When the Trump administration declared two weeks ago that it would largely disregard the economic cost of climate change as it sets policies and regulations, it was just the latest step in a multipronged effort to erase global warming from the American agenda.
But President Trump is doing more than just turning a blind eye to the fact that the planet is growing hotter. He is weakening the country’s capacity to understand global warming and to prepare for its consequences.
The administration has dismantled climate research, firing some of the nation’s top scientists, and gutted efforts to chart how fast greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere and what that means for the economy, employment, agriculture, health and other aspects of American society. The government will no longer track major sources of greenhouse gases, data that has been used to measure the scale and identify sources of the problem for the past 15 years.
“We’re not doing that climate change, you know, crud, anymore,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told Fox Business on May 8.
By getting rid of data, the administration is trying to halt the national discussion about how to deal with global warming, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The notion of there being any shared factual reality just seems to be completely out the window,” he said.
At the same time, through cuts to the National Weather Service and by denying disaster relief through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the administration has weakened the country’s ability to prepare for and recover from hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather that is being made worse by climate change.
The president is also moving to loosen restrictions on air pollution, which experts say will lead to more planet warming emissions, and to overturn the government’s legal authority to regulate those gases.
Taken together, these moves are poised to leave the world’s biggest economy less informed, less prepared and, over time, more polluted.
Mr. Trump dismisses the threats posed by climate change, suggesting that rising seas would create more “oceanfront property.” He blames “climate lunatics” for environmental regulations that he says have been a drag on the U.S. economy.
On his first day in office, Mr. Trump declared a national energy emergency, something that experts dispute because the United States is producing more oil than any country in history and is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas. Mr. Trump has cited the emergency as justification for speeding approvals for oil, gas and coal projects and expanding logging in national forests.
Some agree that reforms to the nation’s environmental regulations were overdue. Complex and lengthy processes to get permits to build pipelines, transmission lines and drilling projects have also meant significant delays for wind farms, solar projects and other clean energy, said Robert Stavins, a professor of energy and economic development at Harvard University.
“Permitting as whole in the United States is just a mess,” he said.
But the president has gone much further than just trying to speed up permits. He’s made the American government a global outlier in its denial of science.
“It’s as if we’re in the Dark Ages,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Eliminating climate data
At the most basic level, the Trump administration is dismantling the government’s ability to monitor a rapidly changing climate.
Last month, the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been working on the National Climate Assessment, a report mandated by Congress that details how global warming is affecting specific regions across the country.
In recent weeks, more than 500 people have left the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government’s premier agency for climate and weather science. That has led the National Weather Service, an agency within NOAA, to warn of “degraded operations.”
NOAA also stopped monthly briefing calls on climate change, and the president’s proposed budget would eliminate funding for the agency’s weather and climate research. The administration has purged the phrases “climate crisis” and “climate science” from government websites.
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting effort spearheaded by the billionaire Elon Musk, has proposed closing a NOAA observatory in Hawaii that has been continuously monitoring greenhouse gas levels since 1958.
The data collected there were used to create the Keeling Curve, a well-known graph that showed the sharp recent rise in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. The data from Hawaii and other NOAA monitoring stations are shared with scientists around the globe and inform international climate negotiations.
“The lack of scientific data collection is going to harm our ability to understand the natural and physical world,” said Brandon Jones, president of the American Geophysical Union. “It’s also going to impact our ability to provide early warning systems for severe storms or the next wildfire. It’s going to have an impact on lives.”
A spokesman for the Commerce Department, which oversees NOAA, defended the cuts, saying that the agency was exploring new ways to collect data and did not expect disruptions to weather forecasting.
The capacity to respond
Mr. Trump is also reducing the federal government’s response to disasters, a function that dates to 1803.
Instead, the White House is trying to shift responsibility to the states. The administration has canceled a FEMA program aimed at making communities more resilient before disasters hit, calling it “wasteful and ineffective.” And it said FEMA staffers would no longer go door to door to help survivors after a catastrophe.
In a statement, a spokesman for the National Security Council said that when disasters strike, states must have “an appetite to own the problem.”
“The Trump administration is reforming a broken disaster relief system that has repeatedly let Americans down,” said Kush Desai, an administration spokesman. “Instead of doling out blank checks, the administration is working with state and local governments to proactively make investments and enact common sense policies that prioritize disaster preparedness and resilience.”
As human-caused global warming increases, disasters are becoming more frequent, destructive and expensive. There were just three billion-dollar disasters in the United States in 1980, but that total increased to 27 last year, according to data collected by NOAA. The agency said last week that it would no longer tally and publicly report the costs of extreme weather.
Daniel Kaniewski, who served as FEMA’s acting deputy administrator during the first Trump administration, said it made little sense to cut programs that help harden communities against extreme weather.
