In a few short weeks, President Trump has severely damaged the government’s ability to fight climate change, upending American environmental policy with moves that could have lasting implications for the country, and the planet.
With a flurry of actions that have stretched the limits of presidential power, Mr. Trump has gutted federal climate efforts, rolled back regulations aimed at limiting pollution and given a major boost to the fossil fuel industry.
He is abandoning efforts to reduce global warming, even as the world has reached record levels of heat that scientists say is driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels. Every corner of the world is now experiencing the effects of these rising temperatures in the form of deadlier hurricanes, floods, wildfires and droughts, as well as species extinction.
To achieve such a wholesale overhaul of the country’s climate policies in such a short time, the Trump administration has reneged on federal grants, fired workers en masse and attacked longstanding environmental regulations.
All new presidents have their own agendas, but the speed and scale of Mr. Trump’s efforts to uproot climate policy is unprecedented. “This is not the kind of stately tennis match of the usual switch-over in administrations,” said Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, an environmental law firm. “This is full on Fight Club.”
The Trump administration’s moves have unfolded simultaneously across the sprawling government, affecting federal, state and local agencies and hitting government-funded projects in Africa, Antarctica and around the world. On Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement, making it the only nation to walk away.
Mr. Trump has frozen funds appropriated by Congress for clean energy projects, taking particular aim at wind energy, the country’s largest source of renewable power. He has stopped approvals for wind farms on public land and in federal waters and has threatened to block projects on private land.
He has fired thousands of federal workers, dismantled programs aimed at helping polluted communities and scrubbed references to climate change from numerous federal websites.
He has waged a multipronged assault at regulations designed to curb pollution, immediately sweeping some rules to the side and circumventing the normally lengthy rule-making processes. At the same time, Mr. Trump has declared an energy emergency, giving himself the authority to fast-track the construction of oil and gas projects as he works to stoke supply as well as demand for fossil fuels.
“We’re going to drill, baby, drill and do all of the things that we wanted to,” Mr. Trump said just hours after being sworn in for his second term.
The United States is producing more oil than any other nation in history, and is also the world’s biggest exporter of natural gas. The fossil fuel industry donated more than $75 million to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and Mr. Trump, in turn, promised to weaken environmental regulations in ways that would lower its costs and increase its margins.
The president has repeatedly mocked climate change, criticized regulations and said that more drilling would bring down energy bills.
In several cases, the administration’s actions have flouted the law, with agencies defying court orders, freezing funds in legally binding contracts and reinterpreting regulations to suit their aims. In doing so, Mr. Trump has busted through many of the barriers that were erected by the officials during the Biden administration who believed that process and the legal system would slow or deter him.
The administration and Republicans in Congress plan to use a legislative maneuver to quickly erase California’s authority to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars in the state by 2035. That authority has never before been challenged in this way, and critics say the maneuver is illegal. But it would be much faster than trying to overturn the California ban through the standard process that requires months of public notice and comment.
Until last month, the United States was expected to record significant reductions in its greenhouse-gas emissions over the next decade. But the Trump administration’s changes pave the way for more planet-warming pollution and will likely slow the advance of cleaner technologies like wind and solar energy.
“To power the Great American comeback, President Trump is unleashing American energy and eliminating the Green New Scam,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson. “The Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency are working in tandem to implement President Trump’s Day 1 executive action and undo Biden’s radical climate policies that restrained America’s economy and abundant natural resources.”
Mr. Trump’s supporters are delighting in the audacity and scale of his attacks on climate and environmental regulations.
“They’re doing all the things I thought they would do, and they’re doing other things that I only dreamed they might do,” said Myron Ebell, a conservative activist who led the E.P.A. transition team during Mr. Trump’s first term.
Many of Mr. Trump’s moves may have a lasting effect on the country’s ability to confront climate change.
Thousands of federal jobs that are eliminated now may be hard to restore. Clean energy projects that were relying on federal funding may not proceed without the expected investments. A sudden stop to scientific work could create gaps in data collection that are impossible to fill. And environmental regulations that are stripped away could be difficult to revive.
