Trump making moves to bulldoze Biden’s climate initiatives

Biden administration working hard to Trump-proof environmental initiatives before the change of guard at the White House

By Vishnu Kaimal

After a stunning landslide victory in the 2024 US presidential elections, President-elect Donald Trump’s first order of business seems to be dismantling President Joe Biden’s climate initiatives.

This year has seen a number of natural disasters and the United States in particular has experienced its fair share of devastating hurricanes and floods. Yet Trump doesn’t seem to believe that fighting climate change is a priority. In fact, the President-elect is a sceptic of climate change and the adverse consequences it may have on the future of the planet.

Arguably one of the cornerstones of Trump’s re-election campaign was his promise to undo Biden’s current climate initiatives. At the forefront of this promise is his unyielding resolve to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, an international treaty to combat climate change that was adopted in 2015 at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris.

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Now that Trump is back, climate activists and countries around the world fear that the United States will regress in its commitments to fight global climate change, which in turn will embolden top polluting countries like China to ignore world concerns.

When the Paris Agreement was being drafted, it was made voluntary and part of the Rio Treaty, which made it possible for Biden to immediately rejoin the initiative without Senate approval after Trump’s departure from the White House.

And now it seems that Trump is poised to return the favour by exiting the agreement. Climate negotiators are poised to meet next week in Azerbaijan with the Biden administration expected to lead the way in helping poor nations carry the expensive burden of battling climate change. But since the election results, participants are not holding out much hope that the United States will honour the promises it makes next week.

In March the Biden administration had passed an US auto-emissions regulation that would cut down on tailpipe emissions and expand on EV and hybrid car production. In a Sep 5 address about his economic platform, Trump unequivocally vowed to “end the electric vehicle mandate.”

“I will immediately issue a National Emergency Declaration to achieve a massive increase in domestic energy supply,” he said. “With these sweeping authorities, we will blast through every bureaucratic hurdle to issue rapid approvals for new drilling, new pipelines, new refineries, and new power plants and reactors.”

Since election day, Biden administration has been reportedly working tirelessly to finalize environmental and climate initiatives, or rather Trump-proof them before the President-elect takes office in 2025.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is reported to have finalized all its major climate rules by April to avoid the Congressional Review Act, which makes it easier to reverse last-minute regulations made at the end of an administration, thereby circumventing any bid by the Trump administration to undo them.

Another way in which Biden administration hopes to keep its climate initiatives in place is by making it profitable for the Republicans. A vast majority of private investments made to build new EV factories or build massive wind and solar farms has gone to Republican congressional districts. A whopping 78% of Republican run districts have profited from these investments, according to a CNN analysis of data from the nonpartisan Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

One hopes that despite his rhetoric against climate change, Trump does not go overboard in his zeal to undo all that was done by Biden administration for the good of the planet as well as the good of the United States.