November 9, 2020
Scientists Relieved by Trump Loss
By Ben Gurin
There is no question that when President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January 2021, he will make radical changes to the United States’ current climate policies. Biden’s win has come as a relief to many environmentalists who worried about the possible consequences of a second Trump term. In less than four years in office, The Trump administration has reversed 72 environmental protections, with 27 more in progress. Policy experts have little doubt that four more years of President Trump would have allowed for even more environmental rollbacks, including those he has already been pursuing.
The climate policies that Trump has reversed thus far have included laws on air pollution and emissions, drilling and extraction, infrastructure and planning, animal protection, water pollution, and toxic substances. Many of Trump’s rollbacks have undone measures passed under President Barack Obama during his own time in the White House.
Just two months into his presidency, Trump signed an executive order to repeal and replace the Clean Power Plan, one of Obama’s key environmental policies. The plan, which had been announced in August 2015 and was to take effect in 2022, called for a 32% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. by 2030. Although many scientists have argued that the plan was not ambitious enough to make necessary progress on reducing emissions, it was a step forward for climate action in the U.S.
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President Trump signed an executive order to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline and North Dakota Access Pipeline in January 2017. Both pipelines had been halted by President Obama in his second term.
An order signed by the president in January 2017 called for the expedition of environmental reviews and approvals for infrastructure projects. The order intended to undermine the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which had been requiring thorough environmental assessments and impact statements for proposed projects since 1969.
The goal of Trump’s anti-NEPA action was to allow for the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline and recommence the use of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) without review. Since then, the approval of Keystone XL, an extension of the existing Keystone Pipeline, had been tied up in courts until this past July when it was blocked by the Supreme Court. However, the DAPL, which had been halted under President Obama, has been carrying oil from North Dakota to Illinois for the past three years since Trump’s order.
In September of this year, the research organization Rhodium Group estimated the potential long-term effects of Trump’s environmental setbacks throughout his presidency. The analysis used a system called RHG-NEMS (for Rhodium Group National Energy Modeling System), based on a method used by the Energy Information Agency (EIA). The system “capture(s) all current state and federal policy – including rollbacks,” and “reflect(s) our own energy market and economic assumptions.”
RHG’s results showed that Trump’s anti-environmental policies thus far will most likely lead to “1.8 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 2035,” an amount greater than the total greenhouse gas emissions of Canada, Germany, and Britain in a single year. RHG calculates that the highest amount of emissions from Trump’s presidency will have resulted from rollbacks of vehicle fuel standards. The research group asserts that emissions from the U.S. by 2035 will be “3% higher than they would have been absent Trump’s rollbacks.”
Leading up to the election, climate scientists were concerned that four more years of Trump’s environmental orders would cause irreparable and catastrophic harm to the earth’s climate and its ability to sustain human life. Climate scientist Michael Mann told The Guardian that a “second Trump term [would be] game over for the climate,” arguing that another four years under Trump would make it “essentially impossible” for the planet to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Mann is referring to the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5° C. The report states that in order to avoid irreversible and devastating consequences of climate change, the world’s population will have to cut its emissions in half by 2030.
Mann says that because of the environmental damage the Trump administration has caused in the two years since the IPCC’s report was published, it will be even more difficult to meet the report’s goal. He estimates that if Trump were to be in power for a second term, the world’s reduction of greenhouse gas emissions per year necessary to hit the 2030 target would be tripled.
Now that Biden has won the presidency and Trump will be leaving office in January, the world’s scientists, policy experts and environmental advocates can breathe a sigh of relief. To them, averting four more years of environmental setbacks means a fighting chance of protecting humankind from the most disastrous effects of climate change.