Photo: Joseph Sohm/Getty Images
Sometimes the forces that lead to major social and political change take years to mature before they become public policy. The environmental movement, for example, began well before the first Earth Day in 1970; after decades of advocacy and resistance, the U.S. government finally passed laws regulating the practices and substances poisoning the planet.
Now all that progress has been reversed at the hands of the Trump administration. The New York Times reported:
President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.
The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.
Led by a president who refers to climate change as a “hoax,” the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research shows it to be.
The so-called endangerment finding, first promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009, represented the culmination of scientific and regulatory initiatives dating back to the Nixon presidency. Until Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, climate-change “denialism” was a fringe movement. While many Republicans questioned the pace and scope of climate-change regulation, they didn’t oppose it entirely. But now climate-change denialism is official U.S. policy, making this country a global pariah. We’re now the only country that has withdrawn from the 2015 Paris Agreement — in which most of the world agreed to greenhouse-gas-emission reductions — joining Iran, Libya, and Yemen as climate-change scofflaws.
While Trump has long been a climate-change denier, he really amped up his opposition to environmental protection in 2024 as part of a devil’s bargain with the fossil-fuel industry, as the Brennan Center explained:
Trump asked oil and gas executives in 2024 to raise $1 billion for his campaign and told them he’d grant their policy wish list if he won. The investment, he said, would be a “deal” given the taxes and regulation they would avoid under his presidency. He also offered to help fast-track fossil fuel industry mergers and acquisitions if he won.
This is one deal on which he has abundantly delivered:
His signature legislative package [the One Big Beautiful Bill Act]— which one executive deemed “positive for us across all of our top priorities” — gives oil and gas firms $18 billion in tax incentives while rolling back incentives for clean energy alternatives. He’s placed fossil fuel allies in charge of the agencies that oversee the industry and fast-tracked drilling projects on public lands. In just his first 100 days back in office, Trump took at least 145 actions to undo environmental rules — more than he reversed during his entire first term as president.
Yes, scientists and nature lovers generally have been stunned by the aggressively reactionary efforts of the 47th president to roll back the fundamental achievements of environmental policy for the past half-century. But you don’t need to be a professor or a tree hugger to comprehend that something dangerous is happening thanks to the toxins our industries and our cars are belching into the atmosphere. The recent explosion of extreme weather from coast to coast, and the steady diminution of the glories of the temperate seasons of spring and autumn, are evident to Americans over the age of 30. And Americans under the age of 30 need no convincing that climate change is a huge and very real challenge, as a 2024 Sacred Heart University survey shows:
Nearly 2 in 3 (63%) youth report experiencing “eco-anxiety”—a level of psychological distress about climate change that impacts their daily lives—up from 55% in the 2024 ISSJ Sacred Heart University poll.
Seven in 10 (70%) also report being worried about climate change.
This concern transcends demographics: more than 60% of Black, Hispanic and white youth report eco-anxiety, and among Republicans and conservatives, over 60% say they also experience “eco-anxiety.”
Partisan polarization means that differences of opinion on climate change can be countered or obliterated by tribal allegiances on other issues. But it’s important to understand that this particular policy priority of the Trump administration is really bad, rivaling mass deportation, the inversion of civil-rights laws, the ongoing destruction of NATO, the subversion of reproductive rights, and the use of government as an instrument of vengeance as precedent-breaking developments. We will live and breathe Trump’s repudiation of climate-change initiatives for a long time.
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