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Alex Palms, 9, shows off his sign before the start of the Rise For Climate march on September 8, 2018, in San Francisco. California and 18 other states plan to sue the Trump administration over its proposal to roll back Obama-era fuel- efficiency standards. (AFP/Getty Images/Amy Osborne)

See the ChronologyClimate Change October 13, 2018

Will deregulatory efforts harm the environment? By Christina L. Lyons

In an effort to reduce regulatory burdens on U.S. industries, President Trump is reversing or weakening federal climate change policies and regulations. The rollback has sparked legal challenges from environmentalists, health advocates and Democratic leaders, as well as heightened criticism from the international community. The administration’s actions come as scientists warn of increasingly intense storms and wildfires, rising sea levels and other effects of global warming. Courts are beginning to rule on challenges to the administration’s deregulatory actions, providing support to opponents in several cases. Meanwhile, some states are undertaking initiatives to help the United States comply with an international climate accord despite the president’s decision to withdraw from the pact.

Rejecting scientists’ warnings about the dangers of global warming, the Trump administration continues to unwind Obama administration-era rules aimed at slowing climate change. The administration’s objective is to ease regulatory burdens on businesses, particularly the fossil fuel industry. In August, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Transportation said they would scrap rules requiring carmakers to steadily reduce greenhouse gas pollution from cars and trucks through 2025. Also in August, the EPA released a proposal to

replace former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which sought to cut greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. The EPA’s proposal is intended to be less burdensome for the coal industry — which President Trump has pledged to revive — by eliminating a federal mandate and letting states set their own standards.

The deregulatory moves are in line with the administration’s decision in 2017 to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which seeks to cut the greenhouse gases that scientists say are causing the Earth’s climate to warm. On Nov. 4, the administration can formally submit a written notice of its intent to withdraw, according to the accord’s rules. But it will take at least another year after that for the withdrawal to be official.

Scott Pruitt, who as EPA administrator worked to reverse or weaken many existing climate change policies and plans, resigned in July amid ethics investigations into his spending and management. His interim replacement, Deputy Administrator Andrew Wheeler, said he would continue the deregulatory efforts.

On Oct. 8, a United Nations panel released a report saying the effects of climate change are worsening more quickly than previously thought and that “rapid and far-reaching” steps will be necessary to avoid a 1.5-degree Celsius (2.7-degree Fahrenheit) increase in global temperatures by 2040. Such an increase would bring severe coastal flooding, droughts and other consequences. “The good news is that some of the kinds of actions that would be needed to limit global warming to 1.5º Celsius already are underway around the world, but they would need to accelerate,” said Valerie Masson-Delmotte, co-chair of one of the working groups that produced the new report.

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President Trump rallies supporters in Charleston, W.Va., on Aug. 21, 2018, the same day his administration announced a plan to weaken regulations on coal plants. (AFP/Getty Images/Mandel Ngan)

Scientists say that higher temperatures, raging wildfires, persistent droughts and more-intense storms across the United States and around the world prove that the need to address climate change is increasingly urgent. In July, record temperatures were reported throughout the Northern Hemisphere, including in New Hampshire, Vermont and Montreal. The Mendocino Complex fire north of San Francisco became the largest in California’s history in August, while more fires raged in the West and in Northern and Western Europe.

Michael Mann, an atmospheric scientist at Penn State University, said “climate change is making these events more extreme. . . . You warm the planet, you’re going to get more frequent and intense heat waves. You warm the soils, you dry them out, you get worse drought. You bring all that together, and those are all the ingredients for unprecedented wildfires.”

Trump, however, blamed the fires on “bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amounts of readily available water to be properly utilized.

Administrative Rollbacks

On Aug. 2, Wheeler said freezing, rather than increasing, fuel efficiency standards through 2025 would strike “the right regulatory balance” between cost, safety and environmental concerns. Administration officials said fuel-efficient cars are lighter and therefore less safe than older models. They also said freezing the standards would keep down vehicle prices and allow consumers to buy newer cars with better safety technology.

The plan would help “create a 50-state solution,” Wheeler said. California and about a dozen other states enforce more-stringent fuel efficiency standards.

But Rob Sargent, energy program director for Environment America, an alliance of state environmental advocacy groups headquartered in Denver, said the repeal means “our cars will continue to pump billions of metric tons of carbon pollution into the atmosphere, further destabilizing the climate and sparking increasingly severe impacts of global warming.”

