Trump's climate policies

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In the crosshairs of his agenda — according to written statements the Trump campaign made shortly before the Nov. 8 election — is a 2009 determination by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that greenhouse gases are dangerous to human health and security, a ruling that serves as the foundation for the EPA’s efforts to curb climate-damaging emissions and that affects its governing of everything from automobile exhaust to power plants to refrigerators. But overturning that rule — known as the “endangerment finding” — might prove difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish with anything like the simple administrative stroke of the pen, according to legal experts.

It looks like an uphill climb for Trump's climate agenda - Business Insider

Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said. Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.

Trump to scrap Nasa climate research in crackdown on ‘politicized science’ | Environment | The Guardian

In the shorter term, however, environmentalists have to worry about the potential reversal of a trend toward tighter and more stringent environmental regulation that dates to the 1970s (with a limited interruption during the Reagan years). After all, Trump promised during the campaign to undo Obama’s climate change policies, and this week he appointed EPA foe Myron Ebell to his transition team. According to comments from Trump’s transition team, many of the environmental community’s most prized policies regarding coal-fired power plant emissions, the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the 2009 EPA endangerment finding concerning greenhouse gases are all possible targets for a new Trump administration. In addition, Trump could use a president’s hitherto untested power to withdraw federal lands from protected status via the Antiquities Act.

“Donald Trump now has the unflattering distinction of being the only head of state in the entire world to reject the scientific consensus that mankind is driving climate change.”

Election Could Reverse Decades-Long Environmental Trend | RealClearPolitics

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President Donald Trump will issue his long-promised executive order rolling back federal government efforts to fight climate change Tuesday. The wide-ranging order, which will be accompanied by other environmental directives, targets Obama-era policies across the government, including in the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Interior, and the Department of Defense.

It directs the EPA to revisit the Clean Power Plan, which limits carbon pollution from power plants and was considered the center-piece of former President Barack Obama's climate policy. Additionally, Trump is asking the Justice Department to stop defending the plan in court. The president will instruct agencies to rescind a moratorium on coal leasing on public lands; rewrite limits on methane emissions from the oil and gas industry; and ignore the EPA's current calculation on the costs of carbon pollution. There are also broad directives reversing an Obama initiative requiring that federal departments consider climate mitigation strategy and the national security risks of global warming.

Trump Just Released His Plan to Gut Obama’s Climate Policies. It’s Worse Than You Thought. | Mother Jones

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Climate change is going to be (and already is) incredibly expensive. But under a new policy from the Trump administration, federal agencies will be able to write off the cost of climate change — defined in cost-benefit analysis as the social cost of carbon — as zero. It may even be calculated as beneficial, if fossil fuel supporters get their way.

In his broad executive order on energy, President Trump on Tuesday disbanded the Interagency Working Group the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases. He also withdrew the group’s technical documents, which form the scientific and economic basis for calculating the social cost of carbon and give federal agencies a key tool to measure the benefits cutting greenhouse gas emissions..

The federal government no longer acknowledges that climate change has a cost

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Methane is about 28 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas compared to CO2..

Environmentalists are asking a federal appeals court to reinstate immediately the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) methane pollution rule for oil and natural gas drillers. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled earlier this month that the Trump administration broke the law when it tried to delay the methane rule’s enforcement in June. But the court let the EPA continue its delay for two weeks. That period ended Friday, and the Trump administration, which is trying to repeal the rule, did not ask for an appeal of the original ruling.

Greens ask court to reinstate EPA methane pollution rule | TheHill

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Amazing stuff this..

Staff at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have been told to avoid using the term climate change in their work, with the officials instructed to reference “weather extremes” instead. A series of emails obtained by the Guardian between staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a USDA unit that oversees farmers’ land conservation, show that the incoming Trump administration has had a stark impact on the language used by some federal employees around climate change.

USDA's advice to staff on climate change language
Avoid → use instead
Climate change → weather extremes
Climate change adaptation → resilience to weather extremes/intense weather events: drought, heavy rain, spring ponding
Reduce greenhouse gases → build soil organic matter, increase nutrient use efficiency
Sequester carbon → build soil organic matter


A missive from Bianca Moebius-Clune, director of soil health, lists terms that should be avoided by staff and those that should replace them. “Climate change” is in the “avoid” category, to be replaced by “weather extremes”. Instead of “climate change adaption”, staff are asked to use “resilience to weather extremes”. The primary cause of human-driven climate change is also targeted, with the term “reduce greenhouse gases” blacklisted in favor of “build soil organic matter, increase nutrient use efficiency”. Meanwhile, “sequester carbon” is ruled out and replaced by “build soil organic matter”.

US federal department is censoring use of term 'climate change', emails reveal | Environment | The Guardian

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Will be good to follow this..

The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration. The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies, which has not yet been made public, concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited. “Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” a draft of the report states. A copy of it was obtained by The New York Times.

