Three months before this week’s Republican National Convention (RNC) opened in Milwaukee, Donald Trump met with oil executives to shake them down for a huge influx of cash. In exchange for them giving his campaign $1 billion, he said, he would dismantle Joe Biden’s green agenda and roll back an array of environmental regulations.
Trump’s rather shameless request — and his promise — was in keeping with the long-standing GOP head-in-the-sand approach to climate change and to environmental policies that in any way, shape or form limit the oil and gas industries’ ability to maximize production and profits. To be clear, while Trump is in many ways a disrupter, when it comes to climate change policies, he’s simply following a decades-old GOP approach, pushed at least as avidly by George H. W. Bush, and then George W. Bush and his Texas oil cronies, as by Trump himself.
When Bush Sr. first got elected, the president at least made noises about caring about the climate. But the further into his presidency he got, the more H.W. pushed the issue onto the backburner. It was too politically explosive to try to limit the size of cars Americans could drive, or to tax carbon emissions or to raise gas taxes. The downsides, politically, in pushing an issue most Americans didn’t really care about or understand, were too manifest.
That’s been the GOP approach pretty much ever since. His son, George W. Bush, initially promised to regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from coal power plants, but then didn’t do so. His administration also refused to implement the provisions of the Kyoto climate change treaty.
When Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords — a decision announced in 2017 and implemented in 2020 — it was simply the latest in a litany of GOP assaults on global efforts to rein in the warming of the planet — though in Trump’s case he has never even paid lip service to caring about the issue. Similarly, his almost obsessive determination to downgrade government agencies’ abilities to collate and to distribute climate change data fit into a pattern of hostility to climate science going back to the 1980s. In the four years of the Trump presidency, the administration rolled back more than 100 major environmental regulations, according to a New York Times analysis. These included the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which required significant reductions in carbon emissions from the power sector.
The administration also devoted a huge amount of effort to an ultimately failed attempt to deprive California of its long-standing right to set its own emissions standards for vehicles. Partly, that seemed to be an act of sheer spite, aimed at a state that had consistently and often successfully opposed an array of Trump policies; partly, however, it was strategic, since California’s more stringent emissions regulations are followed by an increasing number of Democratic-led states. If he could weaken California’s ability to set emissions policies, Trump could hinder an entire state-led movement pushing green policies despite the federal government going AWOL on the issue.
Four years after he triggered an insurrection in a desperate effort to cling to power, Trump — riding high off of Biden’s post-debate woes, and the object of public sympathies after the failed assassination attempt against him last weekend — is now the bookies’ favorite to be the next president. If he returns to power, there’s every indication the incoming administration will be at least as hostile to environmental policies and to efforts to tackle global warming as was his previous presidency. And it will be doing so during a crucial final window of years leading up to 2030 that climate scientists believe humans have in order to contain the worst impacts of the climate crisis.
Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, the 900-plus page Heritage Foundation-inspired policy blueprint for an incoming Trump administration, advocates a massive paring back of the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency; a virtual end to government monitoring of global temperature changes; an acceleration of permitting for natural gas and oil drilling ventures; and a removal of all climate change goals from government services, ranging from how cities are zoned to what materials are used in public construction projects. The blueprint envisions a complete cut off of tax subsidies and rebates for electric vehicles, a rollback of wind farm investments, and a reversal of Pentagon planning around climate change. As Bill McKibben recently wrote in The Nation, “If Trump wins — well, consider the US an Exxon station, open 24 hours a day.” The U.K.-based Carbon Brief has estimated that Trump’s plans would result in a staggering 4 billion tons of additional CO2 being spewed into the Earth’s atmosphere by 2030.
Trump has repeatedly talked about the vast amounts of “liquid gold” he wants the U.S., and American companies, to access, no matter the costs to the global climate and environment. He has repeatedly denigrated the scientific consensus on the dangers of a warming planet and rising sea levels. And he has repeatedly promised to create a golden age of fossil fuel production and usage in the U.S.
Echoing this language, the Republican Party platform, unveiled at this week’s convention in Milwaukee, says — in all caps, of course — that “We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL.” It is a riff on a phrase popular among GOP functionaries and elected officials since 2008, when then-RNC chair Michael Steele first used the term.
There is a nihilism to this approach that puts the GOP in a category of its own among the governing parties of Western democracies. Even European far right parties tend to acknowledge the realities of climate change and accept (though not to the same extent as other parties) the need to modify behavior and consumption habits to tackle this crisis. In the U.S., however, the GOP is hell-bent on ignoring the science, pushing off the hard decisions, and embracing a fossil fuel-at-all-costs strategy that will do enormous damage to the Earth’s environment should Trump win power again in November.
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