the fuel economy standards. Motor vehicles are the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Under President Obama, the emissions standards and the fuel economy standards were going to be much tighter. Trump basically froze those. And that led to, one calculation is 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent more than would have been emitted otherwise.

CURWOOD: Yeah—huge impact on climate change, and those emissions have a big health toll, too. 

LAVELLE: Right, Steve. Now, sometimes the rollbacks came back to bite Trump, such as when he dramatically shrank two national monuments in Utah, says Kristen Brengel of the National Parks Conservation Association. 

KRISTEN BRENGEL: But notice what happened here is that they did Bears Ears and Grand Staircase and then stopped. They had about another dozen monuments on the list and they stopped the whole process because it was so wildly unpopular with the public. And so—listen, people make mistakes, administrations certainly make mistakes. But that was a massive mistake.

DOERING: How effective were Trump’s environment and climate moves? 

LAVELLE: Well, they haven’t stuck. In 2021 the Biden administration immediately came in and got to work restoring those monuments, reinstating the rules Trump had rolled back, and re-entering the Paris Agreement.

DOERING: What’s the lasting impact?

LAVELLE: For that, you can look not to the executive branch but to the judiciary, according to Michael Gerrard of Columbia. The courts have become more and more friendly to these environmental rollbacks, thanks to the couple hundred federal judges Trump appointed to lifetime terms. And as you’ve probably heard, a few of those appointments are extremely important.

GERRARD: Well, Trump, of course, appointed three justices to the Supreme Court who are consistently voting against environmental regulation. We now have a six to three majority. And it has been systematically cutting back on environmental regulations. 

LAVELLE: For example, the court has shrunk wetlands protections and limited agency authority.

CURWOOD: What can we look back on from the Trump administration that brought benefits for the environment or the climate? 

LAVELLE: Kristen Brengel of the National Parks Conservation Association celebrated the bipartisan accomplishment of the Great American Outdoors Act, which President Trump signed.

BRENGEL: Hundreds of national parks, national forests are getting repaired even this summer thanks to this law. And so, on one hand, absolutely the Trump administration deserves credit for making sure that bill was as robust as it possibly could have been and signed into law. And the Biden folks deserve the credit for implementing it really well, and making sure our parks are going to be fit for the next couple of generations. 

DOERING: Let’s look ahead to the near future. I understand you got some perspective from these folks on what a second Trump presidency might look like vis-à-vis climate and environment.

LAVELLE: Yeah Jenni, here’s Michael Gerrard of the Sabin Center again.

GERRARD: We know that the Inflation Reduction Act, that money, has only marginal vulnerability to a new administration. And we know that the market forces are moving renewables forward at a fast pace. But we need regulations to shut down the coal-fired power plants and the other major fossil fuel uses. That depends in significant part on regulations. And these regulations are really in peril, thanks to the Supreme Court and the lower court judges appointed by Trump.

LAVELLE: So, Michael says it’s hard to overstate the impact on climate and environmental policy that this conservative shift has had. And what that could mean for a second Trump term.

GERRARD: Well, if Trump comes back, it’s gonna get a whole lot worse. If we look at the Project 2025 report from the Heritage Foundation, which many people are looking at as a blueprint for what a second Trump administration would be, it would be the first Trump administration on steroids. They would continue the process of trying to revoke all those regulations. They would fight new renewables. And it would be drill, baby, drill.

CURWOOD: Donald Trump says he’s not tied to Project 2025, but in any event how does Mr. Trump plan to address the climate crisis? 

LAVELLE: Well, Steve, although we haven’t heard him call it an outright hoax in recent years, he has expressed no concern about what many scientists are calling an existential crisis for humanity. And the 2024 Republican Party Platform which was directly shaped by Trump and his staff doesn’t even include the word “climate.” Tackling the climate crisis would certainly be at odds with the big plans the GOP and Trump have for fossil fuels.

DOERING: Yeah, he had some glowing words for them on the final night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

DONALD TRUMP: Remember we have more liquid gold under our feet than any other country by far. We are a nation that has the opportunity to make an absolute fortune with its energy. We have it and China doesn’t. Under the Trump administration just 3.5 years ago, we were energy independent. But soon, we will actually be better than that. We will be energy dominant and supply not only ourselves, but we will supply the rest of the world.

LAVELLE: And we noticed that Mr. Trump went off script during much of his speech, and he couldn’t resist taking a jab at the Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats’ climate legislation.

TRUMP: And next we will end the ridiculous and actually incredible waste of taxpayer dollars that is fueling the inflation crisis. They spent trillions of dollars on things having to do with the green new scam, it’s a scam, and that’s caused tremendous inflationary pressures in addition to the cost of energy. 

And all of the trillions of dollars that are sitting there not yet spent, we will redirect that money for important projects like roads, bridges, dams, and we will not allow it to be spent on meaningless green new scam ideas. And I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one, thereby saving the U.S. auto industry from complete obliteration, which is happening right now, and saving U.S. customers thousands and thousands of dollars per car.

LAVELLE: To be clear, there is no electric vehicle mandate. And it’s unclear how a Trump administration would repeal the grants, loans and tax credits of the Inflation Reduction Act without new legislation in Congress. He’d need Republican control of the House and Senate, so even though this presidential election is getting most of the attention right now, Steve, we can’t forget about those down-ballot races, too.

CURWOOD: That’s right, Marianne. Marianne Lavelle reports for Inside Climate News from the nation’s capital.