Hours after his inauguration on Monday, President Trump signed a barrage of executive orders to grant his administration new powers to promote fossil fuels and to withdraw support for renewable energy, signaling that the United States government would no longer fight climate change.
Mr. Trump ordered the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement on global warming for a second time. He initiated plans to open vast areas of public land and federal waters, including fragile wilderness in Alaska, for oil drilling and mining. He ordered the elimination of government offices and programs aimed at protecting poor communities from pollution. And he said he would repeal regulations aimed at promoting electric vehicles and would halt approvals of new wind farms in federal waters.
Mr. Trump also declared a national energy emergency despite the fact that the United States is currently producing more oil and natural gas than any other country. He was the first president to do so, claiming that this declaration could help speed the development of pipelines, refineries, mines and other facilities for fossil fuels.
“We’re going to drill, baby, drill and do all of the things that we wanted to,” Mr. Trump told a cheering crowd of supporters at the Capital One Arena in Washington shortly before he began signing some of the orders.
And, he said, “We aren’t going to do the wind thing.”
Mr. Trump’s dramatic pivot to fossil fuels comes after the hottest year in recorded history and as scientists say the world is running out of time to keep global warming at relatively low levels. Last year, emissions from burning coal, oil and gas helped push average global temperatures past 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels. Scientists have said that every fraction of a degree of warming above that level brings greater risks from deadly heat waves, wildfires, drought, storms and species extinction.
Many of Mr. Trump’s energy policies cannot be achieved with the mere stroke of a pen because some would require action by federal agencies or Congress and others could face legal challenges. He also could not, by fiat, rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, or Denali in Alaska, the highest mountain peak in North America, to Mount McKinley. Mr. Trump promised to do both.
But taken together, the declarations underscore how Mr. Trump views the world: oil and gas are symbols of strength and power, and plentiful fossil fuels will ensure that the United States is able to dominate allies and rivals alike. Unspoken was the fact that the country is historically the biggest source of the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet.
Instead, Mr. Trump said the United States had “the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth, and we are going to use it. We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserve up again, right to the top, and export American energy all over the world.”
The remarks earned a standing ovation in the Capitol Rotunda, where Mr. Trump spoke, and applause at the Hay-Adams hotel in downtown Washington, where some of the country’s leading oil and gas executives popped champagne and ate mini Pop-Tart pastries with Mr. Trump’s image. The party was sponsored by Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder of Continental Resources, an oil company, who helped raise millions of dollars for Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Mr. Trump called the Paris Agreement, a pact among nearly 200 nations to curb greenhouse gases and avoid the worst impacts of global warming, “one-sided.” He said it was unfair that the United States would be expected to reduce its emissions while China is currently the world’s biggest polluter.
“The say we have to clean the air, but, yeah, the dirty air is dropping all over us, so what the hell are they talking about?” Mr. Trump asked.
In one executive order ending Biden administration efforts to consider climate change in all federal agencies, Mr. Trump declared that “climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.” In another Mr. Trump called for rolling back protections for a tiny fish known as the Delta smelt. Mr. Trump has blamed the water that is kept in Northern California to protect the smelt for water shortages during the fires in Los Angeles, something experts in the state said is inaccurate.
Another order directed the Department of Energy to restart reviews of new export terminals for liquefied natural gas, a process that the Biden administration had halted.
Mr. Trump’s agenda is a reverse image of his predecessor’s approach. Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called climate change an existential threat and said the United States had an obligation to lead the world in curbing fossil fuel pollution for the sake of generations to come.
Mr. Biden never sought an immediate end of coal, oil or gas. But he imposed regulations making it more expensive to operate coal plants, limited future drilling leases and signed laws that invested hundreds of billions of dollars in wind, solar, electric vehicles and other low-carbon technologies in order to lay the groundwork for a transition away from fossil fuels.
“We really moved the clean energy transition forward in a really huge way,” Deb Haaland, Mr. Biden’s interior secretary, said. Mr. Biden “really understood that he had a responsibility to do what he could for the climate crisis,” she said.
