Donald Trump clinched a presidential victory, ushering in another term of environmental rollbacks that’ll make it more difficult to safeguard our air, water, and climate.
“Environmental [regulation] is the biggest tool for stopping growth … it costs much more to do things environmentally clean,” Trump said in a rambling three-hour interview with Joe Rogan on October 25th, when he falsely claimed the US had “the cleanest air and cleanest water” under his watch.
The last time he was president, Trump slashed air and water protections, replacing them with weaker rules that, over time, were expected to lead to thousands more deaths from pollution. Now, his administration could take even more extreme action if it follows eye-popping proposals laid out in Project 2025, a right-wing manifesto written by many former Trump officials. Health and environmental groups are already gearing up for battle.
“We really, really need to focus on building more power at the local, tribal, and state and regional levels — understanding that because things are going to be moving much faster this time around, we really need to ramp up,” says KD Chavez, executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance. “We’re just really going to have to lean into our collective power.”
They know what to expect after Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations when he was last in office. That included repealing the Obama-era Clean Power Plan (CPP), a landmark rule that would have set limits to carbon pollution from power plants for the first time, had it been implemented. While it was designed to fight climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it had the added benefit of cleaning up other kinds of pollution from power plants.
The opposite is also true — delaying action on climate change comes with health risks from the soot and smog that come from burning fossil fuels. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated that the Trump administration’s weaker alternative to the CPP could lead to 1,400 more premature deaths and 48,000 “exacerbated” asthma cases a year by 2030.
Since taking office, President Joe Biden has tried to clean up his predecessor’s mess. Air quality protections the EPA has issued since 2021 are projected to prevent 200,000 premature deaths and result in 100 million fewer asthma attacks in the US through 2050, according to a recent report by a group founded by hundreds of former EPA employees. Those gains are in peril now.
“With the election of Donald Trump, we know that environmental justice policies that have been hard fought wins over decades are going to be in jeopardy,” Chavez says. “One of the other things that we’re going to be looking out for is corporate capture … We’re probably going to see appointments of industry operatives in key positions of his cabinet makeup and etc., and just giving polluting industries even greater access to our federal agencies.”
On the campaign trail, Trump said he’d create a new role for billionaire backer Elon Musk as “secretary of cost-cutting.” Musk’s companies — SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI — have faced a slew of accusations that they’ve violated environmental regulations when it comes to hazardous waste, water pollution, and air pollution.
The last time Trump was in the White House, he pushed seasoned scientists out of federal agencies and put fossil fuel lobbyists in charge of the EPA. Now, Project 2025 calls for a “major reorganization” of the EPA that would slash the number of full-time positions and eliminate entire departments and any programs deemed “duplicative, wasteful, or superfluous.” While Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025 on the campaign trail, the lead author of the chapter dedicated to the EPA was written by the former chief of staff at the agency during the Trump administration, Mandy Gunasekara.
“Project 2025 is just full of recommendations that would essentially eviscerate EPA. They would turn it into a shell of what its true mission is,” Stan Meiburg, executive director of the Sabin Center for Environment and Sustainability at Wake Forest University and former acting deputy administrator of the EPA during the Obama administration, previously told The Verge.
It’s difficult to imagine that the US will stay in the Paris climate accord, considering Trump abandoned the international agreement to stop global warming once before and has vowed to do so again. The Biden administration managed to pass the biggest spending package on climate and clean energy, the Inflation Reduction Act, which is supposed to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 40 percent compared to 2005 levels by 2030. Trump has also said, however, that he would “rescind all unspent funds” from the Inflation Reduction Act, stalling the nation’s transition to cleaner energy. When it comes to energy policy, the Republican platform says simply, “We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL.”
“Donald Trump was a disaster for climate progress during his first term, and everything he’s said and done since suggests he’s eager to do even more damage this time,” Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous said in a statement. Sierra Club’s legal team filed more than 300 lawsuits against the Trump administration challenging its environmental rollbacks. “Trump has put profits over people time and again, prioritizing the bottom line of the Big Oil CEOs who bought and paid for his campaign above communities across the country who face the threat of pollution and the devastating impacts of the climate crisis.”
As gloomy as the forecast is come Inauguration Day, environmental advocates are undeterred. They’ve been through this before, after all. Many state and local leaders stepped up and formed a coalition to fill in the gaps in federal leadership on climate change after Trump was first elected in 2016. That kind of work will be crucial again moving forward.
On top of that, prominent environmental groups are already discussing potential legal actions they can take. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) says it filed 163 cases against the Trump administration and won in close to 90 percent of cases that have been resolved so far.
“If he tries to roll back urgently needed climate gains, or follow his radical Project 2025 roadmap to environmental ruin, we’ll stand up for the environment and public health – in the court of public opinion and in our courts of law,” Manish Bapna, NRDC president, said in an emailed statement. “If Trump tries to turn our government against the people it serves, we’ll stand with the people. If he tries to purge the professional civil service we depend on for sound governance, we’ll stand by those who face political attack.”