Several of the administration’s actions are already facing legal challenges.
After Mr. Trump ordered federal agencies to pause billions of dollars in climate and energy grants that were authorized by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, two federal judges ordered the Trump administration to let the money flow again.
In early February, one of those judges, Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island federal court, said the White House was defying his order by withholding funds. Some funds have begun moving, but many remain stalled.
John Podesta, a senior climate adviser in the Biden administration, called many of the Trump administration actions illegal. “We followed the law, and they’re breaking the law,” Mr. Podesta said. “It remains to be seen whether they’ll be allowed to get away with it.”
In the past few weeks Mr. Trump has fired thousands of employees at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department, the Department of Energy, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government’s premiere science agency. On Thursday, a federal judge said directives that led to mass firings were illegal.
And in a move that could have far-reaching implications for government efforts to regulate industry, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the E.P.A., has recommended that the agency reverse its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare, according to three people familiar with the decision. That would eliminate the legal basis for the government’s climate laws, such as limits on pollution from automobiles and power plants.
“We’re talking about undoing 50 years of environmental regulation and accelerating the extinction crisis and risking the health of the American people,” said Ben Jealous, the executive director of the Sierra Club. “There’s so much shocking news every day. People are struggling to process all of it.”
Electric vehicles, long a target for Mr. Trump, have lost much of the federal support they gained during the Biden administration.
Mr. Trump has directed Congress to eliminate federal subsidies for E.V.s., including tax credits for consumers, which could hurt the sales of Tesla, the electric car company, despite Elon Musk’s central role in the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts.
The Transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, signed an order to loosen fuel economy standards enacted by the Biden administration that were designed to encourage automakers to sell electric vehicles. And the administration moved to freeze $5 billion that Congress approved for the construction of a national network of electric-vehicle charging stations.
The administration is also trying to stop states and even cities from enacting their own climate policies.
Mr. Duffy recently lambasted what he called the “mismanagement” of California’s high-speed-rail project, announcing an investigation into how the state was spending a $3.1 billion federal grant.
And the Transportation Department moved to revoke its approval of New York City’s congestion pricing program, a plan designed to reduce traffic, raise money for public transportation and curb emissions.
“The old paradigm was an administration will come in and do all the hard work of dismantling the old administration’s policies and then replacing with its own,” said Ms. Dillen. “This is a very different strategy, which is that we may not even bother to replace policies because we don’t care about complying with the law.”
Attempts to blunt the Inflation Reduction Act are already delaying projects. Jay Turner, a professor at Wellesley College who is tracking investments related to the law, found that at least nine major projects worth $7.6 billion have been slowed in the past month as funding from the law has been put on hold and renewable energy companies adjust to the new reality.
“You’ve seen some real pullback,” he said. “Established players in the industry are reassessing the market and how much capacity is needed right now, and you also see newcomers that suddenly don’t see a path to bringing their projects to fruition.”
Much of the damage to the country’s environmental regulatory apparatus may be long-lasting.
The E.P.A. said it would try to claw back about $20 billion that was awarded to eight organizations under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in low-income communities. A top federal prosecutor resigned after she declined a request by the Trump administration to freeze the money, saying she did not have sufficient evidence to do so.
While the Energy Department has started releasing some grants for battery factories and electric grid upgrades, other projects remain on hold, according to several awardees. A $500 million program to upgrade hydroelectric dams around the country, for instance, remains frozen, and companies are halting construction or wondering if they will get reimbursed for work that has already been done.
On Wednesday, Trump said he believed Mr. Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, would be cutting about 65 percent of the agency’s more than 17,000 jobs. Mr. Zeldin later said that he thought the E.PA. could cut at least 65 percent of its budget and make cuts to its work force.
The effective dissolution of the United States Agency for International Development has led to the immediate termination of long-running projects in the developing world aimed at helping vulnerable countries adapt to a hotter planet.
And more sweeping actions may still be in store.
“The bigger changes are to come,” Mr. Turner said. “What we’ve seen today has been fast, but it’s just kind of the start of much more extensive efforts to dismantle the Biden administration’s policies.”
