Ahead of the United Nations’ annual climate summit beginning this week, scientists and policy experts are once again ringing alarm bells warning that the current efforts to slow climate change are falling short. Only a massive shift away from fossil fuels and a reduction in the amount of carbon dioxide pumped into the air can avert the oncoming disaster. But former President Donald Trump and his advisers have other ideas, all of which would only bring about a climate change-fueled apocalypse even faster.
Former President Donald Trump and his advisers have other ideas, all of which would only bring about a climate change-fueled apocalypse even faster.
As campaign officials and advisers recently told The Financial Times, if Trump is elected to a second term, his climate policies would be focused less on keeping the planet habitable at the end of the century and more on working to “maximize fossil fuel production.” Beyond simply cranking up output, Trump would also seek to roll back any environmental regulations that the Biden administration has issued and have Congress cut off the climate spending in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.
In practice, some of those destructive goals would be easier to achieve than others. Forcing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to reverse its recent proposal to raise fuel economy standards on cars and light trucks would be relatively simple. Doing so would lower the incentive for automakers to swap out their gas-powered fleets for electric vehicles, improve the fuel efficiency of their gas-powered vehicles (or, ideally, both) and leave the country just as dependent on fossil fuels as ever. But for Trump, that would be a feature, not a bug.
It would be more difficult, however, to turn off the IRA’s spigot of funding for clean energy investments. The climate law included massive tax credits for clean energy, loans from the Energy Department to build electric vehicle and battery plants and $110 billion in…
Read the full article here