As the 47th president, Donald Trump and his cabinet will impact environmental policies that affect everything from land conservation to electric vehicles to climate change adaptation.
During his campaign, Trump made speeches decrying the Biden administration’s electric vehicle regulations and spending under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, while also promising to “drill, baby, drill” and fight against what he has called the “big hoax” of climate change.
His presidential win may mean the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 could be implemented. The right-wing think tank’s policy blueprint lays out plans for a Trump administration to “break up” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, withdraw from land conservation initiatives enacted by the Biden administration, rescind all climate policies from the government’s foreign aid programs, withdraw from the Paris Agreement and reduce regulations on polluting facilities.
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On Monday, Trump chose former New York Congressman Lee Zeldin to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. During Zeldin’s tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives he voted against many policies protecting public lands and fighting against climate change. The League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy group, gave Zeldin a lifetime score of 14%, meaning he cast a pro-environmental vote just 14% of the time while he was a congressman.
The implications of a president who works against any progress made in addressing climate change could be massive. Catastrophic impacts of climate change already have been felt globally and locally.
Climate change has made the devastating flooding in Spain, bushfires in Australia, heatwaves in Mexico and hurricanes hitting the United States, to name a few, more frequent and more destructive, according to World Weather Attribution, an international network of scientists who study the impact of climate change on major weather events.
Buffalo has seen rising temperatures, more frequent and more destructive seiche events on Lake Erie as the lake freezes over less frequently, and tornadoes from remnants of Hurricane Beryl, which was fueled by warmer-than-normal ocean waters.
“Regardless of political leadership at local, state or federal levels, we remain committed to our mission, our Western New York community and protecting and restoring our Great Lakes,” said Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper Executive Director Jill Jedlicka. “Clean water and healthy ecosystems should never be politicized, and we encourage everyone to continue to be strong advocates and defenders of our water and environment. While we don’t yet know for certain what to expect with the next administration, we promise our community we will do everything in our power to defend the clean water progress we have made and stand up to any repeated efforts to weaken the Clean Water Act or Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.”
What did Trump do before?
During Trump’s first term as president he rolled back more than 100 environmental rules, according to an analysis by the New York Times. Included in that list were Obama-era fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards for passenger cars and light trucks, a requirement for oil and gas companies to report methane emissions, standards designed to limit toxic emissions from major industrial polluters and guidance directing federal agencies to include greenhouse gas emissions in environmental reviews.
Many of the rollbacks were challenged in court and much of Biden’s presidency was spent undoing Trump’s work.
However, Trump’s legacy bore out in the courts as well as his appointed conservative Supreme Court justices issued rulings that weakened wetland protections in the United States and limited the EPA’s ability to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
The Clean Air Coalition of Western New York’s Executive Director Chris Murawski said Trump’s second term presents “a direct and grave danger to the future ability to protect residents from pollution.”
“During Trump’s first term, he suspended pollution enforcement on permitted factories and facilities, and Clean Air stepped up and organized with others resulting in the New York State attorney general joining a lawsuit against the EPA which forced facilities to comply,” Murawski said. “All evidence points to an even greater attack on long-standing popular bipartisan protections such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, this time with a more radical partisan Supreme Court having the final say.”
‘Drill, baby, drill’
While on the campaign trail, Trump promised to “frack, frack, frack and drill, baby, drill,” as one of his methods to decrease energy prices.
This flies in the face of the United Nations climate agreement in December 2023 to transition away from fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal in energy systems that are heating the planet. It also goes against the Paris climate accord, which Trump has promised to pull out of when he takes office.
The Paris accord is a legally binding international treaty signed by 196 parties at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris in 2015. By signing on, countries promised to pursue efforts to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.
In recent years, the U.S. has produced more natural gas and oil than ever before − a boom that started during Trump’s previous presidency and increased under Biden.
Trump plans to “free up the vast stores of liquid gold on America’s public land for energy development,” according to his Agenda47 campaign website.
To do this, Project 2025 proposes that Trump reopen much of the nation’s public lands for oil and gas drilling, roll back Endangered Species Act rules defining critical habitat, drop the threat of punishments for incidentally killing birds during oil and gas development activities and remove regulations requiring federal agencies to evaluate environmental effects of actions such as permitting oil and gas development.
