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‘VICIOUSNESS’ OF TRUMP’S CLIMATE ATTACKS STUNS EVEN HIS CRITICS
 
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Benjamin Storrow and Jean Chemnick
February 22, 2025
Politico
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_ President Donald Trump has attacked nearly every aspect of the U.S.
effort to confront rising temperatures. _

President Donald Trump has used the first month of his term to target
U.S. institutions working on climate change., Pool photo via AP

 

President Donald Trump’s promised assault on federal climate
policies is sweeping across Washington, state capitals and private
industry with a speed that’s surprising even some of his supporters
and critics — and could leave an impact on the planet’s future
well after his presidency.

His cost-cutting orders have led to the firings of thousands of
people from the Environmental Protection Agency and the departments
of Energy and the Interior, with even deeper slashing on the way.
He’s dammed the flow of billions of federal dollars for energy
rebates, low-income solar installations, electric vehicle chargers and
more — sometimes flouting courts that ordered the money reinstated.

And he has cast uncertainty over clean energy industries by
threatening tariffs on allied nations, pausing permits for wind
projects and promising to roll back hundreds of billions of dollars
in clean energy tax credits
[[link removed]] contained
in former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Taken together, Trump’s actions mark a vast and coordinated attack
on U.S. environmental policy by a president who has spent years
denying the tenets of climate science and the reality of rising global
temperatures. Analysts and advocates say the administration’s moves
threaten to reverse decades of painfully slow progress to curb
planet-warming pollution.

“This shock and awe campaign will undo decades of bipartisan and
international efforts to curb greenhouse gases and, if left unchecked,
will lead to the planet warming far beyond manageable levels,” said
Jillian Blanchard, who runs the climate change program at Lawyers for
Good Government, a nonprofit watchdog group.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. But Energy
Secretary Chris Wright expressed the administration’s view of
climate change this week when he described efforts to zero out
greenhouse gases as a malevolent goal of governments to acquire power.

“Net Zero 2050 is a sinister goal,” Wright told conservative
leaders attending a conference in London. “It’s a terrible goal.
It’s both unachievable by any practical means, but the aggressive
pursuit of it — and you’re sitting in a country that has
aggressively pursued this goal — has not delivered any benefits, but
it’s delivered tremendous costs.”

The United States, and the world, were already on the clock when Trump
won a second term in November. At current pollution levels, the planet
has six years before the industrial-era rise in global temperatures
eclipses the crucial threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, and 27 years
before it breaches the even more serious benchmark of 2
degrees, according to the Global Carbon Project
[[link removed]], an international team
composed of climate researchers.

Trump left little mystery about his intentions during the presidential
campaign, railing against electric vehicles, wind turbines and what he
called Biden’s “Green New Scam” at rally after rally. He has
long ridiculed climate science, joking last year that rising
temperatures would lead to more oceanfront property.

Now he’s embedding those doubts into federal action. Researchers in
and out of government have been put on notice that bucking far-right
orthodoxy on issues like equity and energy “dominance” could get
them fired or blacklisted for grants.

The reach of Trump’s actions has blown past those of his first
administration — and more moves are coming. He has threatened to
make the nation’s disaster response agency “go away.” EPA is
expected to release a list of regulations it plans to scrap and
replace with weaker standards — or no standards at all.

Even EPA’s core finding that greenhouse gases endanger human
health — the cornerstone of all climate regulations under the Clean
Air Act — may be on the chopping block, a move that Trump avoided
making in his first term.

“There’s been a viciousness that I hadn’t anticipated in tearing
everything down without a coherent plan for what to build back up,”
said Daniel Cohan, an environmental engineering professor at Rice
University.

Firings and furloughs

Trump entered office amid a halting and uneven effort by the U.S. to
tackle climate change.

Biden sought to position the U.S. as a climate leader. He approved $1
trillion in clean energy loans, grants and tax credits as part of
sweeping legislative packages that included the IRA and the bipartisan
infrastructure law.

But Biden’s track record of cutting climate pollution was mixed.
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were 20 percent below 2005 levels when
he left office last month, a far cry from the 50 to 52 percent
reduction he had promised to achieve by the end of the decade.

Yet Biden made progress in other areas.

At the Department of Energy, Biden stood up new initiatives to bolster
grid reliability, domestic manufacturing and EV charging. EPA
hired more than 6,000 full-time employees to help carry out the
president’s climate initiatives. In the private sector, companies
that spent the past several years building factories to make solar
panels and electric vehicles have only just begun to see new products
roll off the line.