Government Report Finds Drastic Impact of Climate Change on U.S. - The New York Times

Climate scientists who work for the federal government fear that President Trump or his administration will try to suppress a new study on climate change’s impact on the United States, according to a new report. The New York Times obtained a copy of the report, which is waiting for approval from the Trump administration before it can be made public. The report concludes that Americans are already feeling the effects of climate change and says it is “extremely likely” that the majority of global temperature increases in the past 60 years are partially due to human influence. The report also details the warming trends of more than 1.6 degree Fahrenheit from 1880-2015 are likely linked to human activity. “Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are primarily responsible for observed climate changes in the industrial era,” one portion of the report reads. “There are no alternative explanations, and no natural cycles are found in the observational record that can explain the observed changes in climate.”

Government scientists fear Trump will suppress climate change study: report | TheHill

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US president Donald Trump's administration has disbanded a government advisory committee intended to help the country prepare for a changing climate. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration established the committee in 2015 to help businesses and state and local governments make use of the next national climate assessment. The legally mandated report, due in 2018, will lay out the latest climate-change science and describe how global warming is likely to affect the United States, now and in coming decades.

US government disbands climate-science advisory committee : Nature News & Comment

The Trump administration plans to revisit greenhouse gas emissions and efficiency standards for freight trucks just months before the standards are scheduled to take effect, a decision environmental groups view as yet another capitulation by the administration to industry demands. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation announced on Thursday formal steps to begin reconsidering the greenhouse gas pollution and fuel economy standards of large trucks, focused on the standards for freight trailers. The Obama administration designed the standards to make heavy-duty tractor-trailers more efficient and less polluting.

Trump administration eyes truck emissions standards for its next climate rollback – ThinkProgress

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It’s no secret that President Trump has been busy trying to unravel nearly every part of President Obama’s climate legacy: our commitment to the Paris Agreement, the Clean Power Plan, and so much else. But his latest target is even more ambitious: the idea of using science for the public benefit.

In an especially worrying development, Trump administration officials in the Department of Commerce have decided to disband the Federal Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment, a key panel that was working with scientists to make their findings broadly accessible and useful inside and outside government. The panel was disbanded on Sunday.

Once More, Trump Does Everything in His Power to Bury Science – Mother Jones

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Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s long-awaited grid study is finally out. But while Trump officials clearly tried to rewrite the previously leaked staff draft to give the impression that renewable energy sources are a threat to baseload power and grid resilience, they mostly botched the job.

Back in April, Perry ordered a study to back up his claims that solar and wind power were undermining the U.S. electric grid’s reliability and forcing the premature retirement of baseload nuclear and coal plants. In July, Bloomberg obtained the draft report, written by Department of Energy staff, and revealed that they found essentially the opposite, as we reported.

Trump officials rewrite Energy Dept. study to make renewables look bad, fail anyway – ThinkProgress

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We keep saying amazing, but that's because it just is. If even Marco Rubio starts sounding reasonable you know something weird must be going on..

In a Friday night news dump, the White House announced that President Donald Trump Plans to nominate Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-OK), a climate science denier to be administrator of NASA. Bridenstine is a politician without any scientific credentials, unlike previous NASA chiefs, and for that reason his nomination has already been criticized by both Florida’s senators Marco Rubio ® and Bill Nelson (D), Politico reports. Rubio said, “I just think [his nomination] could be devastating for the space program.”

NASA scientists have led the way in documenting the scientific reality of climate change. But in 2013, Bridenstine not only gave a speech on the House floor filled with standard denier talking points, he actually ended his remarks with a demand that President Obama apologize for funding research into climate science.

“Mr. Speaker, global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago,” claimed Bridenstine, “Global temperature changes, when they exist, correlate with Sun output and ocean cycles.” Although Bridenstine serves on the House science committee, those remarks were in contradiction to well-established science at the time–and indeed to NASA’s own research. Back in 2010, a NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) science brief summarizing recent research, explains, “A study by GISS  climate scientists recently published in the journal Science shows that atmospheric CO2 operates as a thermostat to control the temperature of Earth.”

Trump names climate science denier to run NASA – ThinkProgress

   

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President Trump has stacked his administration with officials who doubt the scientific consensus behind man-made climate change, underscoring a growing divide within the Republican party. Even as leading scientists, environmentalists and most Democrats accept research that shows climate change accelerating — and as some see it contributing to the two mammoth hurricanes that have threatened the United States this year — some in Trump’s administration have openly raised doubts.

The rise of climate change skeptics has been most pronounced in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which helped lead then-President Obama’s efforts to regulate climate change-causing pollutants. Administrator Scott Pruitt has questioned carbon dioxide’s role as a “primary contributor” to a warming climate, something accepted by most researchers. He’s also called for a public debate over climate change science, a proposal that has caused scientists, environmentalists and former regulators to bristle.

“I think it’s going to have a chilling effect on science overall because it’s going to elevate those scientists who are in the vast minority and give them a stage that, frankly, they don’t deserve,” said Christine Whitman, President George W. Bush’s first EPA administrator, who called the proposal “shameful” in a Friday New York Times op-ed.

Trump stacks administration with climate change skeptics | TheHill