The administration, meanwhile, is proposing to allow states more flexibility in complying with its proposed replacement of the Clean Power Plan. Obama’s plan sought to force industry to switch from coal to natural gas or renewable power. Under the proposed “Affordable Clean Energy” rule, announced Aug. 21, the federal government would set emission guidelines, but states could set less-stringent standards, particularly for older facilities that need upgrades.

“The era of top down, one-size-fits-all mandates is over,” Wheeler said.

But Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown said in a statement, “This is a declaration of war against America and all of humanity — it will not stand.”

When the EPA proposed repealing the Clean Power Plan in October 2017, it said the plan exceeded the federal government’s authority under the Clean Air Act. In February, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 to

block implementation of the plan pending a legal challenge by West Virginia, Texas and 25 other states, along with several companies and businesses groups that said the plan could harm local economies.

The EPA estimated that the Affordable Clean Energy rule would lead to $400 million in economic benefits annually and reduce retail power prices

by up to 0.5 percent by 2025.

Two recent Trump administration actions involve methane, a potent greenhouse gas. On Sept. 11, the EPA proposed easing requirements on oil and gas drilling companies to test for methane leaks in their operations, a change the agency estimated would save industry $75 million in regulatory costs anually between 2019 and 2025. A week later, administration officials announced they were throwing out an Obama-era proposal designed to reduce leaking, venting and “flaring” of methane (in which unwanted pockets of the gas are burned off). Methane is estimated to account for 9 percent of domestic greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, NASA has ended its carbon monitoring system, a $10 million-a-year program to fund pilot projects that aimed to improve monitoring of global carbon emissions.

During the Obama era, officials said natural disasters, conflicts over food and water and refugee crises could threaten national security. But the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, which outlines priorities for federal defense agencies, no longer names climate change as a threat. The Federal Emergency Management Agency also has dropped references to “climate change” from its strategic plan.

The House and Senate this year rejected Trump’s request to cut EPA funding by about $2.2 billion in fiscal

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The House and Senate this year rejected Trump’s request to cut EPA funding by about $2.2 billion in fiscal 2019, which began Oct. 1. The House approved a spending bill about $100 million below fiscal 2018 levels, while the Senate bill would maintain the previous year’s spending of about $8 billion. Congress has continued the EPA’s fiscal 2018 funding level until Dec. 7 while congressional negotiators work on reconciling differences between the House and Senate bills.

Several Senate Republicans and the heating, air conditioning and refrigeration industries want Trump to implement a 2016 U.N. accord to phase out the use of hydrofluorocarbons — a potent greenhouse gas. Scientists say reducing the use of the chemicals worldwide could help avoid almost 0.5 degree Celsius of warming by the end of this century.

In a June letter to Trump, 24 industry executives said the Kigali amendment to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an international pact aimed at protecting the Earth’s ozone layer, could boost U.S. exports by $5 billion and create 33,000 manufacturing jobs. (The ozone layer absorbs most ultraviolet radiation emitted by the sun.)

“Without Kigali ratification, the U.S. share of global export markets will decline,” an industry trade group report said. Trump has not decided whether to submit the amendment — named for the capital of Rwanda, where it was negotiated — to the Senate for approval.

Legal Challenges

California, 18 other states and the District of Columbia — which together make up more than a third of the nation’s auto market — said they will sue the administration to halt the proposed reversal on fuel efficiency standards. “The Trump administration has launched a brazen attack, no matter how it is cloaked, on our nation’s Clean Car Standards,” said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. He said California “will use every legal tool at its disposal” to defend the state’s standards. The Clean Air Act grants California a waiver to impose stricter emission standards, according to a 2009 decision by then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and several court rulings.

States also have pushed back against the administration’s decision to postpone a requirement that states formulate plans to address air pollution that exceeds Clean Air Act standards. In June, ruling on a lawsuit by Connecticut and New York, a judge ordered the EPA to finalize smog-reduction plans by Dec. 6 for Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.

New York state Attorney General Barbara Underwood said the ruling would force “the Trump EPA . . . to address smog pollution blowing into New York from upwind states.”

On Sept. 18, California and New Mexico teamed up on a lawsuit aimed at reversing the Trump administration’s rollback of methane rules. If the lawsuit is not successful, the rules will be wiped out in mid-November. Trump administration officials say the rules would be bad for the economy, but environmentalists say they are crucial to public health. Interior Department officials estimated in 2016 that the rules would eliminate 175,000 tons of methane emissions.

