When President-elect Donald Trump takes office in two months, he will waste no time in his push to eradicate the Biden administration’s climate policy.
Trump has pledged to target policies and regulations that do not benefit the fossil fuel industry and to dramatically increase U.S. output of oil and gas. He has said he believes that flooding the market with cheap energy is the key to lowering grocery prices, housing costs, utility bills and inflation.
One big difference between Trump’s first term and his second term is that the early days of his administration are far less likely to be so chaotic. Instead, they will be guided by a curated team of loyalists with a mission to weaken or eliminate parts of the government. That includes EPA, the Interior Department and NOAA.
On Wednesday morning, Trump said he had a “powerful mandate.” That will include an executive order on his first day in office to dramatically increase oil and gas drilling, “which will ultimately then bring down prices, bring down inflation,” Trump adviser Jason Miller said on the “Today” show Wednesday.
And that’s just part of the Day 1 agenda.
In his own words, here is some of what Trump has promised for the next four years.
“If you make doughnuts, if you make cars — whatever you make, energy is a big deal, and we’re going to get that — it’s my ambition to get your energy bill within 12 months down 50 percent.”
Trump’s promise, made at a rally in September, is essentially an impossible goal, energy experts said.
Oil prices are set on a global market, and there’s little a president can do to significantly change them. The U.S. is also already producing oil at peak levels.
While Trump is certain to remove regulations and ease permitting — which could decrease costs for producers — it won’t be enough to dramatically cut prices. Oil producers certainly don’t want to see prices bottom out, which cuts into their bottom line and makes drilling unprofitable, said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.com.
Additionally, any U.S. effort to cut oil prices would be met with a response from the OPEC countries — including Russia and Saudi Arabia, both of which would cut their flow enough to drive prices back up.
“It’s going to be a struggle for him to be able to bend the system enough to be anywhere in the ballpark of cutting energy prices in half,” De Haan said. “I would call it virtually impossible, short of an economic collapse, or short of something else that’s difficult to imagine at this point.”
“On Day 1, I will sign an executive order directing every federal agency to immediately remove every single burdensome regulation driving up the cost of goods.”
Trump made that pledge at a campaign speech in Albuquerque, New Mexico. But rescinding regulations that have been finalized by a previous administration takes time.
A new administration must make a robust case for why it’s pulling back, issue a proposal, take public comment and respond to those comments. For standards as complex as EPA’s power plant or oil and gas rules for climate, the process typically takes two or three years.
Trump’s EPA under his first Administrator Scott Pruitt tried to curtail that process. The agency suffered a series of legal defeats that delayed repeals of key Obama-era rules and meant their replacements weren’t final until the end of Trump’s first term. The Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law estimated that almost 80 percent of Trump administration actions were defeated in court.
Experts say the officials who are likely to run Trump’s second EPA have probably learned from that experience.
“Maybe Trump himself isn’t all that interested in the details, but I think they have people who understand the Administrative Procedure Act, and so I don’t think they’re going to come in and make the same mistakes that Scott Pruitt made,” said Jeff Holmstead, who helmed EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation in the George W. Bush administration.
Holmstead said EPA would likely ask the courts to hold rules in abeyance while the agency begins the process of repealing and replacing them. In some cases — like methane from oil and gas operations — the administration might ultimately opt to tweak Biden-era curbs rather than overhaul them or remove the regulations completely.
“We’ll force it down his throat, and we’ll say, ‘Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving you any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the forest fires that you have.’”
Trump made this comment at a California rally about forcing Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to weaken endangered species protections to increase agricultural water supply.
The threat to withhold federal disaster aid is legitimate. Federal law gives the president sole authority to approve or deny a governor’s request to declare their state a “major disaster” and reimburse states for millions — or billions — in recovery costs.
Presidents also have sole authority to approve various types of disaster aid and to increase federal reimbursement above the standard 75 percent.
Presidents typically follow recommendations by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which estimates damage and determines if it meets regulatory thresholds. During his presidency, Trump delayed aid requested by Newsom for political reasons and withheld aid to Washington state due to personal disputes with Gov. Jay Inslee (D).
