President Trump has long been a supporter of traditional energy. During his campaign, he spoke negatively about electric vehicles, wind, and other renewable energy sources. But in his first day in office, the new president began a historic shift in US energy policy, away from green energy and back to hydrocarbon energy.
On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed five wide-ranging executive orders that radically change United States energy and climate policy. These actions restore efforts to promote coal, natural gas, oil, hydropower, nuclear, and biofuels, while curtailing support for wind and electric vehicles. The Trump executive orders also rescinded orders issued by President Biden and closed federal departments established to promote climate change policies and green energy.
The executive order regarding “offshore wind” and “wind projects” immediately impacted the world wind industry. The US government owns all land from three miles to 200 miles offshore, so wind companies require a federal lease to build offshore systems. The order withdrew “all areas within the Offshore Continental Shelf” from wind leasing. The order also requires that the new Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, “conduct a comprehensive review” to determine the necessity for “terminating or amending any existing wind energy leases” and to submit a report to the President. The order also put a hold on the Lava Ridge Wind Project in Idaho, pending a review by the Secretary of the Interior, a project which was approved by the Biden Administration in December.
Wind energy markets were shocked by Trump’s order. The stock price of Orsted, a Danish wind system supplier, dropped 17% to its lowest price in seven years. Orsted proposed to build Sunrise Wind, the largest planned US offshore wind system, to be located southeast of New York City. The company immediately took a $1.69 billion impairment charge on US wind projects.
Wind suppliers RWE of Germany, Equinor of Norway, Renovaveis of Portugal, and Vestas of Denmark also suffered stock price declines. Italy’s Prysmian announced that it would abandon a plan to build a plant in the US to make cables for offshore wind systems.
Wind energy plans for several states have been crippled. California planned to install 25 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2045, with initial projects at Morro Bay and Humbolt Bay, but these plans are on hold for at least the next four years. Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia are constructing or planning east coast offshore systems, but these programs will be reviewed, limited, or halted if not yet started.
The “Unleashing American Energy (UAE)” executive order calls for elimination of the “electric vehicle (EV) mandate” to promote consumer choice and access to gasoline-powered automobiles. It’s true that we have no formal EV mandate, but 22 states have zero-emissions vehicle laws or executive orders prohibiting sales of gasoline cars by a future date, typically 2035. On March 20 of last year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued updated emissions standards that would force auto manufacturers to sell an increasing number of EVs, rising from about 8% last year to about 56% of new light vehicle purchases by 2032.
A map of the united states with green and white states
The Trump orders also call for termination of state emissions waivers “that function to limit sales of gasoline powered automobiles.” The 1970 Clean Air Act established the federal government as responsible for regulating pollution, except where a waiver is granted by the EPA to a state. For years, California has set emissions standards, receiving EPA waivers to do so, with other states following California’s lead. The orders seek to terminate these waivers to California and restore emissions control to the EPA. Earlier this month, California withdrew their request for a waiver for regulations to electrify heavy trucks and locomotives because it appeared that Trump’s EPA would not grant that request.
The order also calls for the “elimination of unfair subsidies and other ill-conceived government-imposed market distortions that favor EVs.” This probably refers to coming efforts to eliminate the $7500 tax credit on new EV sales and also efforts to eliminate the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards issued by the Department of Transportation, which force auto manufacturers to sell a larger share of EVs.
The US economy today includes several green energy industries which probably would not exist without the vast array of federal and state subsidies and tax credits. Wind, solar, EV charging, carbon dioxide (CO2) capture, and green hydrogen receive a limitless stream of subsidies and tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), both of which were passed during the Biden Presidency. The CATO institute estimates that renewable energy will receive about $80 billion in federal funds during fiscal year 2025.
During his campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to eliminate the money flow from these two acts, and his first-day executive orders reflect this. The UAE order calls for “termination of the Green New Deal,” and a halt to the disbursement of funds from the IRA and IIJA. President Trump will probably need to pass Congressional legislation to permanently reduce the flow of IRA and IIJA funds.
Wind and solar systems are intermittent, use 100 times the land area, and require at least double the transmission infrastructure compared to traditional coal, gas, or nuclear power plants. Few utilities would build wind and solar systems if not for the fear of human-caused global warming. But the new executive orders make it clear that the US will no longer pursue efforts to “mitigate” climate change.
In the executive order titled “Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements,” the President directs the US Ambassador to the United Nations, nominee Elise Stefanik, to notify the UN in writing that the US withdraws from the Paris Climate Agreement, effective immediately. The order also states that the US will immediately cease financial payments under the Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The orders direct executive branch officials to cancel at least five Biden executive orders on climate change, and to disband the Climate Change Support Office, the American Climate Corps, and The Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases. The orders also call for the EPA to review the 2009 Endangerment Finding for “continuing applicability.” That finding concluded that carbon dioxide endangered US citizens and is the basis for regulating CO2 emissions in the US.
