Screw Trump, The Climate Fight Continues. Here's How.

It isn't gonna be easy. It never has been.

San Francisco’s terrifyingly good 2020 cosplay as the setting of Blade Runner, thanks to wildfire smoke. Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash

Donald Trump has already made clear that when he returns to power in January 2025, he intends to reverse as many of Joe Biden’s climate policies as he possibly can. Trump will pull the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement — again — and end Biden’s freeze on new liquified natural gas (LNG) export terminals. He’ll also seek to overturn the EPA’s new limits on vehicle emissions, regulations limiting emissions from power plants, and limits on methane emissions from oil and gas production and pipelines.

As we discussed earlier in the first part of this series, parts of Biden’s climate legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) — are likely to survive, especially if Democrats retake the House when all this year’s votes are counted. Even if Republicans take the House, it’ll likely be a thin majority with all the same internal chaos; the election won’t have turned Mike Johnson into a Nancy Pelosi.

But there’s no escaping it: The next four years of the climate fight in the US will largely be about defending as much of the progress we’ve started to make on climate as we can. Trump is going to set back the energy transition badly, but there are several reasons he can’t halt it altogether. We need to roll up our sleeves and make sure it continues wherever we can push back.

How Biden Tried To ‘Trump-Proof’ Climate Rules

While Biden’s legislative achievements can only be undone by Congress, the ugly fact is that any action initiated by one executive branch can be undone by the next administration. Trump plans to do severe and lasting damage to Biden’s regulatory progress, but at least a few factors may slow or reduce his steamroller, starting with the fact that the Biden administration was full of people who knew what the hell they were doing.

That’s why Trump and his buddies in rightwing think tanks want to root out the “Deep State”: They want massive purges in government agencies, to eliminate experts who might stand in the way.

While the overall prospects are grim, Biden and his agency heads designed the new rules to be as resilient as possible — pretty fitting for climate infrastructure, even the kind that’s on paper.

For starters, several of the more sweeping emissions regulations, including those EPA rules, were finalized early enough this year that they can’t simply be vaporized by the Congressional Review Act (CRA, which allows recently enacted regulations to be repealed by a majority in both houses of Congress, and worse, prohibits any future administration from enacting the regulations again.

Many on Team Biden saw Trump use the CRA to reverse a whole bunch of environmental regulations enacted in the last six months of the Obama administration, which is why they published critical rules before May of this year, effectively putting them beyond the reach of the CRA. That takes the fastest and shittiest option for Trump off the table, even if the House remains in GOP hands.

How Trump Will Fuck Things Up

To undo Biden’s regulations, the incoming Trumpers have two options: 1) sue to undo the rules, or more likely, refuse to defend them from suits launched by industry and/or Republican states; and 2) use the federal rule-making process to create new rules that replace the Biden regulations. A new Trump administration will pursue both strategies.

Sadly, we probably shouldn’t count too much on a second Trump term to be quite as totally fucking incompetent as the first, although as Chris Hayes likes to point out, Trump’s inner circle hasn’t necessarily gotten any smarter or competent. This time around, Trump will instead count on help from industry and think-tank experts who may still pursue cockamamie ideas, but will at least avoid rookie legal mistakes. That said, new regulations must go through the federal rules-making process, including public comment, and that won’t be fast.

States Step Up

Outside the federal government, which has the most powerful levers to fuck over climate policy, there are nonetheless powerful forces that will keep the clean energy transition moving forward albeit much more slowly than if the federal government were still helping. The indispensable Heatmap News (they may as well add the adjective to their title) identifies two factors that will keep driving the energy transition. Both of these kept Trump from killing off climate progress in his first term, and have only gotten stronger since then.

For starters, there are many more state-level climate policies, including hardwired commitments to decarbonize like those passed in Minnesota under Gov. Tim Walz. Many, like Minnesota’s, don’t go far beyond an on-paper commitment to eliminate fossil fuel power within two decades, but also include regular evaluations of progress that’ll mandate adjustments to state regulations if needed.

Thursday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom called a special session of the state Legislature to determine how the state, already a leader in climate legislation, can strengthen its protections against Trump’s efforts to undo climate laws. Expect similar efforts in other blue states to shore up their commitments to reducing emissions, and expect them to grow in response to every whack Trump takes at climate progress. Per Heatmap:

“States are the critical last line of defense on climate,” said Caroline Spears, the executive director of Climate Cabinet, a group that campaigns for local climate leaders, during a press call on Wednesday. “I used to work in the solar industry under the Trump administration. We still built solar and it was on the back of great state policy.”

What’s more, states already have that experience of setting good climate policy even during the first Trump administration, and as Heatmap notes, 23 states now have Democratic governors, and at least 15 have Democratic trifectas, a huge gain over 2017. We’ll also find out whether the governments of red states like Georgia, which have benefited hugely from new green industries under the IRA and BIL, are willing to accept huge economic losses for the sake of going along with Trump. Damned if we know. Maybe mobs will burn down EV battery factories, but it seems bloody unlikely.

Clean Industry Won’t Be Ignored

The other thing we have going for us is the rapidly growing clean energy industry, which even in the Trump years employed more people than coal, and which enjoyed exponential growth during the Biden years. Beyond that, renewable power and electrified everything are in general less expensive and more efficient than fossil fuels, so a lot of momentum for clean energy will continue on simply an economic basis even if nobody utters the taboo word “climate.” Texas may purport to love dirty oil and gas above all other energy, but it’s nonetheless the biggest state for wind and solar, and likely to remain so.

And as Heatmap points out, companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have made huge investments in decarbonization and clean energy, which they aren’t likely to abandon. Yes, the tech industry’s electricity-hungry data centers will also require a hell of a lot of new generation capacity, some of which will likely come, at least in the short term, from new fossil gas plants, which will no longer be constrained by the carbon limits the EPA set under Biden. More gas plants equals a longer life for fossil fuels, and more planet-warming emissions.

But even there, it remains to be seen whether growing demand for electricity will necessarily be met by new fossil fuel plants, because renewable energy is so much cheaper, and because at least some businesses will be thinking for the long term, both in terms of energy costs and climate policy. Businesses want certainty more than anything else, and while Trump and his cabal may seek to build an autocracy, the rest of the world is decarbonizing — again, China is kicking everyone else’s asses in the clean energy transition, and Trump can’t stop that — and if Trumpism can be kept from taking hold and the Republic survives, sane climate policies will be back.

We’ll close with this post-election thought from Rebecca Solnit, who as Heatmap notes may have coined a motto for the climate movement in the coming years: “The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.”

We’ve got work to do. We will do it together, goddamn it.

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EPA Vehicle Emissions Rules Here To Save Planet, Make You Wear Birkenstocks

Joe Biden Has Another Big F*cking Deal For Climate, Again

Trump EPA Will Make You Eat Coal, And You Will Like It

China Killing It (Complimentary) In Clean Energy Transition

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[WaPo (gift link) / Heatmap News / Politico]

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