Pouring Gas on a Five Alarm Fire

That’s Trump’s climate policy in a nutshell. His campaign slogan should be, “Burn, Baby, Burn.”

At a dinner for oil industry CEOs last week, Trump promised to fulfill the industry’s every dream in return for a billion dollars in donations.  We urgently need now is more federal climate action, not less. Yet the reelection of Donald Trump would wipe out years of federal climate action.  It’s important to understand fully not just the immediate effect, but the permanent impact of a second Trump term.

The short term damage would be bad enough. We know that Trump would exit the Paris Agreement (again). He would also roll back all of Biden’s climate regulations. We know he would stop enforcing environmental requirements. We know all that because it’s what he did before. That would leave federal climate regulation in the same place it was in 2007. It’s as if firefighters were told to stop fighting an inferno and go back to the fire station.

Yet, that understates the problem. Trump doesn’t just want to end climate policy, One of his top priorities is to dramatically expand fossil fuel production — throwing fuel on the fire, a world that has just experienced its hottest year in thousands of years.  He has also used increasingly unhinged language in attacks on EVs, speaking of bloodbaths and the destruction of the car industry.  Oil industry lawyers are already writing executive orders for Trump to sign as soon as he takes office.

Recovering from Trump’s policies could be fraught. Trump has promised an all-out war against the regulatory state. Last time, he came to office without any clear plan for achieving his goals. This time, his allies have ambitious plans already laid out. They call for packing government agencies like EPA with MAGA-friendly appointments and firing 50,000 of the most experienced and expert civil servants.  That damage would not be easy to undo.

There’s also the judiciary. Trump has already appointed nearly a third of all federal appeals judges, so we could end a second term with his picks being half or more of the appeals judges. The Supreme Court decides fewer than a hundred cases a year. For all the rest, appeals judges have the final word. And there’s always the chance that Trump might get another Supreme Court appointment or two.

Picking an arsonist as Fire Chief doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole city will burn down. But even so, it does pose certain risks.