Trump is ‘erasing climate action’ within federal agencies and giving the green light to big polluters.
A month into his second term as US President, Donald Trump is busy steering his country into dangerous climate waters.
Alongside exiting the global Paris Agreement, Trump has unleashed a slew of executive orders with planet-heating and life-threatening consequences. He is scrapping climate science funding, wiping websites of critical information, and rolling back rules for oil and gas companies.
“Donald Trump’s return to power isn’t just about revenge – it’s about erasing climate action at a speed we’ve never seen before,” according to We Don’t Have Time, a media platform for climate action. “In just three weeks, his administration has launched an all-out war on science, environmental protections, and even basic facts.”
It’s hard to keep track, but there is a method to the madness. Many of these moves were foretold in ‘Project 2025’ – a playbook which also provides some signs of what’s to come.
What is Project 2025 and what does it say about climate change?
It is a 900-page policy “wish list” to create an ultra-conservative society, drawn up by influential right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation in 2023.
Despite distancing himself from Project 2025 on the campaign trail last year, Trump has already acted on many of its proposals. Analysis from CNN at the end of January found that more than two-thirds of the 53 executive orders he issued during his first week answered calls in Project 2025’s ‘Mandate for Leadership’ document.
The symbiotic relationship between think tanks and political parties is particularly strong in the case of the Heritage Foundation and Trump’s Republican Party, Zachary Albert, assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, writes for The Conversation.
That is concerning from a climate point of view. ‘Climate change’ features almost neurotically in the Mandate for Leadership, which was penned by groups with histories of climate denial. It is explicitly mentioned over 50 times, often as a “radical priority” of the Biden administration that needs to be dropped.
If all the energy and environmental policies in the document come to pass, US emissions will “significantly increase” by 2.7 billion tonnes above the current trajectory by 2030, according to a report last year. That’s a devastating amount – equivalent to the entire annual emissions of India.
What climate cutbacks has Trump made so far?
On his first day back in office (20 January), Trump declared a national energy emergency – blaming Biden for an “inadequate” energy supply which he claims is driving up prices for Americans.
“Drill, baby, drill” is the name of the game now, corresponding with Project 2025’s demand to “stop the war on oil and natural gas.” Trump swiftly repealed protections for fossil fuel extraction in Alaska and coastal waters.
Amid headlines on the so-called energy emergency, and Paris Agreement exit, there have been numerous other environmental executive orders.
Under the stated aim of ‘unleashing American energy’, dozens of climate-related programmes have been revoked. These include projects on clean energy, forests, environmental justice and climate migration. The American Climate Corps, a national service of the US government formed by Biden, has also been disbanded.
The government’s scientific agencies are having climate projects pulled from under their feet too. Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – the federal agency that provides science, service and stewardship for weather, climate, ocean and coasts – have reportedly received a list of terms that could contravene Trump’s orders in the grants and programmes they manage.
The list, seen by NPR, includes terms like “climate change,” “pollution” and “natural resources”.
Climate change language is also being erased from official websites. Agriculture Department (USDA) employees, for example, were ordered to delete webpages discussing climate change, according to an internal email seen by Politico last month.
This mirrors moves made during Trump’s first administration to remove mentions of climate change on federal government websites.
But climate push-backs could go even further this time if the Project 2025 vision is fulfilled.
What other anti-climate action moves could Trump make?
Project 2025 wants to go even further with NOAA, which its mandate describes as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry”. It should be broken up and downsized, the document argues, and its weather services outsourced.
But advocates warn that shutting off public NOAA data that informs daily weather forecasts, wildfire alerts and hurricane tracking could have deadly consequences.
“In a world where catastrophic climate change impacts and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense, I can think of nothing worse than turning this scientific powerhouse into a skeletal operation,” Juan Declet-Barreto, senior social scientist for climate vulnerability at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement.
“If President Trump moves forward with demolishing NOAA, he will jeopardise most people’s access to life-saving information, while only the rich might be able to afford private data sources.”
We Don’t Have Time predicts many more climate-backwards plans. It is expecting NASA’s Earth Science division to be defunded or restricted, leading to further censorship of climate data.
There are also fears that new laws could be brought in to criminalise protests against fossil fuel projects, severely hampering climate activism.