Trump, on the other hand, empowered Elon Musk, the world’s richest
person, to dramatically slash the size of the federal bureaucracy
through the Department of Government Efficiency.

[Elon Musk attended the Future Investment Initiative summit in Miami
Beach, where President Donald Trump spoke on Wednesday. ]

Elon Musk attended the Future Investment Initiative summit in Miami
Beach, where President Donald Trump spoke on Wednesday. | Pool photo
via AP

At the National Science Foundation, staff meetings are no longer
recorded because civil servants fear the audio could fall into the
wrong hands. Nearly 170 people were fired from NSF on Tuesday, with
more layoffs on the way. At EPA, where 388 people were fired last
week, civil servants have been told to cut off communication with
grantees and some state officials while political leaders get up to
speed.

DOE was among the first to see staff cuts, starting with diversity
and equity offices days after the inauguration and continuing last
week as new workers were let go. Cuts then came at other agencies.
The Interior Department cut 2,700 people while the Forest Service, a
division of the Department of Agriculture, fired 3,400 employees.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency fired 200 people
[[link removed]] and
sent out a directive targeting climate programs.

And when career staff can’t be sacked, they’re sometimes being
reassigned to do work outside their expertise. The Justice
Department assigned environmental enforcement and civil rights
attorneys to work on a team devoted to punishing so-called sanctuary
cities for bucking Trump’s immigration policies.

“You can’t do anything in the government unless you have people
who are doing it, and not just the numbers, but the quality,” said
David Turk, who served as deputy Energy secretary during the Biden
administration.

Many of the probationary staff fired in recent days were hired from
the private sector for their technical expertise. “In many ways,
those are the worst people to get rid of,” Turk said.

‘Psychological tactic’

With a flourish of his black Sharpie, Trump affected families from New
Mexico to Africa.

The State Department rescinded $4 billion in pledged funding to the
United Nations Green Climate Fund. The Treasury Department ditched a
group that studied the financial risks of climate change because it
was organized to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, of which the
U.S. is no longer a part.

And a host of climate-related programs at USAID have been halted or
terminated amid Trump’s attempt to close the agency. They include
installing solar panels on hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa, and to
alert farmers in Central America of impending extreme weather events,
so they can cover their crops.

Programs are disappearing, whether they’re climate-related or not,
said one current USAID staffer who requested anonymity to avoid
retaliation. It feels like a “psychological tactic,” they said.

“It’s not about aid, it’s not about what we do and it’s not
about there being fraud or waste,” the person said. “It’s the
narrative that we’re being sacrificed to.”

[The USAID sign was removed from the agency's Washington
headquarters.]

The USAID sign was removed from the agency's Washington headquarters.
| Jose Luis Magana/AP

At home, $8 billion in home energy rebates
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thrown into limbo.

New Mexico last year raced to create a rebate program using IRA
funding in a bid to lower household energy costs. It will “not only
do good things for the climate, but to finally move New Mexico out of
the poverty that has endured for generations,” said Rebecca Stair,
director of the state Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources
Department.

Now she never knows what her staff will find when they open the
federal government’s online payment system. Some days the grants are
there. On others, some disappear.

“It seems to change every day or even every few hours,” Stair
said. “So trying to operate these big, consequential programs under
that much uncertainty is really an enormous challenge.”

Federal workers are not the only ones losing their jobs.

Small businesses and nonprofits that expected to receive IRA grants
from the Department of Agriculture or EPA have begun laying off
people. School districts that anticipated buying electric buses with
grants are holding off for fear that they won’t be reimbursed.

“Communities are paying out of pocket for work that the federal
government has a legal obligation to pay in advance,” said Zealan
Hoover, EPA’s IRA and infrastructure implementation lead under
Biden. “Upstream orders to factories are drying up, forcing
companies to pause hiring and prepare to furlough factory workers.”

At the same time, the business world is anxiously awaiting details of
Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on imports from allied and
adversarial nations alike. Those levies could snarl supply
chains for green technologies and reverse falling prices for
renewable energy.

The business group E2 said January saw the lowest level of new
large-scale clean energy investments
[[link removed]] announced
since August 2022, when Biden and congressional Democrats passed the
IRA.

