Energy Blog

Climate Change in the Second Trump Reich

In the last few weeks, events involving Donald Trump have completely dumped the responsible US plans under President Biden to reduce and eventually end the US contributions to climate change.

Briefly, the events were:

1. The Trumps Supreme Court aggrandized the powers to make all federal regulations, reversing the Court’s precedent of assigning such regulations to the Executive Branch in the Chevron deference decision of 1984, forty years in standing.  In this we have to note that it has been further revealed how Justice Thomas has literally been in the pocket of Texas real estate developer Harlan Crow, who is on the board of the American Enterprise Institute and is a large Republican donor.  Thomas hid his luxury vacations and other financial support from required reporting.  We also note that Trump appointed the three latest conservative Justices, bypassing the normal rules of appointment in each case.
2. In the first Presidential debate of 2024, President Biden, responding late at night, and with a cold, raised serious debts about his responsiveness to assume four more years as President.  He has now slipped further behind Trump in the polls.  Nobody is hand-ringing that Trump didn’t answer the questions posed by CNN, but simply recited the 30 lies that he has been telling during every interview and rally.  However, the lack of enthusiastic backing of Biden is weakening the Democratic candidate whomever they might turn out to be.  We note that Biden as President would be replaced in case of any serious weakness by the highly competent and four year experienced VP Kamala Harris, as well as the continued competence and experience of thousands of Presidential appointees and the three million federal employees.
3. Trump’s statements and the detailed policies originally set forth in the Heritage Foundation’s guide book Policy 2025 call for a complete removal of all climate regulations from the Federal Government, and a boosting of all policies for oil and natural gas production and foreign sales.  Trump has also stated that he will again withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement, as he did his first term in office, and which President Biden had to reverse.  On July 5th, Trump said that he hadn’t heard of the Project 2025.   Oddly enough, I found an article on The Hill of Trump saying exactly the same thing precisely a year earlier.  He also hypocritically added that he disagreed with a number of things in the Project 2025.  Wikipedia also lists 20 members of the Trump administration who worked on the Project.  It also points out that the sponsors of the Project employ over 200 officials from the Trump administration.
4. Saved to just after the debate, the Court announced that a President has been and is immune from prosecution for all official acts, and given the presumption of possible immunity for all other acts. 

Do I know the outcome of this?  Of course not.  But the promises that Trump made to the Oil and Natural Gas companies to halt all regulation, has, surprisingly to us, been taken out of his hands by the Court.  He won’t like that!  By the way, the opening up of more Natural Gas sales to foreign countries, like the EU, where it is five times as expensive due to the boycott of Russian Natural Gas, is only going to skyrocket the price in the US, not lower it.

Why am I writing this on July 4th, Independence Day?  Obviously, since it is when we declared independence from a King, and everybody is calling the President’s new-found immunity after 235 years since the Constitution was adopted in 1789 that of a Kingship.  In the title I used Trump’s preferred title of his second Reich.  (Actually, he would say that it is his third, since he won in 2020 also and currently rules the Republican Party, the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court.)

Who is the Supreme Court going to hire to decide on scientific executive issues?  The Heritage Foundation or the present competent and experienced federal scientists, as well as those at universities and in government funded corporations and labs?  Why didn’t the Court remove at least a year of uncertainty until their next delayed decisions on these matters by telling us?  By removing Executive experts, they give grounds for Trump to fire all of them, although they are so valuable, that they would quit in frustration, as they did during the First Trump Reich.

Also, I am motivated by watching the fireworks in cities across the US on CNN, and the dense air pollution that they are leaving in all major cities.  Not to mention the endless explosions of private fireworks.

Republican Representative Elise Stefanik has thrown all federal funding of scientists at especially leading universities in danger, over simply policies of handling free speech and the freedom to demonstrate in new and unique situations.  I remind the public that such funding is highly competitive and only awarded by highly qualified review boards by scientific executive branches for important research in the national interest.  Arbitrarily cutting off such overall funding depending on the feelings of a single representative over a specific university policy in newly challenging circumstances is a great disservice to the health, competitiveness, and security of the United States.  Stefanik benefited from all of the excellent faculty at Harvard University for her education and background.

Unfortunately, daily and multiple climate and weather phenomena are setting records because of climate change, now well calculated by scientists.  The damage is usually in the billions or tens of billions of dollars per event.  The US is second in Greenhouse Gas pollution causing this, at 13% of the world total.  As we showed in a preceding article, despite the fact that China is at about 30%, it has four times the US population, and is leading the world in reducing Greenhouse Gases.  Per capita, the population of India only produces about 1/9th that of the US.  

In terms of sea level rise, Trump confidently told the sympathetic and non-challenging interviewer that it was only going to be 1/8th of an inch in the next 400 years and is therefore not worth the expense of a trillion dollars.  Actually, two to four feet looks like an inevitability by the end of this century, and six feet if we do nothing.  The trillion dollars also appears to be an excessive estimate of the cost to remove the US Greenhouse Gas emissions, but the damages keep adding up.