Mr. Trump’s efforts to reshape America’s energy landscape could bump up against market realities. U.S. oil production reached new heights last year, and natural gas prices fell to their lowest annual average on record, adjusted for inflation, according to the Energy Information Administration. While many oil and gas companies have asked for looser regulations, they have also said they are not looking to drastically increase output, as doing so most likely would weigh on prices, squeezing profits. On Monday, U.S. oil prices fell around 1 percent as details about Mr. Trump’s energy plans emerged.
“If there’s more energy production, you could see a decline in price from that,” said Jacques White, a petroleum engineer from Colorado, at Mr. Hamm’s party.
“Misguided, irrational energy policies are done,” said Jeff Eshelman, the chief executive of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, which represents oil and gas companies. “America’s vast resources will be unleashed responsibly.”
Some experts questioned whether Mr. Trump’s declaration of a national energy emergency would be more symbolic than substantive.
“It’s not clear what the emergency is,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “The U.S. is producing more oil and gas than ever before, more than any other country in the world, we have no gas lines, we have no widespread electricity blackouts.” He called the emergency order “mostly performative.”
In a call with reporters, a White House official said that the emergency declaration was motivated by the idea that U.S. energy costs were currently higher than they should be because of policy decisions by the Biden administration. Interest in artificial intelligence and a boom in data center construction have created an urgent need for more energy, the official said.
Legal experts have identified roughly 150 emergency powers that a president could invoke under certain conditions, such as suspending certain air pollution requirements or ordering the release of certain raw materials from strategic stockpiles. But many of the powers are relatively limited. In his first term, Mr. Trump proposed invoking certain emergency powers to keep unprofitable coal and nuclear plants from retiring, but that effort was eventually abandoned.
While it remained unclear which powers Mr. Trump might try to employ, his remarks on Monday suggested that he intended to try to test limits of presidential authority.
Some climate activists had pushed Mr. Biden to declare a national emergency around climate change, but legal experts concluded that doing so “wouldn’t really unlock major powers,” said Daniel Farber, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump promised to unleash oil and gas production and eliminate the “Green New Deal,” his catchall phrase to mean Mr. Biden’s climate policies. Doing so, he promised, would cut grocery and energy prices in half within 18 months of his inauguration.
Environmental groups as well as a coalition of mayors and governors said on Monday that many states, cities and businesses would continue cutting planet-warming emissions on their own. But they warned that Mr. Trump could significantly slow progress.
“The climate crisis is a global issue that demands urgent action,” said Jonathan Pershing, a former deputy climate envoy under Mr. Biden. “Failure to act will lead to more wildfires, droughts, and harm to communities and businesses both in the United States and around the world.”
Mr. Trump ordered federal agencies to pause and review all further grant spending under the Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping climate and clean energy bill that Mr. Biden signed into law in 2022.
In recent months, however, Biden administration officials have raced to finalize contracts for more than $96.7 billion, or 84 percent of the law’s grants for clean energy, meaning the money is essentially out the door. That includes $8.8 billion for state programs to help consumers buy energy-efficient appliances, $3 billion for cutting air pollution at U.S. ports and $9 billion to help rural electric providers switch from burning coal and gas to alternatives like wind, solar and nuclear power.
That still leaves roughly $11 billion in grants and other spending that has not been finalized, including money for agricultural conservation and a program aimed at helping to reduce pollution in disadvantaged communities.
At the same time, the vast majority of spending in the Inflation Reduction Act, potentially hundreds of billions of dollars, flows through tax credits that companies can claim if they use or manufacture carbon capture technology or various low-carbon energy sources, including wind, solar, batteries, hydrogen, nuclear and geothermal.
Those credits would not be affected by the executive order, and repealing them would require Congress to act. Some Republicans whose districts have benefited from the spending have said that at least some of the tax breaks should remain in place.
Mr. Trump, a longtime critic of wind power, also ordered a halt to government leasing for large wind farms in federal waters, pending further review.
The Biden administration has already approved 11 commercial-scale wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean. Some are currently under construction but others have been halted or faced delays because of inflation or supply-chain problems. Several Eastern states — including Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York — have set ambitious renewable energy targets and were hoping to build many more offshore wind farms this decade. Additional projects, however, would require federal approval.
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