The Trump actions also seek to boost the development of hydrocarbon energy in the spirit of “drill, baby, drill.} Key actions include re-opening the licensing of liquified natural gas terminals, opening federal lands for onshore and offshore oil and gas production, reopening Alaska lands for energy production, and reducing efficiency regulations on dishwashers, stoves, and furnaces. The President also declared a national energy emergency to speed the deployment of pipelines and other energy infrastructure. The Trump EPA and Department of Energy will roll back regulations on oil and gas to expand US production.
Trump’s executive order bomb, followed by Congressional action to limit funds from the IRA and IIJA, promises to gut, or profoundly reshape, the US green energy movement. January 2025 may begin a long decline for green energy and a return to sensible energy policy.
Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and author of the bestselling book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.
As discussed in my previous post, one of President Trump’s first-day Executive Orders - the one entitled “Unleashing American Energy” - directed a reconsideration of EPA’s so-called “Endangerment Finding” (EF) of 2009. The EF is the EPA regulatory action where it claimed to determine that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” qualify as “pollutants” under the Clean Air Act because they are a “danger to public health and welfare.” President Trump’s January 20 EO directs that EPA, within 30 days, submit “recommendations to the Director of OMB on the legality and continuing applicability of the Administrator’s findings.”
Since the EF is the foundation underlying all the Biden-era regulations restricting and suppressing fossil fuels, you can be sure that any attempt to eliminate it will be met with a full-bore litigation attack from the forces of the crazy left. Can the EF really be rescinded in a way that will stand up to these attacks?
Absolutely, it can. Let me address a few of the issues.
Massachusetts v. EPA
This is the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision that held that EPA was required to make a determination as to the status of CO2 and other greenhouse gases as “pollutants” under the Clean Air Act. Here is a link to the Supreme Court’s opinion. Some commenters have suggested that Mass v. EPA must be reversed before the EF can be undone.
I disagree. I’m not saying that Mass v. EPA is a model of clarity, and there is some language in it that would suggest the opposite. However, I think that the language at the very end of Justice Stevens’s majority opinion is the holding:
We need not and do not reach the question whether on remand EPA must make an endangerment finding, or whether policy concerns can inform EPA’s actions in the event that it makes such a finding...We hold only that EPA must ground its reasons for action or inaction in the statute.
Thus Mass v. EPA did not determine that CO2 was a “pollutant” as defined in Section 202 of the Clean Air Act, but only directed EPA to determine whether it was or was not. Thus a new well-reasoned determination by EPA that CO2 and the other GHGs are not pollutants would not violate that case.
West Virginia v. EPA
The other important Supreme Court decision bearing on the EF is West Virginia v. EPA, the 2022 decision where the Supreme Court held that EPA’s Clean Power Plan was beyond its regulatory authority under the Clean Air Act. The basis for the Court’s decision was what it called the Major Questions Doctrine, by which it held that a “transformative expansion” of EPA’s regulatory power would require a clear direction from Congress, which had not been given.
In 2024, despite West Virginia v. EPA, and without any further clear direction from Congress, EPA went ahead and finalized two gigantic new regulations to restrict use of fossil fuels, one regarding power plants and the other regarding automobiles. They essentially decided to dare the Supreme Court to try to stop them (much like Biden with his repeated efforts to forgive student loans).
West Virginia v. EPA did not explicitly overrule Massachusetts v. EPA, but the two are fundamentally in tension. The big difference is that the Court that decided Massachusetts v. EPA has since been largely transformed in personnel. Of the nine justices on the Court in 2007, only three remain - Roberts, Thomas and Alito - and all of them dissented in Mass v. EPA. The five justices in the majority plus Scalia have been replaced by three conservatives (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett) and three liberals.
On today’s Court, I think it highly likely that a majority will uphold a well-reasoned rescission of the EF, and will not think it necessary to overrule Mass v. EPA.
Substance of the rescinding determination
Three main points need to be made in an EPA regulatory action rescinding the EF: (1) Empirical evidence accumulated since the original EF invalidates the finding and makes it impossible to conclude that CO2 and other GHGs constitute a “danger” as required by the statute; (2) due to huge increases since 2009 in CO2 and other GHG emissions outside the U.S. and thus outside the ability of EPA to regulate, no regulations promulgated by EPA could have any meaningful impact on the overall atmospheric concentrations of the gases, and (3) efforts by EPA to control the climate by restricting CO2 and other GHGs, by contrast, would almost certainly have drastic adverse effects on public health and welfare by, for example, destabilizing the electrical grid and causing blackouts, driving up the cost of electricity or mobility, bringing about massive battery fires and explosions, and lots of other such things.
