Trump 2 is pushing environmentalists to rethink their approach

The administration is trying to erase climate-change regulation

HALF A CENTURY ago Republicans were leading the charge to clean up the environment. Richard Nixon prioritised de-smogging America, protecting endangered species and establishing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the country’s pollution regulator. But Tricky Dick’s environmentalism was complicated. The Watergate tapes capture a conversation from 1971 between the president (“You can talk to me in complete confidence, I can assure you”), Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca. The two auto executives allowed that some rules made sense (“The citizens of the US must be protected from their own idiocy”) but complained about the costs of complying. Nixon stammered his sympathies. Pollution was real, he argued, but he was “extremely pro-business” and, in fact, some environmentalists were “enemies of the system”.

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President Donald Trump is using a version of that argument to erase the regulatory framework that Nixon helped create. “Overregulation has really suppressed economic opportunity,” argues Mandy Gunasekara, the author of the “Project 2025” chapter on the EPA, whose ideas for how to reform the agency are being put in place. The EPA has announced its intention to weaken emissions and pollutant standards for coal- and gas-fired power plants, renounce its ability to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and stop updating research that helps firms calculate those emissions, among other things. The House appropriations committee wants to cut the EPA’s budget by 23% next year.

Environmentalists are not surprised. The administration’s tactics reflect the way climate policy has become entangled in the culture wars. On the day he unveiled the agency’s deregulatory bonanza, Lee Zeldin, the EPA’s administrator and a former congressman for New York, declared: “Today the green new scam ends.”

Mr Zeldin’s biggest swing is his announcement that the EPA will move to rescind the “endangerment finding”, a scientific judgment from 2009 that underpins the agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions—from cars, for example—as “pollutants” under the Clean Air Act. The Supreme Court has several times declined to review the finding, but the Trump administration will be hoping this time is different.

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Mr Zeldin’s strategy resembles “a cluster-bomb approach”, says Michael Gerrard of the Sabin Centre for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. Several scientists—who Mr Gerrard says are “climate minimisers, not climate deniers”—handpicked by Chris Wright, the energy secretary, wrote a report suggesting that the science on climate change is not settled. Defenders of the endangerment finding reckon that argument won’t hold water in court: the effect of climate change on the environment and public health has only become clearer. But the administration also contends that regulating emissions is too important an issue for the agency to pursue without express direction from Congress. The process of rescinding the finding, and the inevitable lawsuits to come, could take years to shake out.

The episode has shed light on the flimsy structures for regulating emissions at the federal level. Even the EPA’s staunchest defenders admit that the Clean Air Act, while remarkably successful at eliminating pollutants, is an awkward vehicle through which to tackle climate change. Its effectiveness has been limited by the courts and changes in administration. Additionally, most of the decline in America’s greenhouse-gas emissions in recent years can be traced to the transition from coal to gas, not federal regulation. “It’s not perfect,” says Mary Nichols, who ran the agency’s air and radiation programme in the 1990s and later built California’s air-pollution regime. “It would be better if Congress had passed one of several different efforts that have been put forward…that focuses only on global warming, but obviously that hasn’t happened.”

The Trump administration’s assault on the endangerment finding, and the EPA more broadly, has pushed some climate hawks to question how they should proceed. After more than a decade of ping-ponging between Democratic administrations that try to regulate emissions and Republican presidents who roll back those rules, is the status quo worth preserving?

Noah Kaufman, a former adviser to Barack Obama and Joe Biden who is now at Columbia University, argues that climate policy in America has a “path dependency problem”. Climate advocates may cling to a policy because it already exists—or because Mr Trump is attacking it—and not necessarily because it works well. It seemed plausible for the EPA to try to regulate emissions using the Clean Air Act in 2009, but 16 years, two Trump electoral victories and many conservative Supreme Court decisions later, perhaps a new strategy is needed. “The climate-policy advocacy community is freaking out justifiably because there is not science to back up what the administration is doing,” says Mr Kaufman, but “let’s try something else.”

While Mr Trump is in office most of the action in climate policy will take place outside Washington, DC. “It’s not the most optimal way to regulate against climate change,” says Gina McCarthy, a former EPA administrator and adviser to Mr Biden, “but we’ll have to go to the states.” Plenty of states are already working towards net-zero emissions, have clean-energy targets and, on the West Coast at least, economy-wide carbon markets.

Further inland, Ohio just passed a law to incentivise and streamline new energy projects praised by groups as disparate as the Nature Conservancy (an environmentalist outfit) and Americans for Prosperity (a libertarian group founded by the Koch brothers). The law speeds permitting for all kinds of energy projects, prioritises the redevelopment of former mines and brownfield sites, and ends subsidies for coal. It may prove to be a template for other states as they try to plan for more electricity generation to feed power-hungry data centres while keeping energy prices in check. California is implementing laws passed in 2023 that require big firms to disclose their carbon emissions. Other states may follow the Golden State.

A potential flurry of state legislation helps explain why even the fossil-fuel industry was not ecstatic about the Trump administration’s potential repeal of the endangerment finding. Leaving climate policy to the states means firms will have to comply with a patchwork of divergent policies. “I’m not aware of any sort of industry trade association that was pushing for this,” says Jeff Holmstead, who was an EPA official under George W. Bush and now represents energy firms.

...is the air that I breathe

Yet there is retrenchment at the state level, too. Even before Congress revoked California’s waivers—which since the 1960s have allowed the state to set stricter vehicle-emissions rules—other states had begun to back away from their commitments to follow California’s aggressive policies on zero-emissions trucks. California, too, may allow for new oil drilling to keep local refineries from shutting down. This is not a time for making big statements and setting ambitious goals, says Ms Nichols.

This new reluctance to talk about the pace of the energy transition recalls that conversation in Nixon’s Oval Office all those decades ago. “I don’t think we want to talk to you today about emissions,” Ford told the president. “It’s very political.”

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