Trump’s climate agenda
By Adam B. Kushner – I’m the editor of this newsletter.
President Trump has proposed to cancel the government’s 16-year-old finding that carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health. Doing so would mean the Environmental Protection Agency could no longer limit emissions from cars or power plants.
The Trump administration once merely downplayed the threat of global warming. Now it “flatly denies the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change,” reports my colleague Lisa Friedman, who covers climate policy. For today’s newsletter, I spoke with Lisa about all the things that are shifting.
Excerpts of Lisa Friedman, who covers climate policy:
Can you list for us the most important climate decisions from Trump’s second term?
NYT’s Lisa Friedman: Ending climate protections. The most significant is the proposed repeal of the “endangerment finding,” which you mentioned above.
Dismantling climate science. The administration cut funding and took down the website of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a 35-year effort to track climate change and its impacts. It fired hundreds of scientists at work on the next version of the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report used to prepare for extreme weather events. And it created a new official analysis written by climate skeptics.
War on wind and solar. Trump is stopping renewable energy projects, and his domestic policy law phases out tax credits for new wind and solar development.
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Can’t the next Democratic president just undo all of this?
NYT’s Lisa Friedman: Yes, a new president could create new analyses, new climate protections and new incentives for renewable energy. But it would be a long and difficult process. Some things require Congress. And there’s one legal possibility that climate activists fear the most. In reviewing lawsuits about the climate endangerment finding, it’s possible that the Supreme Court will reverse the 2007 precedent that lets the government regulate greenhouse gases. If it does, the next president may not be able to restore any of these regulations.
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