Only the first of these three points deals with the “science” of whether GHGs do or do not cause any significant global warming. Most important is that this argument needs to be written carefully to not take on more than needs to be taken on. To rescind the EF, EPA does not need to contend that GHGs will not or cannot cause any global warming. Rather, they can put the burden of proof on the other side to show that GHGs emitted under EPA’s regulatory jurisdiction will inevitably cause dangerous warming. EPA need only conclude that there is no sufficient proof of that.
Framed in that way, this is not a complicated or difficult task. There are hundreds of scientific papers in the peer reviewed literature since 2009 accumulating empirical evidence that the dangers predicted 15 years ago have not happened. For example:
There have been no upward trends in hurricanes, droughts, floods, tornadoes, wild fires, or other dangerous weather events.
Sea level has not risen beyond the slow rate of rise over the prior century.
Sea ice has not declined as predicted. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have not meaningfully changed.
EPA can just create lists of dozens or hundreds of such scientific papers, and perhaps add a quote of a line or two from the abstract for each.
Points (2) and (3) are actually more important to the rescission than the point about the science of atmospheric warming. Trying to replace the fossil fuel energy system with something untried and untested actually does pose many real and immediate dangers - far more real, immediate, and dangerous than anything that might result from a hypothetical warming of a degree or two a hundred years from now. California is only up to about 30-40% of its electricity from wind and solar, and yet has suffered multiple instances of rolling blackouts. The extent of these blackouts has been relatively small only because California has the ability to import fossil-fuel- become lengthy and catastrophic. Similarly, batteries are proposed as the backup for intermittency of wind and solar generation. California and New York have both begun building massive battery farms to serve this role, although neither state has yet reached nearly 1% of the battery capacity they would need to back up a predominantly wind/solar generation system. But even with that small amount of batteries, both have suffered massive and explosive fires at their battery facilities. California had such a fire just last week at the facility known as Moss Landing in Monterey County. This was the fourth large fire at the Moss Landing facility over the past few years.
I actually have a high degree of confidence that a reconsideration of the EF will be successful. Likely, that will sweep away all of the restrictions on fossil fuels that have been put in place via regulation during the Biden years. One more thing: Once CO2 and GHGs are declared to no longer by “pollutants,” all of the billions of dollars of government grants under the Inflation Reduction Act to “reduce GHG pollution” can be suspended and never spent.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide: you can’t see, hear, smell or taste it. But it’s there - all around us - and it’s crucial for life. Composed of one carbon and two oxygen atoms, this simple molecule serves as the primary raw material out of which plants construct their tissues, which in turn provide the materials out of which animals construct theirs. Knowledge of the key life giving and life sustaining role played by carbon dioxide, or CO2, is so well established, in fact, that humans - and all the rest of the biosphere - are described in the most basic of terms as carbon-based lifeforms.
We simply could not and would not exist without it. Ironically, far too many demonize and falsely label this important atmospheric trace gas a pollutant. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of being shunned like the plague, the ongoing rise in CO2 should be welcomed with open arms. Why? Because plants love CO2. Far from being a pollutant, this colorless, odorless, tasteless and invisible gas is better than the best fertilizer ever invented. Essentially, it is the “food” that sustains all plants on the face of the earth. And the more of it they “eat” (or take in from the air), the bigger and better they grow.
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Conversations That Matter
Dr. Patrick Moore takes issue with NGOs over climate, genetically modified organisms and the “truth” about carbon
He says we were literally running out of carbon before we started to pump it back into the atmosphere. “CO2 has been declining to where it is getting close to the end of plant life, and in another 1.8 million years, life would begin to die on planet Earth for lack of CO2.”
According to Moore, it is life itself that has been consuming carbon and storing it in carbonaceous rocks. He goes on to say, “Billions of tons of carbonaceous rock represent carbon dioxide pulled out of the atmosphere, and because the Earth has cooled over the millennia, nature is no longer putting CO2 into the atmosphere to offset this.”
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No sooner had fires erupted around Los Angeles than the vultures swooped hissing that it was climate change. Why, you might even get told “Human use of fire has produced an era of uncontrolled burning: Welcome to the Pyrocene”. And when it snowed in Florida, well, the Climate Adaptation Center went ‘How climate warming contributed to record snow in Florida’, to which Roger Pielke Jr. replied, “like clockwork”. And of course should it snow in LA, burn in Pensacola, flood in Kapuskasing or go dry in Managua, the little cuckoo will pop out and go “climate change” over and over as it always does.