Trump approved 233 major disasters after wildfires, floods and similar events, acting routinely almost every time.
“On Day 1 of the Trump administration, I will terminate [Vice President] Kamala [Harris’] insane electric vehicle mandate, and we will end the green new scam once and for all. The green new scam will end.”
Trump made this promise about EVs at a North Carolina rally in October and has repeated it several times.
While there’s no specific “EV mandate,” the Biden administration’s EPA adopted greenhouse gas regulations that would force the automotive industry to broadly electrify its new cars and trucks.
As president, Trump can order EPA to rescind those regulations, but it’ll take time, and he’ll likely face court challenges. And that doesn’t address the tax credits, loans and grants that the Inflation Reduction Act established for EVs. The car industry is already arguing that electric cars are the future of transportation, and that Congress and the administration need to preserve the Inflation Reduction Act funding, even though some companies have said they want relief from the EPA regulations.
Companies have invested $320 billion in new car plants, battery manufacturing and other aspects of electrification, according to the Electric Drive Transportation Association.
“All those dollars are jobs, economic activity and innovation that states and towns need,” Genevieve Cullen, the association’s executive director, said in an interview.
“The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean’s going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years. The big — and you’ll have more, you’ll have more oceanfront property, right? The biggest threat is not that. The biggest threat is nuclear warming.”
Trump’s comments in an X interview with Elon Musk in August underscore his denial of the basic science of global warming. Sea levels are currently rising by more than an eighth of an inch every year, not every 400 years, as he suggested. Oceanfront property is disappearing as coastal communities — and, in some cases, entire island nations — slip beneath the rising waves. Research has warned that sea-level rise worldwide could cause trillions of dollars in annual damages by the end of the century, depending on future levels of warming.
Scientists unequivocally state that climate change is an existential threat to humanity, with the United Nations recently warning that the world is on track for “unthinkable” levels of future warming.
Trump’s dismissal of basic climate science had far-reaching consequences for federal research in his first term. He dragged his feet on appointing a White House science adviser; appointed officials who deny the reality of climate change to leadership positions at federal agencies; and undermined the findings of the National Climate Assessment, a major U.S. climate report published approximately every five years.
Experts worry a second term could have similar consequences for federal science. And Project 2025, the conservative policy playbook spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, would take things a step further.
The plan calls for overhauling federal science agencies, including the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which coordinates federal climate research. And it suggests that the next administration should consider whether NOAA — an agency tasked in part with monitoring sea-level rise — should be “dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”
“When I’m back in the White House, I will sign an executive order and, with Congress’ support, a law to keep politics away from America’s retirement accounts forever. I will demand that funds invest money to help you, not them. But to help you, not to help the radical left communists because that’s exactly what they are. I will once again protect our seniors just like I did before from the woke left.”
In this 2023 campaign video, Trump was referring to so-called environmental, social and governance (ESG) investments, which allow investors to put their money into funds that consider factors such as companies’ sustainability goals and greenhouse gas emissions.
During the first Trump administration, the Labor Department adopted a rule that made it harder for U.S. retirement plan sponsors to put workers’ retirement savings into those funds. The agency said the rule was needed to ensure plan sponsors were not putting social or environmental goals over profits.
The Biden Labor Department later reversed that rule and issued a new one that said plan sponsors can indeed consider ESG issues alongside traditional financial factors when investing on retirees’ behalf.
But experts say the pendulum could swing back yet again under Trump.
“If he wants to do something pertaining to the DOL ESG rule, he would have to write a new rule. And he would have to demonstrate why a new rule is needed with an economic analysis,” said Bryan McGannon, a managing director at US SIF, a sustainable-investing advocacy group.
“Congress could very much pass a bill, and outlaw” ESG considerations, too, McGannon added. “There have been proposals to do that.”
Reporters Avery Ellfeldt, Jean Chemnick, Chelsea Harvey, Mike Lee and Tom Frank contributed.
