From electric cars to wildfires, how Trump may affect climate actions

If we learned anything from 2024, it’s that climate change is rapidly reshaping our world. We’re on course to set the hottest year on record. In just the past few months, supercharged hurricanes, 1-in-1,000-year floods and drought-fueled wildfires have devastated parts of the United States.

It’s a very bad time to put the brakes on the aggressive actions — including slashing U.S. carbon emissions and transitioning to greener, lower-carbon sources of energy — that scientists have repeatedly said are necessary to help keep the planet’s warming in check. There is simply no more time for denial or delay, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned back in 2021 (SN: 8/9/21).

The decisions the incoming Trump Administration makes on how the U.S. government will address these challenges will have a great impact on the course of climate change not just over the next four years, but for decades to come. It may be too soon to know what these decisions will be, but President-elect Donald Trump’s words, his actions during his first term as U.S. president and his nominees for key positions in his new administration provide some guidance.

Trump himself has called climate change a “hoax.” In 2017, he pulled the United States out of the historic Paris climate accord, saying that reducing the country’s carbon emissions imposed “draconian financial and economic burdens” on the country (SN: 6/1/17). That viewpoint ignores the heavy toll that climate change is already taking on the United States, from increasingly frequent and deadly heat waves to hurricane rainfall sent into hyperdrive (SN: 11/28/18; SN: 7/7/21; SN: 10/1/24).

And then there’s Project 2025, a 900-page report by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation that is widely considered a policy blueprint for the incoming administration. The report proposes reforms to how federal agencies manage natural resources like forests and water, which are affected by climate change.

Here are some key climate and environmental issues to keep an eye on as the new administration enters office — and why they matter.

The future of efforts to curb U.S. carbon emissions

Forestalling the worst impacts of climate change means dramatically reducing humans’ emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly the climate-warming gases carbon dioxide and methane, from activities such as burning fossil fuels.

The best-case scenario sketched out by scientists was to limit the average warming of the planet to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by the end of the century — a threshold that has increasingly felt further away as many of the world’s most powerful nations dragged their feet on limiting their own emissions. Achieving that goal means that by 2030, the world must reduce emissions to 57 percent of 2019 levels (SN: 4/4/22). That target quantity is roughly equivalent to the combined 2023 emissions of China, the United States, Russia and India.

Achieving net-zero carbon emissions — reducing the world’s emissions to the point where new emissions are balanced out by carbon removed from the atmosphere — is possible but would require global and concerted actions by the world’s governments, researchers say (SN: 1/27/23).

Progress on that has been maddeningly slow — but there were some hopeful signs of movement. In December 2023, world leaders meeting in Dubai for a climate summit agreed for the first time to set their global emissions goal according to the numbers cited by scientists (SN: 12/15/23). That agreement also called on nations to speed up their climate actions by increasing global renewable energy generation and phasing out fossil fuel subsidies.

President Joe Biden’s administration had pledged to reduce U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent, relative to 2005 levels, by 2030. One aim was to reduce U.S. transportation emissions, in part by dramatically increasing the relative proportion of electric vehicles on the road.

These policies are likely to be on the chopping block. During his previous administration, Trump repeatedly rejected any calls to reduce emissions, instead promising to end the “war on coal.” He called for opening up public lands for oil and gas development, and for reducing energy research and development by the federal government’s national laboratories.

During his most recent campaign, Trump has asserted that, if elected, he is likely to pull the United States from the Paris accord yet again. The campaign pledged to make boosting fossil fuels one of his top priorities, and to roll back the Biden administration’s tax credit for electric vehicles, which could stall efforts to reduce emissions from transportation, currently the largest greenhouse-gas emitting sector in the United States (SN: 12/22/21). 

How the incoming Trump administration will address climate change loomed over COP29, a climate summit held in November in Baku, Azerbaijan. The meeting concluded November 24 with an agreement that, by 2035, developed nations will deliver $300 billion a year to developing countries to reduce the burden of climate change impacts. That target date, a decade out, was intended to extend the deal beyond the next four years, U.S. State Department officials told Politico.

The future of the “green transition”

Trump’s selection to head the U.S. Department of Energy, Liberty Energy oil executive Chris Wright, has expressed doubts regarding the science behind climate change. “We have seen no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts or floods despite endless fear-mongering of the media, politicians and activists,” Wright said in a video posted to LinkedIn in 2023.

In fact, numerous attribution studies clearly show climate change’s fingerprint on natural disasters, including extreme heat waves, hurricane wind speeds and the rapid intensification and torrential rainfall of hurricanes like Helene and Milton (SN: 9/12/24; SN: 7/25/23; SN: 11/20/24; SN: 10/9/24).

Wright has also said that the United States is “not in the midst of an energy transition.”

