Much of Donald Trump’s climate policy may be overturned by Biden

In April 2018, environmental activist David Buckel set himself on fire in a New York park. Soon he died of flames. In a letter, Buckel stated that he saw the protest as necessary to draw attention to the damage that Donald Trump is inflicting on the planet. Buckel wasn’t the only one who felt desperate about Trump’s climate policy. In the United States, climate policy activists and organizations have been mobilizing for the past four years, in nationwide protests against Trump’s controversial climate policy.

Already during Donald Trump’s first week as president, he made it clear that he would prioritize a pushback on climate policy. He promised to repeal all the reforms carried out by Barack Obama in the last eight years. Trump immediately began with the message that every new climate policy regulation that is implemented means that two existing regulations must be repealed.

Since then he has tried overcome 104 deregulated climate policy deregulations and regulations, of which 84 have already been implemented, according to a recent compilation by the New York Times.

During Trump’s first year as president, he also announced that the United States would be leaving the Paris Agreement on climate change, which took effect this November.

The consequences of Trump’s climate policy will be felt for a long time, according to US climate experts. The most complete change was to abandon the so-called Clean Energy Plan implemented by Barack Obama, in an attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Trump has also dramatically raised emission limits for cars, trucks and the freight industry, while also halting attempts by several states to introduce their own emission limits.

The Trump administration too allowed drilling for oil along the Atlantic coast and sought to approve two controversial projects for new pipelines, Dakota Access and Keystone XL. Two vast Utah national parks have been opened for the extraction of oil and natural gas. By presidential decree, Trump also introduced a requirement that logging in the United States must increase by 30 percent.

Trump’s most influential climate policy change was weakening the federal environmental agency EPA, where he implemented drastic cuts. Since the 1970s, the EPA has been a kind of police force that stops environmentally harmful projects in the United States. But in the past four years, EPA interventions have been less than in any other year since 1989.

– I have worked with climate policy for three decades and have never seen anything like this, Martin Hayden of the environmental law organization Earth Justice said in a previous interview with DN.

During Trump’s final weeks at the White House in January, he hopes to implement another controversial climate policy move. Then, the sale of oil drilling licenses will begin in one of the largest natural reserves in the United States in Alaska, at the initiative of Trump. He has spent the last month speeding up the legal process to allow the sale, which will begin on January 6, two weeks before Joe Biden takes office.

Local environmental organizations warn that the entry of energy companies into the nature reserve can have devastating effects on wildlife and nature. Among other things, it could lead to the extinction of polar bears in the region. Seven of the largest banks and finance companies in the United States have joined in and said they will not approve any loans or project financing related to the oil and gas industry in the area, a sign of how controversial the issue is.

Trump’s policy It has been implemented on the grounds that it benefits the country’s energy companies. Nicolas Loris, an energy policy expert at the conservative think tank Heritage, defended Trump’s energy policy in a previous interview with DN, where he said Trump will “unleash American innovation, reduce energy costs for families and businesses, and create hundreds thousands of jobs in the next few years. “

But despite records of deregulation, US oil, natural gas and coal companies have had four weak years. Under the Trump administration, coal consumption in the United States fell 22 percent, despite all the measures. In a drastic attempt to help the oil industry when the pandemic paralyzed the United States earlier this year, Trump declared that any application of existing regulations and bans to companies would take a break for seven months. He did nothing to control the oil company crisis.

The market capitalization of the United States The largest oil company Exxon fell by half this year, while the value of the shares of the second largest oil company Chevron fell by a third. During a period this year, we saw negative oil prices in the US, when oil reserves were forced to pay to dump surpluses.

Many of the president’s attempts to repeal climate policy regulations have encountered legal opposition. According to a review by New York University, the Trump administration has lost 87 percent of legal cases in which its regulations have been challenged in court. This summer, the Trump administration’s attempt to pass the controversial Dakota Access pipeline in the northern United States was also halted; the future of the pipeline is now uncertain.

There are many signs that Joe Biden, when he takes office as president, may repeal a significant part of Donald Trump’s climate policy. Most of Trump’s climate policy changes have been implemented by executive order, by decree, rather than by conventional congressional legislation.

That makes it much easier to reintroduce the rules. Biden has already said that the United States will rejoin the Paris Agreement. He has also listed ten other climate policy measures that he hopes to implement immediately, where he does not have to rely on Congress.

However, if Republicans retain their majority in the Senate, which is indicative, it will be difficult for Biden to implement the comprehensive reform package he promised during the election campaign, with a historic investment of $ 1.7 trillion in jobs and infrastructure. green.

But in global politics, Biden promises a new direction. It recently appointed John Kerry, former secretary of state, to a new position as head of climate change for the US Security Council, NSC. In practice, this means that the United States will have a kind of vice foreign minister who only focuses on climate issues.

“The United States will soon have a government that views the climate crisis as the acute threat to national security that it really is,” Kerry said in a comment after the nomination.

Biden will come too, though expect tough legal battles to implement climate reforms. He faces a reinforced conservative majority on the Supreme Court, as well as federal courts where Trump has made more than 200 Republican appointments in the past four years. This can make it particularly difficult to enforce regulations in conservative oil-producing states like Texas, Oklahoma, and North Dakota.

Climate activists trying to pressure Biden to prioritize climate issues have at least the winds of opinion behind them. The number of Americans who want to see drastic changes in climate policy increased during Trump’s first three years as president from 55 to 70 percent. It is now one of the few issues on which Republican voters themselves differ from party leaders. 64 percent of Republicans say they believe the climate crisis is real, up from 49 percent when Trump took office.

Trump’s climate policy appears to have sparked a backlash among young activists. One in four American teens now say they get involved in climate policy activism on a regular basis.