As Donald Trump campaigned for president in 2024, he talked about his plan to roll back most, if not all environmental and climate regulations. On his first day back in the White House, he signed an executive order withdrawing the U.S., for a second time, from the 2015 Paris climate agreement where nations around the world pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to the worsening climate crisis.
In the recently passed federal budget bill, the Trump regime cut every subsidy and tax rebate for clean energy under the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law by President Biden. And in the administration’s latest move to reverse progress made on climate change, Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced in late July that his agency is proposing to rescind the agency’s 2009 declaration that determined carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.
Revoking this finding will end federal regulation of emissions linked to climate change under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other sources of pollution. This reckless policy change rejecting mainstream science, but applauded by the fossil fuel industry, is occurring as the world is experiencing the increasing severity and frequency of global extreme weather events, including floods, droughts, wildfires and ever more deadly heatwaves and hurricanes.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke Candice Fortin, U.S. campaign manager with the global climate group 350.org. Here, she assesses the consequences of Trump’s dismantling of federal climate regulations and what if anything states can do to implement or strengthen their own local climate laws.
CANDICE FORTIN: It’s pretty much an earthquake. It’s catastrophic because the EPA, quite literally, and I know this sounds so reductive — and I don’t know what the EPA stands for anymore. It’s supposed to be the Environmental Protection Agency. And what we’re seeing is a complete erosion of that. If you entirely remove the EPA’s ability to enact regulations around climate change or carbon pollution, then that infects so many industries. It affects the public health. It cannot come at a worse time when we’re in our sixth year of record heat. This summer, where we have so many catastrophic climate-related disasters, whether we’re talking about the flooding in Texas, the LA fires, whether we’re talking about Hurricane Helene, whether we’re talking about Hurricane Milton.
It’s just really, really wild that at this time we’re at a really, really critical point where we need to address this crisis that they choose to completely erode any sort of foundation of that lever at all. So it just really just brings to me a question around how is this still called the Environmental Protection Agency? If you take away any sort of regulations, anything that’s going to actually serve the public health of the people and also to fight climate change, my personal opinion is that I don’t understand the utility of the agency existing.
SCOTT HARRIS: Candice, I know your organization has given some thought to how to counter the federal deregulation of greenhouse gas emissions in the courts, on the streets. And in addition to that, how about state capitals and state jurisdictions? What regulations are possible to strengthen at the local level here in states to counter what’s going on under the Trump regime?
CANDICE FORTIN: I’m based in New York. I live in Hudson Valley. I used to live in New York City for 23 years. You’ve probably already heard about the New York’s Climate Super Fund bill, which is telling the energy sector, the fossil fuel sector that they have to proactively commit to a $7 billion fund to make sure that there is renewable energy infrastructure as well as carbon-reducing infrastructure to mitigate the harms that these companies put into place. This was a bill that was a landmark achievement, but it happened on the state level with a lot of advocates really pressuring and pushing Gov. Hochul to sign this bill into law and it worked. And I think a lot of that, those same sorts of bills can be achieved on the state level. I think that there’s a lot that can happen there that can obviously impact the lives of millions of people.
All is not lost. You have to just really focus on figuring out who your governors are, reaching out to them, asking for them to take responsibility for their constituents to prioritize climate whenever they are reaching their next legislative session. And I think there’s a lot of levers that can happen there. I’ve also seen it on the city level as well. Mayor Brandon Johnson, who is the mayor of Chicago, mandated that every city-owned building is 100 percent renewable. That’s a really big sweeping change that impacts the lives of millions of folks. So I do think that there’s a lot that can be achieved, and I think if we decentralize that and we kind of build movements and we take notes from a state that was successful or a city that was successful and try to replicate it — and like replicating that DNA, I think that we do have a really great opportunity to see what it looks like to kind of decentralize the movement versus relying on the federal government.
For more information, visit 350.org’s Global Climate Organization at 350.org; and 350.org Action at 350action.org.
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