Trump specifically calls out the Marcellus Shale in his agenda, noting that he aims to “remove all red tape that is leaving oil and natural gas projects stranded, including speeding up approval of natural gas pipelines into the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and New York.”
The Marcellus Shale contains an estimated 214 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Appalachian Basin.
Electric cars
During his presidency, Trump has promised to roll back Biden’s “series of crippling mandates designed to force Americans into expensive electric cars.”
New EPA regulations essentially forced automakers to ramp up production of electric vehicles. The rules, finalized in March, were expected to result in EVs accounting for up to 56% of new passenger vehicles sold for model years 2030 through 2032.
The rules were not written as a ban on the sale of gas cars, but were designed to shift the United States away from relying on fossil fuels for transportation, according to EPA officials.
Nationally, electric vehicles represented 9.96% of new light-duty vehicle sales in the second quarter of 2024, up from 9.34% in the first quarter and 9.05% in the second quarter of 2023, according to Tonya Parish, communications manager for the Alliance for Automotive Innovation.
In New York, electric vehicle sales were up to 9.44% of sales in the second quarter of 2024 from 8.3% the year before, Parish told The Buffalo News.
The sale of electric vehicles in the United States under Trump’s presidency also could be impacted should he “rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act” as he promised during a Sept. 5 speech to the New York Economic Club.
The Inflation Reduction Act includes tax credits of up to $7,500 for eligible buyers of qualified clean vehicles made in North America.
Inflation Reduction Act funds under Trump
Additionally, the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022 provides billions in tax credits for individuals and businesses for investing in clean energy projects, as well as billions in loans and grants for projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect against climate change impacts.
Locally, one project funded by the IRA is the City of Buffalo’s $8 million tree grant. The city is expected to plant thousands of trees over the next few years to combat heat islands, reduce stormwater runoff, help clean the air and improve home values, among other things. Trump may find it difficult to garner support for rescinding or reappropriating the unspent funds from the IRA as much of the funds from it have gone to Republican-led districts in the United States, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from MIT and Rhodium’s Clean Investment Monitor.
Since the bill’s passage, $165 billion went to congressional districts where a plurality of the voters backed Trump, whereas $54 billion went to areas that backed Biden, according to the Post’s analysis.
No Republican lawmakers voted for the IRA, however, and some have called it a waste of taxpayer dollars.
Project 2025: Break up NOAA
Project 2025 also lays out several major initiatives that attempt to delegitimize the science of climate change and derail climate change mitigation and adaptation work in the United States should the Trump administration carry it out.
This includes breaking up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and privatizing some of its functions, including the National Weather Service’s weather forecasting operations.
NOAA’s departments “form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” Project 2025 says.
Should the Trump administration follow Project 2025, it could disband NOAA departments that focus on climate change research.
Additionally, under the Trump administration, the U.S. Agency for International Development should “rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs” and “narrowly limit funding to traditional climate mitigation efforts,” according to Project 2025.
Project 2025 also calls for withdrawing from the 30×30 executive order, which was signed by Biden in 2021 and laid out the goal of the administration to conserve 30% of the nation’s land and water by 2030.
New York followed Biden’s lead and in 2022 Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the state’s own 30×30 initiative.
“New Yorkers rely on our clean water for recreation, forests to provide wildlife habitats, and the outdoor spaces for jobs and adventures,” Hochul said in a statement at the time. “It’s more important than ever to safeguard these resources and setting the goal to conserve 30 percent of public land by 2030 will ensure we’re protecting our state for future generations.”
Project 2025 wants to remove federal protections for the federally threatened grizzly bear, threatened and endangered gray wolf and the greater sage-grouse − iconic wildlife that have long been imperiled by human development, hunting and climate change.
Project 2025’s outline for what could happen during Trump’s presidency is “very alarming when it comes to climate and protection of the natural world,” said Andrew Wetzler, senior vice president of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Nature Program. “Ultimately, we need federal leadership if we’re going to successfully tackle climate change,” Wetzler said. “But we will be counting on states and local governments now to lead the way.”
Reach climate and environment reporter Mackenzie Shuman at mshuman@buffnews.com or 716-715-4722.
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