Donald Trump’s administration has been working diligently stop efforts to fight climate change and protect the environment since the president returned to office last year. He gutted the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Law. It has been trying cancel clean energy projects. Is close climate research. In recent weeks, it has appeared that the administration is trying to end America’s environmental protection efforts.
He Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is reportedly now planning to end the practice of evaluating the number of lives saved by regulations intended to curb the air. pollution of fine particles and ozone. News of the move came a week after the administration thrown United States of numerous international climate and environmental organizations, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Calculating lives saved by regulating air pollution used to be a bipartisan issue. Marshall Burke, a professor of global environmental policy at Stanford University, says this has been done for a long time without much opposition from politicians.
“For decades, the EPA and other U.S. government agencies have conducted careful cost-benefit analyzes to understand the impact of regulations on the U.S. economy and the people there,” Burke says. “It’s been pretty bipartisan…This push for a cost-benefit analysis was largely a Republican push from the beginning, decades ago…Basically, what the administration is saying now is we’re just going to ignore the benefits.”
Getting rid of this analysis will make it easier to eliminate regulations that are saving human lives (which will benefit companies that pollute the air) related to coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, and other parts of the fossil fuel industry. The Biden administration had worked to increase these protections, estimating that reducing the amount of fine particles that could be emitted would prevent 4,500 premature deaths and nearly 300,000 lost work hours in 2023. by The New York Times. The Trump administration will no longer factor health risks into its cost-benefit analyses, but will only estimate the costs to companies that enact regulations.
“EPA, as it always has, is still considering the impacts that [fine particulate matter] and ozone emissions have on human health,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement to the Times. “Not monetizing is not equivalent to not considering or valuing the impact on human health.”
Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, says the move is an attempt to “rip the heart out of the government’s ability to regulate.” Approximately 135,000 Americans that prematurely every year due to air pollution.
Oppenheimer is not surprised that the administration is withdrawing from international efforts to combat the climate crisis, in addition to removing health risks from its cost-benefit analyzes of pollution regulations, and notes that it has become clear since Trump took office that the United States has no interest in leading on the issue.
“I think it’s absolutely important, just from a leadership perspective,” Burke adds of U.S. cooperation with other nations on climate. “That’s a problem for the climate, but it’s probably a problem for us economically as well.”
The list of international organizations from which the United States will withdraw starting this month goes beyond climate organizations, but several of them focus specifically on climate and the environment. They include the 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy Pact, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, the IPCC, the International Renewable Energy Agency, the International Solar Alliance, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and other climate or climate-adjacent organizations or agreements. The White House says participation in these cooperatives is “contrary to the interests of the United States.”
The more the United States relinquishes its leadership role in the climate space, the more other countries will fill that void. Oppenheimer says China will become even more influential in setting the path forward and will continue to dominate the clean energy space internationally.
“China is making a lot of money developing and selling technologies that reduce greenhouse gases internationally,” says Oppenheimer. “They are the world’s leading producer of solar photovoltaic modules. They are the leading producer of wind turbines. They are the leading producer of electric vehicles.”
Oppenheimer adds that if China leads climate efforts on the world stage, there will be less transparency in those efforts than if the United States led them.
As Burke says, the abdication of the United States “gives up” the opportunity to set the terms of the energy transition. He notes that there are local and state governments in the United States that are stepping up clean energy, but “the federal government is taking a step back from international participation.” This means a worse climate future, unnecessary deaths, and a less competitive American economy. It is “insane” for the United States to turn its back on the progress it has made on these fronts in recent years, Burke says.
“We are on our way to becoming the last oil state,” adds Oppenheimer. “All this is the image of a country that is not only not interested in fighting climate change but wants to cause more climate change. There is no rational excuse for this.”
While the United States remains focused on the energy of the past, the rest of the world will continue to move forward focusing on the energy of the future. The only thing that remains to be seen is whether the United States can catch up with the world when it realizes how much damage it has done to itself and the planet, and for no good reason.
