Climate skeptics urge Trump to boost coal, gut science in agencies

Activists who dispute the severity of climate change enjoyed cachet in Donald Trump’s first administration and salivated over the prospect of his return to the White House. Now that he’s won, they’ve delivered a wish list to his transition team.

At the top of their agenda: Terminating federal science advisory boards, reviewing air-quality regulations issued by the Environmental Protection Agency and repealing President Joe Biden’s “anti-coal regulatory actions,” as well as promoting coal as “a preferred means of electricity.”

Groups behind the memo include the Illinois-based Heartland Institute, an Illinois-based think tank that has argued global warming is beneficial; the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, a Virginia-based organisation; and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which runs a website that promotes climate change skepticism. One of Energy & Environment’s leaders advised Trump’s EPA transition team after his first election win, and Heartland’s president has touted its ties with the incoming administration.

The Trump transition team didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Scientists are near unanimous that the atmosphere has warmed more than 1^oC since the Industrial Revolution, due to human activity and especially burning fossil fuels. They agree that emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases must be reduced sharply to maintain a habitable planet. The US is the world’s second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.

The skeptics’ to-do list, or parts of it, could find a welcome home in the incoming administration. The president-elect has mocked climate change as a “hoax” and a “scam” and employed a number of climate science critics in prominent roles during his first term.

“This is a tremendous opportunity,” said James Taylor, the president of the Heartland Institute. “Donald Trump has demonstrated during his first four years in office that he will not be misled by the climate crisis myth.”

On some points, the groups’ agenda already dovetails with Trump’s stated aims. Trump is a vocal critic of wind energy and has said he will target the industry; the activists want him to “delist” areas designated for future offshore wind projects. They also want the next administration to prevent the grid from becoming reliant on “variable” wind and solar as a matter of national security. And if Trump pulls the US back out of the 2015 Paris climate accord, as he’s vowed to, they want him to take that further by formally sending it to the Senate for a vote — a move that could prevent a future Democratic president from rejoining the agreement.

The groups urge Trump to crack down on science in the EPA in particular. They want a repeal of the agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” which found that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere endangers public health, and which underpins many US environmental rules. They also hope to reinstate the “secret science” rule from Trump’s first term. This limited the use of research to craft regulations unless the authors disclosed the data they used. Critics said the rule excluded important research such as public-health studies based on anonymized patient data.

Environmentalists say adopting the agenda would reverse US progress in cutting emissions, after the outgoing Biden administration made tackling climate change a priority. The world has almost breached the 1.5^oC warming threshold that countries agreed on in the Paris accord. Earth is currently on track for 3.1^oC of warming, the United Nations recently said.

The groups’ memo “clearly reads like an oil and gas industry wish list,” said Kalee Kreider, who formerly advised Al Gore on environmental issues and is now president of public affairs firm Ridgely Walsh. But, she added, it appears to underestimate the shift to clean energy that has already taken place, including in red-leaning parts of the country.

“It looks to me there is an overreach — and almost even a misread — from where we were in 2016 to where we are today,” she said.