In July, the Supreme Court turned down an administration request to throw out or delay a climate change lawsuit filed in 2015 against Obama-era officials. The suit, filed in Oregon by young environmental activists between the ages of 11 and 22, says federal officials have ignored climate change dangers.

Some communities and states, meanwhile, are suing oil companies to recoup money spent building infrastructure to protect residents and property from rising seas. Rhode Island, for example, filed a lawsuit in July against 21 oil and gas companies for “knowingly contributing to climate change and the catastrophic consequences to the State and its residents, economy, eco-system, and infrastructure.”

In June, a federal judge in California dismissed similar lawsuits filed by San Francisco and Oakland against Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum. U.S. District Judge William Alsup said the dangers of climate change are “very real” but that Congress should handle the problem.

The United States Climate Alliance, a coalition of 17 states that includes New York and California, has begun initiatives aimed at cutting carbon pollution by more than 26 percent by 2025, part of the Paris climate accord. The initiatives include plans for financing clean-energy products and cleaning up carbon in the atmosphere.

And state legislators from nine states — Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington — formed the Carbon Costs Coalition in January focused on reducing carbon emissions.

Some states are taking steps to address climate change. In Alaska, for example, independent Gov. Bill Walker created a task force to develop proposals to reduce emissions. In September, he accepted the task force’s 38- page plan detailing numerous recommendations, including requirements that oil, gas and mining industries reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 and reduce emissions from power plants 33 percent below 2010 levels by 2030. The plan also suggests taxing companies that use carbon-based fuel. It would not require changing state laws but could be used as a basis for future legislation and policy

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proposals.

Scientific Findings

In July, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said 2018 likely will be the fourth hottest year on record, based on data from the first half of the year indicating warmer-than-average conditions around the globe.

In May, scientists reported a mysterious resurgence of a banned industrial gas called CFC-11 that damages the ozone layer and warms the planet. The reappearance of the gas, they said, is undermining successful recovery of ozone in the wake of the Montreal Protocol, a 1989 international agreement that banned chlorofluorocarbons. Scientists suspect the culprit is China, where factories producing foam insulation for refrigerators and buildings have ignored the ban.

The Earth Institute of Columbia University in New York, which studies the planet, joined the state of New York and the American Meteorological Society in forming a panel in January to replace the federal Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment that the Trump administration disbanded last year. The advisory committee was created in 2013 to help public and private officials implement the findings of the annual National Climate Assessment.

With 19 members and more than 80 partner organizations, the panel plans to seek ways to decipher information from the next National Climate Assessment — expected in December — and provide data to cities as they plan new infrastructure.

International Community

The U.N. Security Council, which has not taken a formal stance on the role of climate change in security issues, said in March that climate change is helping to drive conflict in Somalia, where a civil war has been ongoing since 1991.

In July, Hindou Ibrahim, an African woman whose people are nomads, told the council that the scarcity of resources resulting from climate change has spurred migration throughout her country and into Europe and has led to the development of terrorist groups. “So you must consider climate change as a security risk,” she said.

That same month, as dozens of wildfires burned in Sweden, along the southern coast of Portugal and in Greece, Christos Stylianides, the humanitarian aid commissioner of the European Union (EU), said the 28- member EU must be “better prepared and stronger in responding to multiple disasters across the continent.”

Also in July, Pope Francis urged governments to comply with their commitments to the Paris agreement and curb global warming. Without concerted action, he said, climate change could turn the Earth into a pile of “rubble, deserts and refuse.”

In June, German Chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated Germany’s commitment to the Paris accord and urged the 178 countries that have ratified the pact to agree by the end of the year on rules to implement it.

But former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who had agreed to the accord, said his country should withdraw. “If we had known then what we know now about America’s withdrawal, about the economic damage that renewable energy, in particular, would do to our power system and to our industries, we would never have signed up,” he said. Australia is the world’s leading coal exporter.

In August, Malcolm Turnbull was ousted as Australia’s prime minister in a leadership revolt that began after Turnbull admitted he could not pass his signature energy proposal to set the emissions target agreed to under the Paris accord.

International talks begin in Katowice, Poland, on Dec. 3 to address how countries will meet their commitments under the accord, how to finance actions to meet those goals — particularly in developed countries — and how countries might exceed the goals.

Chronology

2017

August President Trump disbands a federal advisory panel that had helped businesses and local governments factor the effects of climate change into future infrastructure projects.

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