The Climate Can’t Afford Another Trump Presidency
His approach to the environment: ignore it.
by Zoë Schlanger
On
the last Saturday before Donald Trump took office, in January 2017, I
watched the controlled chaos of a hackathon unfold in a library at the
University of Pennsylvania. Volunteer archivists, librarians, and
computer scientists were trawling government websites, looking for data
sets about climate change to duplicate for safekeeping. Groups like this
were meeting across the country. Flowcharts on whiteboards laid out
this particular room’s priorities: copy decades of ice-core statistics
from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; scrape the
Environmental Protection Agency’s entire library of local air-monitoring
results from the previous four years; find a way to preserve a zoomable
map of the factories and power plants emitting the most greenhouse
gases.
The fear was that the incoming administration would pull
information like this from public view—and within a week, it did. By
noon on Inauguration Day, the Trump administration had scrubbed mentions
of climate change from the White House website. By May, officials had
taken down the EPA’s page laying out climate science for the general
public, as well as 108 pages associated with the Clean Power Plan, the
landmark Obama policy meant to curb emissions from power plants—months
before the Trump administration tried to repeal the policy altogether.
The
administration’s goal was to bury the issue of climate change. Nothing
was done to address it; the very mention of it was knocked from the
national agenda—and, by extension, the international agenda. If Trump
returns to office, he will surely double down on this strategy.
First,
the global implications: The United States would probably exit from the
Paris Agreement again, Michael Gerrard, the founder and director of the
Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told me.
Despite its status as the wealthiest big emitter, the United States
continues to express little to no interest in substantially funding
global climate action, even during Democratic administrations. For now,
though, at least the country is still at the table for international
climate talks. Pulling out of Paris might be a largely symbolic move,
but it could have a domino effect. “India, Indonesia, Brazil—if they see
the U.S. is not acting, it’s easy for conservative politicians in those
countries to say, ‘These big rich guys aren’t doing anything; why
should we?’ ” Gerrard said.
Domestically, it would in some ways
be harder now for Trump to meaningfully alter climate policy than it was
when he first came to office. Electric vehicles have become popular,
and solar power will likely be the cheapest source of electricity in
basically every country by 2030. Heat pumps have proved to be
fantastically efficient, and a bipartisan consortium of 25 governors
just agreed to quadruple the number of them installed in homes in their
states. One consequence of the Trump administration was the emergence of
a new kind of subnational climate diplomacy: Mayors and governors began
meeting with international leaders to discuss the issue on their own.
During a second Trump term, these efforts would surely pick up again.
In
addition, certain new climate-friendly policies are so good for
Republican states that their representatives probably won’t want to
touch them. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 promotes clean power by
offering major tax credits to individuals and businesses that make or
use renewable energy, and most of that money is likely to flow to red
states.
But a second Trump administration could still do major
damage. The fossil-fuel lobby would work to dismantle climate policies.
Groups led by the Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy
Institute are already making a “battle plan” to block electricity-grid
updates that would allow for solar and wind expansion, to prevent states
from adopting California’s car-pollution standards, and to gut
clean-power divisions at the Department of Energy, among other things.
Under
a second Trump term, the EPA would no doubt be threatened with budget
cuts, as it was during the first. Staffers would likely retire en masse,
as they did before, and enforcement of climate policy would slow or
stop.
But the first thing to go will likely be the
websites—again. The U.S. has no law against a government agency deleting
pages from its own websites, even if the information on them is in the
public interest. “We have been telling the Biden administration that
this is a real vulnerability,” Gretchen Gehrke, a co-founder of the
Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, told me. For now, all of
the data sets that those teams of hackers scraped the first time around
are still housed on private servers, just in case.
ATLANTIC