IN THIS ISSUE:
- Energy, Climate Top Agenda Items for Trump’s Busy First Days: Pt. 1
- Contra NOAA, Antarctic Sea Ice Is Well Within the ‘Range of Observed Variability’
Energy, Climate Top Agenda Items for Trump’s Busy First Days: Pt. 1
There’s a (re)new(ed) sheriff in town.
With the swearing in of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States, the nation’s environment, energy, and climate policies took a dramatic shift. Trump promised to end climate lockdowns and unjustified, harmful diktats restricting personal freedom and consumer choice and imposing energy subservience to international bureaucrats, green-energy profiteers, power-hungry elites, and the Chinese Communist Party. Trump’s initial flurry of executive orders (EO) counts as promises kept.
Below I discuss several climate and energy EOs Trump signed on his first day, considering the importance of a few of them in some detail. Because Trump had so many orders teed up—47 on energy, climate, and the environment so far, by one count—each one being consequential, I will cover Trump’s actions in two parts. I’ll analyze some initial orders this week, and some during the next CCW, which will give me time to review EOs on energy and climate Trump signs after the initial flurry of his first 48 hours in office.
Among the first EOs Trump signed was one EO rescinding 78 EOs, directives, and memorandums his predecessor, President Joe Biden, had signed during his term in office. The reversals included Biden EOs that wasted money and resources on phony climate science research tying climate change to public health problems; Biden’s order “tackling the climate crisis at home and abroad” (his signature order initiating his “all-of-government approach” to climate change, making climate considerations a primary concern in every cabinet agency and department and all their actions); ending the climate change support office and directives to account for climate financial risks; halting Biden’s clean car initiative, which served as a justification for the Biden EPA’s EV mandate; ending restrictions on federal infrastructure, buildings, and repairs to ensure “sustainability” (which made cost and effectiveness secondary considerations) in contracting for projects, to boost the fortune of purportedly “green” developers and contractors; reversing Biden’s offshore oil ban; and ending Biden’s offices of environmental justice placed within each of the departments and agencies.
Trump’s EO rescinding all these orders in one fell swoop was masterful, will save the country and the American people billions of dollars, and will improve government performance by focusing on the federal government’s core functions. Only one of his recissions may not stick: his EO on offshore oil. This action will almost certainly face legal challenges, which might be successful because the law allowing presidents to withdraw areas of federal waters from offshore oil and gas development does not have a specific provision allowing subsequent presidents to reverse such actions. As Reuters reports,
While the law expressly grant[s] presidents the authority to set aside lands, the 1953 measure is silent on whether they are able to revoke prior decisions. The question has only ever been addressed once in court, during Trump’s first administration.
Environmental groups sued after Trump, in April 2017, issued an executive order designed to revoke a similar decision by Democratic former President Barack Obama. Obama invoked OCSLA and put the Arctic’s Chukchi Sea, part of the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea off-limits to oil leasing, along with a large swath of Atlantic Ocean off the U.S. East Coast.
In 2019, U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason in Anchorage ruled Trump’s order was unlawful. “Had Congress intended to grant the President revocation authority, it could have done so explicitly, as it had previously done in several (but not all) of its previously enacted upland laws,” she wrote.
This may be one of those policies Trump has to work with Congress to reverse. They should reverse it, just as they should end the president’s unilateral authority to declare wide swaths of public lands as national monuments. Congress should have to explicitly approve, on a case-by-case basis, any such sweeping declarations locking up the nation’s lands and waters. Doing so would reinforce the legislature’s specifically delegated role in our constitutional republic and rein in the imperial presidency, whether left or right.
Another Trump EO halts new offshore wind industrial facilities permitting and stays consideration of onshore wind. Trump understands offshore wind is unnecessary, expensive, ugly, and dangerous to wildlife and traditional ocean activities. Heartland has been in court for a year fighting one offshore wind facility. This order may not stop it, since it has construction permits in hand, but it would prevent the issuance of permits to operate the facility. In any case, Trump’s EO destroys Biden’s plan of wind farms up and down the East Coast, and it may discourage those planning to construct these facilities or request offshore wind leases from doing so, because delays increase costs. This order may do for offshore wind what Biden’s actions did to the already approved Keystone XL pipeline: scuttle further development.
Trump also issued an EO rescinding Biden’s halt to new liquefied natural gas terminals and permits. This comes at a critical junction for our European allies faced with continuing energy shortfalls due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Natural-gas exports also reduce our trade deficit, since it is one item the world wants where the United States can dominate.