“Right now, what Washington is doing in regard to the future of
clean energy in America is about as clear as a midnight snowstorm in
D.C.,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a clean energy
business group. “It’s really created a self-inflicted wound to one
of the fastest-growing sectors of the American economy.”

‘A ridiculous thought’

Federal agencies and corporate boardrooms are accustomed to Washington
shifting its priorities when a new president arrives.

So it wasn’t a surprise when Trump pledged to work with Republican
lawmakers to claw back unobligated IRA dollars or directed agencies to
move swiftly to roll back regulations on fossil fuels and open public
lands to drilling. It was expected that Trump would pull the U.S. out
of the Paris climate agreement — as he did in his first term.

But he didn’t stop there, catching even insiders by surprise.

Two weeks after the election, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va
[[link removed]].) — who now chairs the Environment and Public Works
Committee — told POLITICO that IRA funding can’t be taken back
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it was already obligated.

[T]hat’s a decision that’s final. We’re not gonna go claw back
money. That’s a ridiculous thought,” said Capito, who will have a
leading role in shaping budget legislation that could jettison IRA
programs.

[Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) at the Capitol.]

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) rejected the idea before Trump
took office that he would claw back committed climate money. |
Angelina Katsanis/POLITICO

What the establishment did not see coming was Trump’s blizzard of
executive orders, his blitz to fire workers and the speed with which
he froze federal funding. It was a multidimensional campaign to
destabilize the bureaucracy — and U.S. climate policy paid a large
price.

Liberal states and federal unions have sued to stop the administration
from razing Biden’s climate legacy. They’ve won some preliminary
cases — including on the funding freeze.

But those orders amount to putting a Band-Aid on an amputated limb.

Meantime, the spending pause has impacted businesses large and small.
A Massachusetts company said last week that it no longer planned to
build a factory for making EV components after receiving a $671
million DOE grant.

TotalEnergies has halted its plans for offshore wind projects in the
U.S., while Orsted, the Danish wind giant, announced it is cutting
spending 25 percent. In Georgia, a battery maker recently
announced it was scrapping plans for a $2.5 billion facility.

“What’s hard for me now is that it feels like it’s not just a
situation where we’re going to let the best technology win,” said
Rob Jackson, an earth systems professor at Stanford University.
“We’re going to actively spite green technologies and clean energy
because they’re clean and because they help climate. That, to me, is
messed up.”

A small electric vehicle charger startup in New York has been forced
to scramble for new funding after a $1.4 million DOE grant was frozen.
The freeze comes as part of a wider order to pause a $5 billion
initiative supporting the build-out of EV chargers.

The company, named it’s electric, was granted cost-share funding for
60 curbside EV chargers in four cities complete with workforce
training. Instead of waiting on Trump, they are pushing through
without federal funding.

“We’re not going to fall into this trap of ‘waiting and
seeing’ for this funding,” said Tiya Gordon, a co-founder of
it’s electric. “We can’t sway opinion with the new
administration.”

‘Like it doesn’t exist’

Climate researchers told POLITICO’s E&E News they have been told to
self-censor their grant documents for trigger words that might lead to
a loss of funding.

Agencies that fund scientific research — including the National
Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation — paused
review panels charged with evaluating grant proposals while they
grappled with how to comply with Trump’s executive orders on
diversity and environmental justice. The move alarmed scientists who
depend on the agencies to support their research.

NSF program officers were told to comb through existing grants to see
if any were out of step with Trump’s agenda. They were given
spreadsheets of grants flagged as possibly pertaining to DEI issues
because they contained terms like “barrier,” according to one
agency official who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid
reprisals. The managers were told to look for grants that affect
social topics, like barriers to education.

“There is a general feeling of helplessness, confusion and anger,”
said one NSF staffer. “Morale is bent.”

One career scientist at USDA said they were considering taking their
name off a climate-related study they led to avoid being targeted.
Another option: leaving it unpublished until Trump leaves office.

“I think they generally don’t want the information that we
provide. They don’t want it to be available because, if it’s not,
it’s like it doesn’t exist,” said Jackson, the Stanford
professor. “I think people are living in fear in a way that I
haven’t seen in my lifetime.”

_Sara Schonhardt, Chelsea Harvey, Corbin Hiar, Mike Lee, Lesley Clark,
Scott Waldman and Thomas Frank contributed to this report._

* Climate Deniers
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* Donald Trump
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* Inflation Reduction Act of 2022; Climate Crisis; Fossil Fuel
Subsidies;
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