Climate Policy 2025: Much Good News

“… one of the less well understood aspects of the damage Trump is doing is how long it will take to repair it after he’s gone, assuming that he is not succeeded by an equally anti-fact president. You can’t entirely recover from it.” (- John Holdren, below)

The bad news was really good in the New York Times stocktaking, “How Trump’s First Year Reshaped U.S. Energy and Climate Policy,” subtitled “The sweeping changes have affected everything from coal plant retirements to international diplomacy over shipping emissions.” Four Times reporters—Brad Plumer, Lisa Friedman, Maxine Joselow, and Scott Dance—summarized the Trump Administration’s ethics-driven course change. [1] Quotations follow:

[Trump’s] changes have reverberated far beyond the United States, as the administration has pressured other countries to abandon their own efforts to tackle global warming.

Five of the changes would wipe out limits on the greenhouse gas emissions that are heating the planet. The most consequential of those changes came in July, when the E.P.A. said it would revoke the scientific determination that underpins the government’s legal authority to combat climate change.

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement: “President Trump has been clear: he will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.”

Tech companies and utilities are easing off their climate goals and ordering gigawatts worth of new plants that will burn natural gas to produce electricity needed for enormous data centers. Some A.I. companies, like Nvidia, have praised Mr. Trump’s energy policies for helping their industry expand.

… the Trump administration has defunded climate research, erased scientific data and removed terms like “climate change” from federal websites.

It has proposed to erase money for climate science in next year’s budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, while eliminating climate laboratories and severe storm research.

It slashed funding and staffing for the National Climate Assessment, the federal government’s premier report on how global warming is affecting the country. Instead, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, selected five skeptics of climate science to write their own assessment of global warming. Their conclusion, that worries are overblown, was criticized by dozens of climate researchers who accused them of mischaracterizing scientific findings.

The administration also said it would break up the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, a world-leading Earth science research institutions.

“I would say one of the less well understood aspects of the damage Trump is doing is how long it will take to repair it after he’s gone, assuming that he is not succeeded by an equally anti-fact president,” said John Holdren, a Harvard University physicist who served as the White House scientific adviser in the Obama administration. “You can’t entirely recover from it.”

On his first day in office, Mr. Trump began the yearlong process of withdrawing the nation from the Paris climate agreement, a voluntary pact among nearly 200 countries to curb greenhouse gases and fight climate change.

Mr. Trump has criticized Europe and the United Nations for their climate policies and fought international agreements to limit greenhouse gases.

When more than 100 nations were poised to approve a [CO2 tax] deal to slash pollution from cargo ships, the Trump administration launched a successful pressure campaign to halt it. State Department officials threatened tariffs, visa restrictions, additional port fees, sanctions and personal reprisals against individual diplomats.

The Trump administration also sided with Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran to block part of a United Nations report about the state of the planet because it called for phasing out fossil fuels and the use of plastics.

A new national security strategy the Trump administration released this month emphasizes the direction the United States will take for at least the next three years…. “We reject the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.”

Final Comment

Energy affordability is in; climate alarm from speculative modeling and Net Zero aspirations are out. Flagrant discrimination against CO2/climate optimists by consensus science is being reversed. Meanwhile, 1) humankind is adapting to weather/climate change and 2) the saturation effect is in play where increases in atmospheric concentrations of CO2 make future mitigation less and less effective.

Advantage climate and energy realism.

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[1] “Brad Plumer is a Times reporter who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming. Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities. Maxine Joselow covers climate change and the environment for The Times from Washington. Scott Dance is a Times reporter who covers how climate change and extreme weather are transforming society.”

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