He is wrong. The transition is well under way. Renewable energy was responsible for about 23 percent of U.S. power generation in 2023, enough to power about 90 million typical U.S. homes for a year. Solar and wind power in particular are growing quickly; the U.S. Energy Information Administration projected in January that by 2050, renewables would generate 44 percent of U.S. power.

What impact Wright might have over stopping this energy transition isn’t clear. If confirmed as Energy Secretary, Wright would oversee the country’s renewable energy, carbon capture, gas, direct air capture and hydrogen projects, many funded by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (SN: 12/14/22). He could boost fossil fuel energy sources, including domestic oil that Trump has called “liquid gold.”

The future of climate research

Project 2025, the proposed conservative “roadmap” for the incoming Trump administration, takes square aim at U.S. climate research.

The report suggests that Trump should use an executive order to overhaul and potentially eliminate the country’s climate change research programs. That includes the U.S. Global Change Research Program, established in 1990 to coordinate federal climate change research. The program was responsible for revealing how the depletion of the ozone layer was harming Americans. It also puts out the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report that focuses on the impacts of climate change on the United States (SN: 11/28/18). 

Project 2025 also targets the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a branch of the Department of Commerce that undertakes much of the United States’ most essential climate research and weather forecasting (SN: 5/26/23). NOAA, the report states, should be broken up and downsized, and its primary research arm, the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, should be largely disbanded (SN: 5/26/17). OAR is “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism,” the report adds.

The report also calls for NOAA’s National Weather Service, the nation’s primary source of weather data, forecasts and warnings, to pivot to data collection only; weather forecasting should be completely privatized. Weather forecasting is a multibillion-dollar industry, and freely available forecasts undercut potential profits from private companies. However, NOAA provides weather data and forecasts that are available universally as a public service (SN: 4/22/24). Privatizing the nation’s forecasts could mean that crucial alerts to protect lives and property wouldn’t be available equally to all.

Trump’s pick to head the Commerce Department is billionaire Howard Lutnick, CEO of the global financial institution Cantor Fitzgerald. Lutnick has not yet announced any specific plans regarding NOAA, but as a member of Trump’s transition team, he has been vocally supportive of cutting billions of dollars from federal agencies. That includes the Department of the Interior, which Lutnick has said should be called “the department of all the land and mineral rights of the United States of America.”

The future of wildfire management

The U.S. Forest Service is the largest wildland firefighting force on Earth and has been responsible for managing blazes on National Forests and Grasslands for over a century. For much of that time, the agency sought to suppress every wildfire it could. But that paradigm is shifting, as studies have shown wildfire suppression makes later fires burn more severely. In recent years, the Forest Service has expanded its use of prescribed burning, or planned fire, as well as its managing of unplanned fires to reduce the amount of flammable vegetation on the landscape (SN: 4/30/24).

But Project 2025 calls for reforming the way that the Forest Service manages wildfire. It recommends “the Forest Service should focus on proactive management of the forests and grasslands that does not depend heavily on burning.” In other words, the agency should reduce its use of fire. It goes on to recommend that the Forest Service, rather than using natural wildfires or human-ignited fires to manage vegetation, should focus on other methods to reduce the buildup of burnable biomass.

While land managers do have other methods to mitigate wildfire, like using heavy equipment to reduce tree density in forests, those tools don’t replace fire itself. That’s because fire is a natural part of many landscapes. Blazes don’t just consume vegetation; they also stimulate new growth and restore nutrients to soils. And they create habitat for species like spotted owls and juvenile Chinook salmon.

As a solution to the wildfire crisis, Project 2025 raises logging. But “wildfire risk tends to be greatest in areas that don’t have very much commercial value for harvesting, and where the most important trees to harvest are the small, scraggly ones that have very little commercial value,” says climate scientist Chris Field of Stanford University.

The future of clean water

The Biden administration expanded federal protections for small streams, wetlands and other waterways, reinstating a rule called the “waters of the United States,” or WOTUS, that the first Trump administration had repealed. The rule defined which wetlands and waterways were protected by the Clean Water Act. Trump could again repeal the WOTUS rule when he retakes office, and he could again enact the Navigable Waters Protection Rule. That rule excluded ephemeral waters — those that flow only after rainfall or during snowmelt — from federal protections.

But these flows contribute more than half of the water in U.S. river systems, researchers have shown (SN: 7/8/24). Deregulating the discharge of pollutants into these ephemeral waters could lead to worse drinking water quality for communities who rely on them or any waterways downstream.

“We know what happens if you loosen regulation and you allow more pollutants to go into our waterways, and then you start changing the definitions of waterways,” says water researcher Yolanda McDonald of Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “If that particular waterway just happens to feed into or contribute to a [drinking water source], guess where it’s going?”

Loosening these restrictions is a risky move as climate change is lowering flows in many waterways by exacerbating drought conditions and increasing the frequency of floods that can worsen water quality (SN: 4/13/23).