Activists who dispute the severity of human-caused climate change are quietly preparing to seize their moment should Donald Trump win a second term.
Pushed to the political fringes during Joe Biden’s presidency, they are now laying the groundwork to bring back coal-fired power plants, gut science at the Environmental Protection Agency and neuter the modelling used in the federal government’s national climate assessment and other reports.
“Everything Biden did will be looked at. The question is: Is there enough time in the the day over the next four years?” said Steve Milloy, who formerly advised Trump’s EPA transition team and who serves on the board of directors of the Heartland Institute, a free-market think-tank that has espoused the benefits of a warming climate. “How much can you get rid of?”
The Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in Washington, DC
Environmental groups say the measures would reverse US climate progress at a critical moment, as the Earth verges on 1.5°C of warming and climate-charged disasters mount.
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“With Trump, we will go backward at a time we can least afford to,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen Action. “These guys have an agenda that would kill jobs and raise electricity rates for Americans, not to mention cost thousands of people their lives.”
A representative of the Trump campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Democrat Kamala Harris, meanwhile, is largely expected to stay the Biden-era course on energy issues, including policies that promote clean energy and address greenhouse gas emissions.
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Trump in the past has dismissed global warming as a hoax. During his first term, members of his administration extolled fossil fuels, dismissed the scientific consensus on climate change and touted the benefits of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. (Emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases have already raised global temperatures by about 1.2°C, scientists say.)
Although Trump pulled the US out of the 2015 Paris climate accord and managed to repeal or slow scores of environmental regulations, many of the sweeping changes sought by climate sceptics weren’t realised.
A former director at coal mining company Murray Energy, Milloy said that he and allied groups are working on a policy road map for a potential Trump administration, similar to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which Heartland signed onto. (Trump and his campaign have disavowed Project 2025, which many of his former advisers helped draft.)
The road map will challenge science that has been used by the EPA to underpin a swathe of environmental rules, said Milloy. During Trump’s presidency, the agency proposed limits on the use of scientific research unless methodological, technical and other information was publicly available. Critics said the move would exclude such research as public health studies containing anonymised patient data.
It would roll back the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding”, which provides some of the legal underpinning for regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, cars and other sources of the planet-warming pollution.
Among the targets Heartland is taking aim at are Biden-era restrictions on coal plants, the Biden administration’s pause on the approval of permits to export liquefied natural gas and greenhouse gas reporting requirements, said James Taylor, the president of the Illinois-based organisation, which has been critical of climate science.
“We have folks within Heartland who may have ties or influence or contacts with an incoming Trump administration, and these are the things we’d promote,” Taylor said.
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Much of the wishlist is in sync with Trump’s pledge to “drill, baby, drill” for fossil fuels and with the oil, gas and coal industries’ desire for regulatory changes.
Other sceptics are taking aim at the scientific modelling used by federal researchers to create the National Climate Assessment and other major reports on climate change. The most recent edition of the National Climate Assessment, released last year, found that climate change was fuelling a rising number of heat waves and wildfires.
Myron Ebell
“Modelling is in the crosshairs,” said Myron Ebell, a longtime sceptic who led Trump’s EPA transition team and who said he believes “by and large the impacts of modest warming have been largely beneficial”. Ebell added that some groups are pushing to require that scientific modelling be verified.
The CO2 Coalition, a non-profit whose self-proclaimed goal is to educate policymakers and others about the benefits of carbon dioxide, wants to see the creation of a presidential committee to review climate science, said Greg Wrightstone, the group’s executive director. “We have climate alarmists at every level of government,” Wrightstone said. “We need to have climate realists to have an open and fair debate.” An overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that Earth’s climate is warming and that human activity is the primary cause.
Such a review was proposed during the first Trump administration by William Happer, an adviser on Trump’s National Security Council. The effort faltered after pushback from moderate Republicans, who were concerned it would cost Trump votes with women, Happer said in an interview. But if re-elected, Trump wouldn’t have the political considerations that come with running for another term, he added.
The level of planning by sceptics shows they’re more prepared for a possible second Trump term than they were when he won in 2016, said Kert Davies, a director at the Washington, DC-based Center for Climate Integrity. He said he feared the results given the seriousness of climate change: “Killing regulations — even slowing them down — is terrible.”
Photos: Bloomberg
