This story was first published by Grist.
One year ago, with one of the first strokes of his presidential Sharpie, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring a “national energy emergency,” making good on a campaign promise to “drill, baby, drill.” It was the first of many such orders, signaling that the championing of fossil fuels would be a cornerstone of the new administration: A subsequent order pledged to revitalize America’s waning coal industry, eliminate subsidies for electric vehicles approved by Congress under former President Joe Biden, and loosen regulations for domestic producers of fossil fuels. Yet another executive order withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the nearly unanimously adopted international treaty that coordinates the global fight against climate change. He resumed liquefied natural gas permitting paused by his predecessor and reopened United States coastlines to drilling.
On paper, it certainly appears as though Trump has continued to make good on these early promises. He pushed Congress to pass the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, which phases out an extensive set of tax credits — for wind and solar energy, electric vehicles, and other decarbonization tools — that were responsible for much of the progress the U.S. was expected to make toward its Paris Agreement commitments. (That move has already led some companies to abandon new clean energy projects.) Trump’s attacks on the nation’s offshore wind industry, which he recently called “so pathetic and so bad,” have been unrelenting, culminating in a blanket ban on offshore leases last month. A few weeks ago, he upped the ante on his earlier withdrawal from the Paris Agreement by severing ties with the United Nations framework that facilitates international cooperation on matters of climate change, environmental health, and resilience — a treaty that was ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate in 1992.
“It has been an extraordinarily destructive year,” said Rachel Cleetus, climate and energy policy director at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists. It’s not hard to find specific moves that have already done tangible harm to the climate: The EPA, for instance, delayed a requirement that oil and gas operators reduce emissions of methane, an ultra-potent and fast-acting greenhouse gas, for a full year. The Interior Department announced a $625 million investment to “reinvigorate and expand America’s coal industry” and directed a costly Michigan coal plant on the verge of closure to stay open.
However, while these moves have been effective in sowing panic and uncertainty, their long-term effects on the country’s climate policy framework are far from certain. Indeed, only a small fraction of the climate damage threatened by Trump is truly permanent, experts told Grist. That’s not only because many of Trump’s moves may ultimately be ruled illegal — federal judges in Rhode Island, New York, and Virginia, for instance, allowed offshore wind farms in those states to resume construction just last week — but also because executive actions can be reversed by a future president. And the president has not shown much interest in passing energy- or climate-related legislation, a far more durable form of policymaking than executive decree. Despite claims to the contrary, Trump has signed fewer bills than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“He is not changing law,” said Elaine Kamarck, who worked in the Clinton administration and is the founding director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Effective Public Management. “He is changing practice.”
Even something as unprecedented as the EPA’s moves to relinquish its own authority to regulate the emissions that affect human health — a responsibility that is a core tenet part of the agency’s mission and is therefore widely regarded as unlikely to hold up in court — could be unraveled by a future administration even if it’s ruled to be legal, though that process would take years.
“You can’t make up for the lost time, the increased emissions, and the extent that new areas are opened up for [fossil fuel] exploration,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “But from a regulatory perspective, what this administration is doing to EPA and the other agencies are all executive actions that can be undone in the same way they were done.”
The major exception is the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA. If a future administration wants to restore expansive tax credits for wind and solar energy, that president will have to push Congress to pass new climate legislation. But the climate-relevant portions of OBBBA are noteworthy for being subtractive rather than additive — and are perhaps more accurately viewed as a representation of Trump’s quest to refute Biden’s legacy than as a desire to radically alter U.S. energy law. Indeed, the new law left in place the tax credits for other sources of carbon-free energy, including nuclear and geothermal — something that more moderate Republicans who do not share the president’s dismissal of climate science have been quick to note.
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