When Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States in November 2016, many observers in the U.S. and international environmental communities began voicing concerns about the range of environmental laws, regulations, and protections that suddenly seemed in jeopardy. Given Trump’s populist platform during the campaign – and often times conflicting views on environmental matters over the years – as well as his outspoken commitment to manufacturing and extractive industries – there was reason to be concerned. A frenzied effort by researchers in the academy, national labs, and even in the government to document, catalog, promulgate, and secure many of the scientific findings that had otherwise been matters of public record, was just one signal that even access to information might become restricted in the new administration.
It has now been over a year since Trump took office on 20 January 2017. The world has watched as the Trump administration has tried to dramatically reverse U.S. positions on domestic and international climate and environmental policy that had been put in place by the last two administrations. Since then, some of the worst fears of those concerned have been realized, and some policies and agencies have shown themselves to be more resilient than was anticipated.
Primarily using the authority of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Department of the Interior (DOI), Trump moved quickly after the inauguration to begin the process of reversing regulations created by the Obama administration. These measures included announcements of reconsideration by the EPA of ambitious greenhouse gas standards for cars on 15 March, and the next day release of an OMB budget which would cut the EPA budget by 31%, practically eliminating Department of Energy renewable energy and energy efficiency programs, cutting payments to all UN climate-related funds, and slashing climate preparedness funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Thankfully, most of these budget recommendations were eventually rejected by the U.S. Senate.
This shot across the bow of a more responsible climate and energy policy was followed on 26 March by an omnibus Presidential Executive Order which, among other things: rescinded a previous Executive Order on climate resilience, directed the DOI both to terminate a moratorium on coal leasing on public lands and to review fossil fuel production rules, rescinded federal guidance on considering climate change in project permitting, disbanded a working group on the social cost of carbon, and, most distressingly, ordered review of restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and began the review of methane emission limits for oil and gas systems, with a clear aim of dismantling the Clean Power Plan, the cornerstone of Obama’s domestic climate policy. It was primarily the Clean Power Plan that created the capacity for the U.S. to reduce greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the goal of achieving its first pledge under the Paris Agreement of a 26–28% reduction below 2005 levels by 2025, and formed the foundation of additional policies that could arguably achieve a mid-century strategy of an 80% reduction by 2050.
These measures were followed by a long, well reported struggle between top White House staffers, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson over whether the U.S. should withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change, which then-candidate Trump had repeatedly attacked on the campaign trail. When Trump announced on 1 June 2017 the intention of the U.S. to withdraw from the agreement, which the U.S. had played a singularly important role in creating, speculation was finally laid to rest. In his withdrawal announcement, Trump, citing only one highly criticized study, falsely claimed that U.S. compliance with the Paris Agreement would cost the U.S. $3 trillion in lost GDP and 6.5 million industrial jobs, while allowing countries like China to do nothing.Footnote1 In this entire speech, certainly momentous for the stress test he was initiating for the world on the integrity and durability of the Paris Agreement, the president did not utter the words “climate change” once. (We note however an interesting irony from this announcement. Given the date that the Paris Agreement officially entered into force, the provisions of the agreement make the first day that the U.S. can legally withdraw from the Agreement the day after the 2020 election.)
These steps by the new administration are both dramatic and disturbing, and it is only to highlight the hits that climate and energy policy in the U.S. have taken over the last year, not to mention the many examples of attacks on other facets of environmental policy, including an assault on public lands with a reduction of both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments.Footnote2 Some of these issues will be covered in the papers that follow.
Despite all of these setbacks, resistance to the Trump administration’s wholesale assault on climate and environmental policy has been significant. Almost immediately after the June 1 announcement, mayors, governors, business CEOs, and university presidents from across the country announced an array of collaborative endeavors which had quietly been moving into place to support collective non-federal action on climate change in general and the Paris Agreement in particular. At the first meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change after the U.S. announcement (the body which produced the Paris Agreement), the America’s Pledge report was released, which took the first cut in analyzing the footprint of these entities. The results are as dramatic in some respects as the damage being attempted by the Trump administration. If the 2500 U.S. states, cities, businesses, and institutions of higher learning that explicitly support the Paris Agreement were a country, they would be the third largest economy in the world, with a GDP of $10.1 trillion, only behind the entire U.S. (including them, at $18.6 trillion) and China ($11.2 trillion). Jurisdictions representing what we might consider calling the “Climate States of America”, represent half of the U.S. population (159 million people) and over half the U.S. GDP.Footnote3 A second phase of this analysis will be released in September, providing a more specific number on what reductions in greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved by these commitments by 2025, and outlining a pathway for increasing their ambition.
Equally important, no other country has yet stated any intention of joining with the U.S. in either withdrawing from Paris, or reversing of their first round of commitments under the agreement. Despite intensive lobbying by the Trump administration one month after the announced withdraws at the 2017 G20 Leaders’ Summit in Hamburg, Germany, the other 19 parties only “took note” of the U.S. intention to withdraw from Paris, while the leaders of these other countries embraced the agreement as “irreversible”.Footnote4 This may be the only time in the history of this process, or the G7, when a paragraph of a leader level joint communiqué was devoted to differentiating the position of one country as opposed to all of the others. While a harder test of the resolve of these leaders will occur in 2020 when parties will be asked to begin announcing early enhancements of their pledges under Paris, such initial signs are encouraging.
Many of these developments are discussed in the papers that follow, where we solicited commentaries from ethicists and policy scholars on the environment, energy, and climate record of the first year of the Trump Administration. Altogether they add to the growing analysis of the domestic and international challenges that this administration has brought to bear on the past several decades of environmental progress, as well as the ample resistance which is rising up to meet it.
Notes
1. For Trump’s remarks see https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-president-trump-paris-climate-accord/. For a criticism of the study used to make these claims on the economic impact of the Paris Agreement see, Noah Kaufman, R. Gasper, and K. Igusky, “U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Energy Institute Misleads on Climate Action Costs: 3 Things to Know”, World Resources Institute, April 26, 2017. Access at: http://www.wri.org/blog/2017/04/us-chamber-commerces-energy-institute-misleads-climate-action-costs-3-things-know.
2. See Julie Turkewitz, “Trump Slashes Size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Monuments”, The New York Times, December 4, 2017. Access at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/us/trump-bears-ears.html.
3. America’s Pledge, “America’s Pledge Phase 1 Report: States, Cities, and Businesses in the United States Are Stepping Up on Climate Action”, November 2017. Access at https://www.americaspledgeonclimate.com/.
4. “G20 Leaders’ Declaration: Shaping an Interconnected World”, July 7–8, Hamburg. Accessible at http://www.g20.utoronto.ca/2017/2017-G20-leaders-declaration.pdf.