US elections: climate skeptics come up with plans in case of a second Trump term

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Pushed to the political margins during Joe Biden’s presidency, they are now laying the groundwork for bringing back coal-fired power plants, investigating the science at the Environmental Protection Agency and neutralizing the models used in the federal government’s National Climate Assessment and other reports.

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“Everything Biden did will be looked at. The question is: is there enough time in the day for the next four years?” said Steve Milloy, who previously advised Trump’s EPA transition team and serves on the board of directors of the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank that has embraced the benefits of a warming climate. “How much can you lose?”

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Environmental groups say the measures would reverse U.S. climate progress at a critical time, with the Earth on the brink of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming and climate-related disasters piling up.

“With Trump, we are going backwards at a time when we can least afford it,” said Lena Moffitt, executive director of Evergreen Action. “These guys have an agenda that would kill jobs and raise electricity rates for Americans, not to mention it would kill thousands of people.”

A representative for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Democrat Kamala Harris, meanwhile, is largely expected to continue following the Biden-era course on energy issues, including policies that promote clean energy and tackle greenhouse gas emissions.

Trump has in the past dismissed global warming as a hoax. During his first term, members of his administration praised fossil fuels, rejected the scientific consensus on climate change and touted the benefits of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. (Emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases have already raised global temperatures by about 1.2 degrees Celsius, scientists say.) Although Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate accord and succeeded in repealing or repealing dozens of environmental rules to slow down, many of the sweeping changes that climate skeptics sought have not materialized.

Milloy, a former executive at coal mining company Murray Energy Corp., said he and affiliated groups are working on a policy roadmap for a potential Trump administration, similar to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which Heartland has joined. (Trump and his campaign have disavowed Project 2025, which many of his former advisers worked on.)

The roadmap will challenge the science used by the EPA to inform a slew of environmental regulations, Milloy said. During Trump’s presidency, the agency proposed restrictions on the use of scientific research unless methodological, technical and other information was publicly available. Critics said the move would rule out such research as public health studies using anonymized patient data.

It would reverse the EPA’s 2009 “threat finding,” which provides some of the legal underpinnings for regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, cars and other sources of global warming.

Among the goals Heartland is focused on are Biden-era restrictions on coal-fired power plants, the Biden administration’s pause on approving liquefied natural gas export permits and greenhouse gas reporting requirements, said James Taylor, the president of the in Illinois-based organization. who has been critical of climate science.

“We have people within Heartland who may have ties, influence or contacts with an incoming Trump administration, and these are the things we would promote,” Taylor said.

Much of the wish list aligns with Trump’s pledge to “drill, baby, drill” for fossil fuels and the oil, gas and coal industries’ desire for regulatory changes.

Other skeptics focus on the scientific models used by federal researchers to prepare the National Climate Assessment and other major reports on climate change. The latest edition of the National Climate Assessment, published last year, found that climate change was causing an increasing number of heat waves and wildfires.

“Modelling is in the crosshairs,” said Myron Ebell, a longtime skeptic who led Trump’s EPA transition team and who said he believes “the impacts of modest warming have been largely beneficial overall.” Ebell added that some groups are pushing to require scientific models to be verified.

The CO2 Coalition, a nonprofit whose self-declared goal is to educate policymakers and others about the benefits of carbon dioxide, wants to see the creation of a presidential commission to review climate science, said Greg Wrightstone, the group’s executive director. “We have climate alarmists at every level of government,” Wrightstone said. “We need climate realists to have an open and honest debate.” An overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that Earth’s climate is warming and that human activity is the primary cause.

Such a review was proposed during the first Trump administration by William Happer, an adviser to Trump’s National Security Council. The effort failed after opposition from moderate Republicans, who feared it would cost Trump votes among women, Happer said in an interview. But if re-elected, Trump would not have the political considerations that come with running for another term, he added.

The skeptics’ level of planning shows they are better prepared for a possible second Trump term than when he won in 2016, said Kert Davies, director of the Washington DC-based Center for Climate Integrity. He said he feared the results given the severity of climate change: “Killing regulations – even slowing them down – is terrible.”

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