On his second inauguration day, Jan. 20, the 45th and 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump, signed six executive orders pertaining directly to the issue of climate change.
The first of these executive orders defined Trump’s current environmental policy.
“In recent years, the United States has purported to join international agreements and initiatives that do not reflect our country’s values or our contributions to the pursuit of economic and environmental objectives,” the executive order stated.
The international agreement Trump is primarily referring to in this order is the 2015 Paris Agreement, which he withdrew from the day he took office. Later in the order, Trump claims the agreement had “the potential to damage or stifle the American economy.” Trump ordered that any department that partakes in international energy agreements “henceforth prioritize economic efficiency.”
In Trump’s second environmental executive order, “Unleashing American Energy,” he revoked 12 of former President Joe Biden’s executive orders, hoping to “encourage energy exploration and production,” and that “burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations have impeded the development of these resources,” according to the White House website. This order also included the termination of the Green New Deal and the pause of funds for EV charging stations, asserting that “consumer choice” and “cost-effectiveness” be put before sustainability.
This order was supplemented by another, “Declaring a National Energy Emergency,” which claimed the country is in a national energy deficit that can only be remedied by increased “production, transportation” and “refining” of “domestic energy resources [oil],” according to the White House website.
The environmentally sensitive state of Alaska was mentioned specifically by the president, as he pushes to “maximize” drilling, mining, overfishing and deforestation there in the third climate executive order, “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential.” Funds that the previous administration directed toward protecting Alaska may be reallocated toward intensive extraction of its resources.
According to University of Connecticut professor of political science, Oksan Bayulgen, Ph.D., this administration is “turning a blind eye to all the [socioeconomically] disproportionate effects of that kind of development.”
The primary mechanism the administration is utilizing for this reversion is the withholding of federal funds, according to Bayulgen.
“The Trump administration is saying they want to reverse all of the key elements of this historic legislation by basically turning off the faucet…all those projects will be paused at this point and their future will be uncertain,” Bayulgen said.
Bayulgen added that the Biden administration provided “huge government incentives and support for not only clean energy…but also the infrastructure, [and] expediting the permitting process, and there are a lot of challenges in terms of moving these projects forward.”
Arduous progress toward a cleaner future is now being reversed, according to Bayulgen.
“The Inflation Reduction Act, and Infrastructure and Jobs Act, it was very difficult to pass them,” said Bayulgen. “All that progress that was made in the last decade or so is going to be reversed, and we don’t have time for it.”