{"id":231565,"date":"2026-01-07T03:10:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T03:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/231565\/"},"modified":"2026-01-07T03:10:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T03:10:11","slug":"trumps-assault-on-environment-has-set-back-climate-change-fight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/231565\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump’s Assault on Environment Has Set Back Climate Change Fight"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tDonald Trump<\/a> has been on a vendetta against \u201cwindmills\u201d \u2014 and, really, any form of clean energy \u2014 for many years. He has close ties to the fossil fuel industry, essentially telling<\/a> them he\u2019d do whatever they want if they gave his presidential campaign $1 billion. We knew Trump\u2019s first year back in office would be a disaster for the climate \u2014 but experts say the scope of the damage has exceeded their worst fears.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tLike the Los Angeles fires at the start of 2025, which were fueled by climate change<\/a>, the damage that has been done has been overwhelming and brutal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI think that a lot of these actions were straight out of the Project 2025 playbook,\u201d Jennifer Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, tells Rolling Stone. \u201cI think that what has been surprising or shocking has been the speed and the scope and just the complete disregard for the rule of law.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the most recent examples came in December, when Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and one of the architects of Project 2025, announced that the Trump administration was dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. The climate research center provided essential data for climate scientists \u2014 playing a key role<\/a> in everything from weather forecasting to flight safety. Vought called<\/a> it a source of \u201cclimate alarmism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe administration has meanwhile been canceling<\/a> major renewable energy projects in numerous states, which has set up various court battles. It plans<\/a> to lower fuel efficiency standards for motor vehicles, which are one of the primary<\/a> sources of carbon emissions, and the historic climate investments contained in the Inflation Reduction Act were<\/a> largely dismantled \u2014 even though much of the money that was invested went to conservative states.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Biden administration had moved to regulate methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, generated by the oil and gas industry, but those regulations may<\/a> be out the window, too. Dozens<\/a> and dozens<\/a> of other environmental regulations have been repealed \u2014 often to the benefit of large corporations.<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Environmental Protection Agency, typically tasked with protecting the environment, has been totally reoriented. It is working<\/a> to rescind the Endangerment Finding, a 2009 agency decision that has been pivotal for regulating greenhouse gases. The EPA is required by law to determine which \u201cpollutants\u201d it will regulate, and for years CO2 has been one of those pollutants, but the Trump administration is trying to reverse that decision. Doing so would deal a huge blow to efforts to curb carbon emissions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt has been such an all-out, whole-of-government assault on climate progress that the EPA is even removing<\/a> references to human-caused climate change from its website. Perhaps that\u2019s to be expected from an administration that\u2019s been trying<\/a> to convince the world that climate change might actually be a good thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt does seem to me that a reasonable reading of the administration\u2019s actions is that they\u2019re trying to lock us into fossil fuels for the long term,\u201d says Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M University. \u201cWhereas other countries, like China, are going all-in on renewables, because renewables are cheaper.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile utility bills have been increasing<\/a>, Dessler says the Trump administration has been pushing the country toward \u201cexpensive, dirty\u201d energy. Renewable energy has been cheaper<\/a> than fossil fuel-derived energy for some time now.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis is not just an attack on regulation. This is an attack on actual good governance,\u201d says Daniel Kammen, a distinguished professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley. \u201cAbout 20 years ago, so many clean energy and clean air policies were good environmentally and socially, but they were not home runs economically. They\u2019ve all become home runs economically.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tChina, on the other hand, reportedly<\/a> invested over $600 billion into renewable energy in 2025. The country is producing so many renewable energy components, such as wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries, that it\u2019s exporting<\/a> them around the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThey\u2019re going to be the energy provider for the world,\u201d Dessler says. \u201cThey want to be the dominant economy of the 21st century, and controlling energy is the way you do that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tKammen notes the irony of the United States playing a major role in the development of renewable energy, but then moving away from it now that it\u2019s economically viable and the country can benefit from its use. He says it\u2019s \u201cbad economic policy, bad environmental policy, and bad competitiveness policy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cChina, Vietnam, Germany \u2014 they\u2019re all laughing at us because we did all the heavy lifting,\u201d Kammen says. \u201cWe did all the R&D for decades, and now it\u2019s time to reap the benefits. This administration has decided to give the benefits of our hard work to everybody else and to take no benefits for themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe effects will be felt in the short term when people are calculating their utility bills, but there will also be many long-term effects. The world doesn\u2019t have an infinite amount of time to win the fight against climate change, and each fraction of a degree of warming beyond two degrees Celsius could make hurricanes more powerful, wildfires more destructive, droughts more common, and extreme heat more deadly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAll they care about is enriching themselves,\u201d Kammen says. \u201cThis is a group of Neanderthals in power.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile 79-year-old Donald Trump won\u2019t live to see the full consequences of the suffering he is unleashing on the world, future generations will. Many will likely die due to the decisions that are being made today. Kammen says what\u2019s happening is an affront to humanity, and that the people involved deserve to be held accountable for their actions.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThese people should all be prosecuted someday,\u201d Kammen says, portraying the administration\u2019s assault on the environment as a crime against humanity. \u201cI\u2019m not joking. These people should be prosecuted.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump has been on a vendetta against \u201cwindmills\u201d \u2014 and, really, any form of clean energy \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":231566,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[2885,969,246,61,60,82],"class_list":["post-231565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-donald-trump","tag-environment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}