The ravages of global heating in Pensacola, Florida Jan. 22, 2025 (courtesy of an alert reader who lives there)
One California news outlet admitted that “The snow comes during an exceptionally cold pattern for the south.” But then it insisted that:
“According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Earth’s global average temperature has been rising since about 1850. Human activity including the burning of fossil fuels is accelerating the pace of that warming beyond what would occur naturally… NOAA analyses show that ocean surface temperatures are rising faster than air temperatures. Warmer oceans can drive more intense evaporation and send more water vapor into the air for developing storms. More water vapor typically means heavy rain and snow rates.”
OK. So more snow despite that stuff about the end of winter. Got it. But in Florida?
Oh yes. You see:
“Of all regions on Earth’s surface, the Arctic is warming the fastest. This warming creates imbalances in the polar vortex, an area of powerful winds near the Arctic Circle.”
Oooh imbalances. It never used to happen, which we know because we don’t. But it must be so:
“When the polar vortex weakens, lobes of bitter, cold air can drop south and bring prolonged cold spells to the United States and other countries at the middle latitudes. This phenomenon led to the intense cold in the Eastern U.S. this week.”
No hesitation about causation. And then a fearless prediction that weather may happen:
“As climate change continues, snowstorms are still going to be part of the weather we experience. Shifts in moisture and temperature patterns will change where we see that snow and how much. Some regions could see significantly less snow in the long run as warming air favors more rain than snow. This is a concern for California, which relies on Sierra snowmelt as part of the state’s water supply. Changes in storm track patterns could also lead to relatively infrequent but unusually big snow events like what fell this week in the southern Gulf states.”
Could. Might. Unless it doesn’t.
Bloomberg wrote that:
“The region’s worst snowstorm in 130 years has seen as much as 10 inches pile up in New Orleans, according to public reports, smashing a record of 2.7 inches set in 1963. Temperatures fell to 26F (minus 3C) overnight. Similar accumulations of snow were recorded in Pensacola, Florida, and more than four inches hit the Houston area.”
And normally when you get a once-in-a-century event the media tell you it’s definitely proof that climate change has made it more frequent even with no data to support the claim. But in this case, crickets. Or not even those, given the temperature.
In fact often-loose talk of smashing records is appropriate here. As an AP story in the Winnipeg Free Press observed:
“Milton is just northeast of Pensacola, where 8.9 inches (22.6 centimeters) shattered the city’s previous all-time snow record of 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) set in 1895.”
As in nearly three times as much fell. So tell us the one about the end of winter again?
London, 28 January: The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has today published its periodic review of global hurricane activity. The review is based on the findings of key scientific bodies, comparing them to sensationalist news reporting and popular perceptions.
Trends in landfalling Atlantic/western Pacific hurricanes have been stable or decreasing since 1950.
There is also no global trend in overall hurricane frequency since reliable records began in the 1970s.
The apparent increase in the number of hurricanes since the 19th century has been due to changes in observation practices over the years, rather than an actual increase.
Data show no long-term trends in US landfalling hurricanes since the mid-19th century, when systematic records began, either in terms of frequency or intensity.
Similarly, after allowing for the fact that many storms were not spotted prior to the satellite era, there are no such trends in Atlantic hurricanes either.
There is growing evidence that wind speeds of the most powerful hurricanes may now be overestimated in comparison to pre-satellite era ones, because of changing methods of measurement.
The increase in Atlantic hurricanes in the last fifty years is not part of a long-term trend, but is linked to a recovery from a deep minimum in hurricane activity in the 1970s, associated with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.
The author, climate researcher Paul Homewood, said:
“The observational findings of meteorological agencies in 2024 once again confound those who claim to see a ‘climate crisis’ in the hurricane data. It is clear that we have not seen an increase in hurricane frequency, even though the public have been scared into thinking that tropical storms are getting worse.”
GWPF Director, Dr Benny Peiser, said:
“The gap between media hype, popular perceptions and the reality of empirical data is becoming ever more evident. This report sets out the facts and is a welcome corrective to misleading news coverage of hurricanes.”
Read the full paper here: The 2024 Hurricane Season (pdf)
NOAA has started tampering with their “RAW” temperature data, increasing all post-2007 temperatures. The graph below shows changes in the “RAW” maximum temperatures made over the past two years.
See the before and after images of the data here. Yes there is man made global warming but the men are at NOAA.
See animating before and after images at Tony Heller’s site here.