“The longer we go without these programs, the more risk will accrue to these communities and the nation,” said Mr. Kaniewski, who is now a managing director at Marsh McLennan, an insurance broker and risk adviser. “And soon enough, we’ll all bear the consequences.”
Going into hurricane season, FEMA is being run by an acting administrator with no experience in emergency management. As of May 8, the agency had available about half as many staff members trained to respond to disasters as it did at the same time last year, according to agency documents. That follows months of downsizing at FEMA through resignations and layoffs.
FEMA has recently denied some requests for assistance from Arkansas, where a series of tornadoes in March was followed by a second round of destructive weather, including flooding and hail. It also rejected requests from several counties in West Virginia where February floods caused extensive damage; Washington State, which was battered by windstorms; and North Carolina, which is still trying to recover from Hurricane Helene, which destroyed 1,000 homes last year.
Jonas Anderson, the mayor of Cave City, Ark., population 1,994, where a tornado destroyed more than 20 homes and many local businesses, said FEMA’s denial of community assistance was “shocking and disappointing.”
“It’s pretty rough on people,” Mr. Anderson said.
Slashing regulations
The Environmental Protection Agency, which has been the government’s lead agency in terms of measuring and controlling greenhouse gas emissions, is being overhauled to end those functions. The administration is shredding the E.P.A.’s staff and budget and wants to revoke its two most powerful climate regulations: limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks.
Mr. Trump has said that relaxing limits on pollution from automobiles wouldn’t “mean a damn bit of difference to the environment.”
But transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gases generated by the United States and its pollution is linked to asthma, heart disease, other health problems and premature deaths.
Sensing an opening, two major chemical industry trade groups, have asked the E.P.A. administrator, Lee Zeldin, for a complete exemption from limits on hazardous pollution.
“Rolling back regulations will have a catastrophic effect on health in America,” said Harold Wimmer, the chief executive of the American Lung Association.
Throttling the energy transition
Mr. Trump has made no secret of his hostility toward wind power, along with most of the clean energy technologies that would help the country pivot away from oil, gas and coal and reduce the emissions driving climate change.
But actions by his administration last month shocked many observers. It ordered a stop to construction that was underway on a wind farm off the coast of Long Island.
That wind farm, developed by Norway-based Equinor, had received all necessary permits in 2023 — after nearly four years of environmental reviews — along with $3 billion in financing. The project, which been expected to provide electricity to 500,000 homes by 2027, was about 30 percent complete when the stop work order was issued.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggested on social media that the permits had been rushed. Equinor is considering legal action.
“To stop a project that already has all its federal permits is fairly unprecedented, especially at a large scale, like this,” said Robert Freudenberg, vice president of energy and environmental programs for Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to promote development in the area around New York City. “It shows how determined they are to hurt this industry.”
The president’s proposed budget calls for eliminating funding for “the Green New Scam,” including $15 billion in cuts at the Energy Department for clean energy projects and $80 million at the Interior Department for offshore wind and other renewable energy. The administration has frozen approvals for new offshore wind farms and imposed tariffs that would raise costs for renewable energy companies. Republicans in Congress want to repeal billions of dollars in tax incentives for production and sales of solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and other clean energy technologies.
Some Republicans are trying to preserve the tax credits, saying that they have helped drive investment in manufacturing.
“A lot of these members have billions and billions of dollars invested in their districts,” said Heather Reams, president of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, a conservative nonprofit group.
Alone in the world
The American retreat from climate action has made the United States a global outlier. Nearly every other government has recognized that a hotter planet poses a profound threat to humans and ecosystems. Not the Trump administration, which made the United States the only nation to formally withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit planetary warming.
Around the world, countries are racing to adapt to a rapidly warming planet, reduce pollution and build clean energy. China, the only other superpower, has made a strategic decision to adopt clean energy and then sell it abroad, dominating the global markets for electric vehicles, solar panels and other technologies. Even Saudi Arabia, the second-largest producer of oil after the United States, is spending heavily on wind and solar power.
Average global temperatures last year were the hottest on record and 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, a threshold that nations had been working to avoid. Every fraction of a degree of additional warming raises the risk of severe effects and possibly irreversible changes to the planet. Nations must make deep and fast cuts to pollution to avoid a grim future of increasingly violent weather, deadly heat waves, drought, water scarcity and displacement, scientists have said.
But at this perilous moment, the United States is virtually alone in the world in rejecting climate science.
“Here we see a government that is taking a hatchet to the scientific enterprise,” Ms. Cleetus said. “It’s the kind of destruction that will have implications for a while to come.”
David Gelles reports on climate change and leads The Times’s Climate Forward newsletter and events series.
The post The U.S. Under Trump: Alone in Its Climate Denial appeared first on New York Times.