Trump recognizes energy is the foundation for a country’s prosperity and that being beholden to foreign powers for the nation’s energy supply and technologies is a national-security weakness. As a result, another Trump EO declares a National Energy Emergency.
This may prove to be the most consequential order of all in the long term. Under national emergency orders, the president can waive a lot of rules, regulations, studies, analyses, hearings, and public comment periods, to expedite critical infrastructure, in this case energy infrastructure. This would allow Trump to hasten construction of pipelines and railways, avoiding the copious delays such projects typically face because of lawsuits by environmental groups. Trump specifically mentioned oil, gas, coal, uranium, and critical minerals, all things we have in abundance and can produce, develop, and use right here. Trump left off the list anything to do with wind and solar power because they are expensive and unreliable and China controls the market for the key elements that go into them.
This emergency order could expedite the leasing and permitting of new oil and gas operations on federal lands and offshore; mining for coal, uranium, and critical minerals; and development of energy projects to bring the power they can deliver to market relatively quickly. That would shore up our industrial base by delivering cheap energy and chemicals and enabling big tech and its high-energy-demand AI facilities to flourish here.
“We will drill, baby, drill,” Trump said at his inauguration. When he signed the emergency order, Trump said it “means you can do whatever you have to do to get out of that problem.”
The final two actions I’ll discuss this week are Trump’s withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement (for the second time), and his EO on Unleashing American Energy.
Everyone knew Trump would withdraw the United States from the ill-conceived Paris climate agreement once he took office. He had done so previously, only to have Biden put us back in, and Trump had promised to withdraw again. The Paris agreement has done, and in fact can do, nothing to prevent or slow climate change, and as Trump rightly noted it put the United States at an economic and geopolitical disadvantage to China by throttling U.S. fossil fuel use, the lifeblood of the economy, while China increased its use of coal, oil, and natural gas.
It’s my opinion that Trump should, on his last day in office, submit the Paris agreement to the Senate with a recommendation against ratifying it. Once it is there, no president can touch it unless and until the Senate acts. Since there is insufficient support to ratify the agreement, it will be dead regardless of whether the Senate rejects it or just never holds a vote.
With his signature on the Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements EO, Trump went beyond simply adding a nail in the coffin of the Paris agreement: he also rescinded America’s support for every climate agreement subsequent to the initial U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) treaty the United States joined through ratification in October 1992. In an article at America Out Loud, International Climate Science Coalition Director Tom Harris listed a few of the agreements voided by Trump’s signature on this EO:
• Kyoto Protocol (1997) established the Adaptation Fund (2001), which financed adaptation projects and programs in developing countries. Kyoto reinforced the financial mechanism under the UNFCCC, including the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the Special Climate Change Fund and the Least Developed Countries Fund.
• Bali Action Plan (2007): emphasized need for financial resources to support climate change adaptation and mitigation in developing nations
• Copenhagen Accord (2009): Under the Green Climate Fund, developed countries committed to mobilize $100 billion per year by 2020 to support climate action in developing countries.
• Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage (2013): the granddaddy of them all. It addresses loss and damage supposedly caused by climate change impacts in developing countries that we supposedly caused. Following this would mean the US would be on the hook for literally trillions of dollars to help developing nations recover from extreme weather events.
• Lima-Paris Action Agenda (2014): aimed to mobilize climate finance and support for developing countries, paid for by us, of course.
• New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG) (2024): The GCF $100 billion per year was tripled to a $300 billion annual commitment, as agreed upon at the last UN Climate Conference in December 2024.
Trump explained in the EO why it was necessary, writing:
In recent years, the United States has purported to join international agreements and initiatives that do not reflect our country’s values or our contributions to the pursuit of economic and environmental objectives. Moreover, these agreements steer American taxpayer dollars to countries that do not require, or merit, financial assistance in the interests of the American people.
Trump’s EO freezes U.S. spending on malinvestments in green energy scams and corruption in developing countries and directs federal agencies to focus solely on programs that advance U.S. interests first in international agreements—something no climate agreement has ever done.
One is left to wonder how many other countries might follow suit, with the United States out of the Paris climate agreement and the myriad other international government/corporate-elite mandates and money grabs.
Finally, the Unleashing American Energy order is to some degree a necessary condition and roadmap for the National Energy Emergency order to be truly effective. This EO has many provisions, and I will discuss now what is arguably the most critical one. I’ll analyze additional provisions of this order in the next CCW.
Explaining why this order is justified, Trump’s order states:
America is blessed with an abundance of energy and natural resources that have historically powered our Nation’s economic prosperity. In recent years, burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations have impeded the development of these resources, limited the generation of reliable and affordable electricity, reduced job creation, and inflicted high energy costs upon our citizens. These high energy costs devastate American consumers by driving up the cost of transportation, heating, utilities, farming, and manufacturing, while weakening our national security.
