After his swearing-in as the 47th President of the United States on Monday President Trump wasted no time communicating his priorities to the American people.
“From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world,” Trump said in his Inaugural address. “…During every single day of the Trump administration, I will very simply put America first.”
Over the next hours, Trump signed dozens of executive orders, essentially laying out policy intentions for this second term in office. Many of the orders dealt with the environment. The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple spoke with Marianne Lavelle, the Bureau Chief in Washington for Inside Climate News, to parse through some of them.
LISTEN to the interview
Kara Holsopple: It’s difficult to know where to start with these executive orders on the environment because they’re all connected.
In Trump’s Inaugural speech, he referred to America’s oil and gas resources, repeating “Drill, baby, drill.” Later in the day, he made good on his promise to declare a national energy emergency. This is a first for a president. What kind of authority is the president looking for with his executive order? And what could it look like on the ground?
Marianne Lavelle: You’re right that this is the first time a president has really declared this kind of emergency, so we’re not really sure. But what most people think is that it is a way to speed up approvals of things like pipelines, liquefied natural gas terminals to export natural gas, all sorts of things you need permits for.
The thing about the national energy emergency that is striking is right now we’re producing more oil and gas than any other country in the world has ever produced. The Trump administration is arguing that because our use of electricity is increasing for artificial intelligence, for cryptocurrency, we’re going to need a whole lot more electricity. And what we’re going to do is put in place the infrastructure to be able to ramp up natural gas especially, that’s what we think this is all aimed at.
Kara Holsopple: Another executive order hits pause on offshore wind leasing and other wind project permits. What is the administration’s rationale for this? Doesn’t that fly in the face of the idea that we need to produce more energy?
Marianne Lavelle: And wind energy that’s offshore has much more what they call “capacity factor.” It’s less intermittent than onshore wind energy, so it has a lot of potential. There are enough offshore projects proposed in the pipeline to bring power to 26 million homes, which is a lot.
The rationale probably is that Donald Trump does not like wind energy, has never liked it. He has expressed many rationales for this, unsupported, that it’s dangerous to health, dangerous to whales. We’re probably going to see some challenges to this, but this is an area where the president has a lot of authority to decide how we lease America’s offshore resources. Because these projects take so long to develop, this could have a real impact.
Kara Holsopple: In a more specific rebuke to the Biden administration. Trump wants to reverse what he calls the “EV mandate,” supporting the production and purchasing of more electric vehicles and limiting tailpipe emissions. And he said the move was for the benefit of auto workers. How would or could these orders be implemented and what would the consequences be?
Marianne Lavelle: He has always called it an “EV mandate.” It is actually the tailpipe pollution standards that the Biden administration put into effect. These had a slow ramp-up, so you’re not even really seeing a lot of impact from them yet.
What you’ll see is if he succeeds in this is there just won’t be that incentive for the U.S. auto industry to make a rapid turnover to electric vehicles. In some ways, they’re going to be okay with that because they make a lot of money from gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks. But in another way, it’s going to hurt the U.S. auto industry in the long run because globally there’s a transition to electric vehicles going on and they will fall further and further behind China, which already is out in front of us.
Like a lot of these executive orders you heard this week, they can’t go into effect immediately. What has to happen in the case of the vehicle standards is that the Environmental Protection Agency has to reopen the whole process and take public comment. It’s something that takes at least 3 to 6 months, and usually takes a couple of years.
They will have to go through the whole process of repealing the Biden administration regulation and arguing that there is no need to really reduce carbon pollution from vehicles. Environmental advocates are saying that’s really a hard argument to make these days, and they plan to challenge it in the courts.
Kara Holsopple: And then there’s the issue of the money from the Inflation Reduction Act that’s already been promised for things like electric charging stations and is already in the process of being rolled out.
Marianne Lavelle: Right. [Trump’s] executive orders called out electric vehicle charging in particular, that they want to stop any grants for that. The money that the Biden administration did not obligate before it left, that’s something they definitely can do.
But it’s going to be a lot harder for the Trump administration to repeal things like the tax incentives. That’s something Congress really has to do because Congress put into effect these tax breaks. In many ways that was the largest part of the Biden Inflation Reduction Act. Tax breaks for wind, solar, electric vehicles, and all sorts of other things to really level the playing field for cleaner energy. That was the idea.
What is happening is a lot of the development that that has spurred is in Republican districts all over the country. So what he’s going to be doing is asking these members of Congress to go against the interests of their districts in some cases. And there’s going to be a lot of back and forth in Congress over this and an effort to minimize the impact. So I don’t think I would bet on all of the tax breaks being eliminated.
Kara Holsopple: With a big flourish at the signing ceremony, amid crowd cheers, Trump signed the executive order to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement. This is the second time he’s withdrawing the U.S. from this agreement. Is this mostly a symbolic move or how will it impact global climate goals?
Marianne Lavelle: Again, it’s something that he can’t do by fiat. He can only begin the process. So it will take at least a year to unwind. One interesting thing, if you read that executive order, is it goes further than Trump did in the first Trump administration. Back then, he exited the Paris Accord. Now he’s talking about getting out of the large United Nations Framework Agreement on addressing climate change that was signed in 1992 by President George H.W. Bush.
Trump…is questioning the whole concept that carbon emissions, greenhouse gases are a danger to health and the environment.
There is an indication that the Trump administration wants to just back away from all of that. So I think you may see an effort to just exit the talks altogether, the annual climate talks. Although many people are telling the administration, you don’t want to give up our seat at the table because what will happen is there will be a power void and that power void will be filled most likely by China, and we won’t have as much say in which direction the whole world goes on this.
Kara Holsopple: Of the executive orders we’ve mentioned and others we haven’t gotten to. Which do you think will have the most immediate impact and which will be more of a long-term impact?
Marianne Lavelle: Well, you mentioned some of the ones that will have an immediate impact. I think the offshore wind definitely. The impact of the decisions on Alaska – same thing. Deciding what areas of Alaska you can drill in and not, [Trump] has a lot of authority on that.
The longer-term impacts? His executive orders talk about reviewing what’s called the endangerment finding. This is EPA’s scientific finding that greenhouse gas emissions are a danger to health and the environment. It would take some time to unwind for sure, but it could have a huge impact.
In the last Trump administration, the EPA put in place weak regulations on carbon emissions. Now what Trump has indicated what he’s doing is questioning the whole concept that carbon emissions, greenhouse gases, are a danger to health and the environment. That means we may see the elimination of regulations and nothing to put in their place. That jumped out as the most striking and impactful, especially since the evidence is so much greater than it was 8 years ago that climate change is a danger.
Marianne Lavelle is the Bureau Chief in Washington D.C. for Inside Climate News. Her most recent reporting is about Biden’s climate legacy.
