Analysis: The US government has declared war on the very idea of climate change
Americans are used to whiplash in their climate policy. The US has been in and out and in and out again of the key Paris climate agreement over the past four presidencies.
But in his second administration, President Donald Trump is not just approaching climate science with skepticism. Instead, his administration is moving to destroy the methods by which his or any future administration can respond to climate change.
These moves, which are sure to be challenged in court, extend far beyond Trump's well-documented antipathy toward solar and wind energy and his pledges to drill ever more oil even though the US is already the world's largest oil producer.
His Environmental Protection Agency announced plans this week to declare that greenhouse gas emissions do not endanger humans, a move meant to pull the rug out from under nearly all environmental regulation related to the climate.
But that's just one data point. There are many others:
► Instead of continuing a push away from coal, the Trump administration wants to do a U-turn; Trump has signed executive orders intended to boost the coal industry and has ordered the EPA to end federal limits on coal- and gas-fired power-plant pollution that's been tied to climate change.
► Tax credits for electric vehicles persisted during Trump's first term before they were expanded during Joe Biden's presidency. Now, Republicans are abruptly ending them next month.
► The administration is also ending Biden-era US government incentives to bring renewable energy projects online, a move that actually appears to be driving up the cost of electricity.
► Republicans in Congress and Trump enacted legislation to strip California of its authority to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles beginning in 2035.
► Trump is also expected to overturn national tailpipe standards enacted under Biden's EPA and is also to challenge California's long-held power to regulate tailpipe emissions.
► The authors of a congressionally mandated report on climate change were all fired; previous versions of the report, the National Climate Assessment, which showed likely effects from climate change across the country, have been hidden from view on government websites.
► Other countries, large and small, will gather in Brazil later this year for a consequential meeting on how the world should respond to climate change. Rather than play a leading role — or any role at all — the US will not attend.
► Cuts to the federal workforce directly targeted offices and employees focused on climate change.
The list goes on.
But it is the Trump administration's move to undo the 'endangerment finding' that could have the most lasting effect. The 2009 declaration that planet-warming pollution from fossil fuels endangers human health is what allows the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.
Now, anticipating the end of that endangerment finding, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin bragged of the 'largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.'
That's the kind of statement that will excite people who don't see a threat from climate change and strike fear in the hearts of those who do.
Zeldin is a former congressman with little background in environmental policy but a demonstrated loyalty to Trump. He has described his mandate at EPA less in terms of protecting the environment than in terms of unleashing businesses from regulation.
The Trump administration is justifying its move to gut the endangerment finding based on a report it commissioned from five climate skeptics.
After a public comment period, the Trump administration can move to undo the endangerment finding in the fall. It would essentially close off the Clean Air Act as a vehicle to combat climate change.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who made millions in the fracking industry, commissioned the report. In a preface, he did not deny that climate change exists.
'Climate change is real, and it deserves attention,' he wrote. 'But it is not the greatest threat facing humanity. That distinction belongs to global energy poverty.'
In other words, Wright sees more damage to humans from cutting back on carbon emissions.
That is a minority view in the scientific community, which has a much, much larger body of peer reviewed studies that raise the alarm about climate change. Most notably, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues peer-reviewed reports with hundreds of authors from around world. The Trump administration has barred US government scientists from taking part in the next installment, due out in 2029.
Katie Dykes, the commissioner of Connecticut's Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, told me that you no longer need a government report to see the effects of changing climate.
'We see that the impacts of climate change have become part of everyday lives of our residents and our communities,' Dykes said. 'In ways that scientists were predicting years ago, we're seeing those impacts are happening faster and they're more severe than we had anticipated.'
By moving to declare that greenhouse gas emissions don't endanger humans, the Trump administration is shifting the burden for dealing with climate change.
'This effort to undo this long-standing framework is really abandoning our communities and our residents to shoulder these costs and these impacts of climate change,' Dykes said.
Those include health risks like respiratory illness, safety risks from extreme weather events, and impacts on infrastructure, housing and neighborhoods.
'We've seen these impacts already in our state in terms of extreme heat and drought, wildfires and flooding,' Dykes said.
'Seeing EPA walk away from decades of their core mission of protecting public health, reducing pollution and setting common sense standards at a national level is really concerning,' she added.
The Trump administration's report should not be viewed as a scientific document, according to Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M University.
'Their goal is not to weigh the evidence fairly but to build the strongest possible case for CO2's innocence,' he told my colleague Ella Nilsen. 'This is a fundamental departure from the norms of science.'
Nilsen reached out to numerous scientists after the report's release.
Phil Duffy, the chief scientist at Spark Climate Solutions, a nonprofit focused on climate change, told her tens of thousands of Americans die every year as a result of particulate pollution, but the numbers have declined as the US has reduced its dependence on coal. The Trump administration would reverse that trend.
Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, sees a hostility to science in the Trump administration.
'Not since Stalin and Soviet Lysenkoism have we seen such a brazen effort to misrepresent science in service of an ideological agenda,' Mann told Nilsen, referring to the disastrous effects of political interference in the scientific process in the Soviet Union.
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