It is thus in the national interest to unleash America’s affordable and reliable energy and natural resources.
Section 6(f) contains what could result in the single most consequential outcome of Trump’s energy and climate EOs:
Within 30 days of the date of this order, the Administrator of the EPA, in collaboration with the heads of any other relevant agencies, shall submit joint recommendations to the Director of OMB on the legality and continuing applicability of the Administrator’s findings, “Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act,” Final Rule, 74 FR 66496 (December 15, 2009).
For those who haven’t followed climate policy regularly since 2009 or my writings on it, the EPA’s “Endangerment finding,” under former President Barack Obama, is the foundation, either openly or in the background, for every climate regulation, policy, and rule that has been adopted in the United States since then. The stance taken by EPA, with no independent analysis, that carbon dioxide poses a threat to human health, welfare, and the environment underpins various restrictions proposed by Obama and Biden on power plant operations, internal combustion engines, fossil fuel development on public and private lands and waters, and infrastructure projects, efficiency standards, and positions taken in international treaty negotiations. The endangerment finding also serves as the justification for the plethora of green-energy subsidies and the expedited permitting and construction of industrial wind and solar projects, electric vehicle mandates, limits on appliances, various carbon credit trading schemes and the carbon capture and storage boondoggle. If the endangerment finding is rescinded, the justification for every one of these costly, wasteful, freedom-limiting policies goes with it.
Public interest groups allied with Heartland, such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, have battled to have the EPA’s endangerment finding reconsidered and withdrawn since its inception, only to have our efforts rebuffed repeatedly by the agencies and the courts.
I gained some hope that withdrawing the endangerment finding was at long last on the table when during the Senate committee hearings to consider Lee Zeldin as administrator of the EPA, Zeldin noted the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the Clean Air Act as saying the EPA was authorized but not obligated to regulate CO2 as a danger to huma health.
Trump’s EO requires Zeldin to analyze and reconsider the endangerment finding. Trump couldn’t just order it to be withdrawn, because it was created through the regulatory process, not an executive order. However, if Zeldin and the OMB find the facts do not justify the endangerment determination—through an accurate assessment of our knowledge of the state of climate change and the harms it is causing or might reasonably be thought to cause—they can start the process to rescind it. Environmental lobbyists and climate scolds will fight this tooth and nail during the regulatory process and in court, if it comes to that, but it’s a battle worth having and could save America from untold economic losses and losses in personal freedom.
All in all, this has been a great start for Trump and his team, taking the federal government’s boot of the necks of America’s economy and its people.
I’ll provide more analysis of Trump’s EOs in the next issue.
Sources: Townhall; CO2 Coalition; The Heartland Institute; Newsweek; America Out Loud
Contra NOAA, Antarctic Sea Ice Is Well Within the ‘Range of Observed Variability’
Tony Heller, who runs the popular climate science website Real Climate Science, points out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) recent claims about Antarctic ice extent in recent years are misleading. NOAA selectively cherry-picked data to make it appear that ice loss in the Antarctic has worsened in recent decades and is now outside the “range of observed variability.” Specifically, in October NOAA wrote that the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC),
… reported that the 2024 Antarctic maximum was 77,000 square miles (200,000 square kilometers) above the 2023 record-low extent, but it was 598,000 square miles (1.55 million square kilometers) below the average maximum extent from 1981-2010. In that sense, it’s continuing a pattern that began around 2016, with most winters from 2016-2022 having below-average ice extents. In another sense, however, it’s nothing like those years; like 2023, the 2024 winter maximum was so far outside the range of observed variability that some scientists speculate that the Southern Ocean sea ice may have entered a wholly new state.
A broader look at the NSIDC data for recent years shows Antarctica’s ice extent is in fact well within the realm of historic natural variability for the continent. It was much higher, in fact, on December 30 than in 1979, 1980, 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2005, and every year since 2016. Ice extent has increased 36 percent in just the past two years. (See graph, below.)
Low ice levels in the 20th century (some from more than 40 years ago) occurred when global average temperatures were modestly cooler and CO2 levels were lower. In fact, since consistent measurements have been recorded starting in 1978, the highest ice extent occurred in multiple years from 2006 to 2015, a period which alarmists proclaimed as the warmest decades in history.
Far from representing a decline “outside the range of observed variability,” as NOAA claimed, the 2024 and 2023 ice extents represent a return to levels that were common throughout most of the past 47 years.
Source: Real Climate Science
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H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
