As deadly wildfires blaze in Los Angeles, President Donald Trump is expanding polluting fossil fuels that made the fires worse than they would be in a world without climate change.
On a brightly lit stage at the Capital One Arena in Washington on Monday, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, an international treaty trying to avert environmental catastrophe, to thunderous applause. The move had long been promised by Trump, who misleadingly criticized the treaty as an “unfair, one-sided … rip off” on the same day that oil tycoons celebrated his win at a rooftop party a block from the White House.
The coordinated, prepared attack on environmental regulations was a sharp contrast to Trump’s disorganized first term.
Since his swearing-in, Trump has issued dozens of executive orders dismantling climate policies and expanding production of coal, oil and gas. The promised glut of fossil fuels would help usher in the “golden age of America,” Trump said in his inaugural address. “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”
The coordinated, prepared attack on environmental regulations was a sharp contrast to Trump’s disorganized first term. Many of the orders Trump signed on his first day prioritized energy even as they directed his administration to gut environmental regulations. Trump lifted Biden’s pause on liquified natural gas exports; opened swaths of the U.S. to drilling, including Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; and invoked emergency powers in order to expedite energy production, going so far as to declare a “national energy emergency.”
At the same time, Trump paused funding from Biden’s landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act; halted offshore wind projects; abolished the office of environmental justice, which protects communities disproportionately affected by pollution; and eliminated Biden’s tailpipe emissions standards that Trump falsely called an “electric vehicle mandate.”
The environmental impact of these executive orders appears dire. Climate scientists have warned for decades that the world must stop burning fossil fuels to avoid the worst effects of climate change, including more frequent wildfires, stronger hurricanes and record heat. Yet in his inauguration speech, with no apparent sense of irony, Trump referred to the suffering caused by climate-intensified Hurricanes Milton and Helene, even as he made moves to exacerbate future climate disasters.
If Trump was unilaterally able to “drill, baby, drill,” the world’s climate goals would be in serious jeopardy. But like the rally inside D.C.’s major sports arena, Trump’s executive orders are partly a performance, rather than a reality. He cannot make laws, nor can he dictate how much oil and gas private companies produce. That is one reason that Trump issued a national energy emergency, despite the fact that the U.S. produced record levels of oil and gas under Joe Biden. By invoking emergency powers, Trump hopes to circumvent laws and environmental regulations that are inconvenient for swift fossil fuel production.
But even emergency powers have their limits. “The president cannot just declare an emergency and suspend the nation’s environmental laws,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
Take, for example, Trump’s executive order “Unleashing American Energy.” In it, he directs the Office of Management and Budget to recommend how to get around the EPA’s ruling that greenhouse gases are harmful pollutants under the Clean Air Act, which has been upheld by the Supreme Court. “Any effort to undo that finding should be laughed out of court,” said Burger. “There is simply no scientific basis.”
While the new executive branch may dislike the inconvenience of the clear scientific consensus on climate change, the courts are another story. Within hours of signing his first executive orders, Democratic attorneys general and environmental groups began suing Trump.
“We’re prepared to use every tool we’ve got to fight these abuses and protect people and wildlife from runaway climate pollution,” Kassie Siegel, director of the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, said in an email.
States also have the power to set their own climate agenda, and Trump’s efforts to take aim at liberal bastions like California will inevitably end in a lawsuit (California sued the Trump administration 123 times in his first term). This isn’t Trump’s first rodeo — he and his advisers know that many of these executive orders may exceed his authority. But it is all part of the show, as much as the marching bands and cheering crowds.
Trump may feel empowered, Burger points out, because the makeup of the courts is now more sympathetic to Trump’s views than in his first term, when he lost more than two-thirds of the lawsuits filed against his rules. Trump now has a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, and he appointed more than 200 conservative federal judges. If his orders do end up in front of the Supreme Court, a favorable ruling could reshape the scope of the executive branch’s authority.
“We are now on the verge of being confronted again with a real test of the rule of law in the United States,” said Burger. “And what Trump puts into these executive orders, and what he seeks to accomplish through any kind of emergency declarations, will be the front edge of that test.”
