Trump is setting us up for a far worse climate future

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When former President Joe Biden got the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed in 2022, it felt like the U.S. might finally start taking climate change seriously after years of flailing. It was the largest climate spending bill ever signed into law, and it appeared it would help prevent billions of tons of heat-trapping CO2 from entering the atmosphere. Things were starting to look up. Enter: Donald Trump.

Trump's big tax and spending bill that was signed into law in early July—which I wouldn't call beautiful—went to great lengths to eliminate the climate portions of the IRA. The bill went after IRA tax credits and made it so wind and solar projects that were not under construction by July 2026 or beginning service by the end of 2027 would no longer be eligible for them.

It also went after the electric vehicle tax credit, which will be completely eliminated next month. Of course, Donald Trump and his cronies in the Republican Party weren't going to stop at harming renewable energy, so they threw in some giveaways to the fossil fuel industry. The bill also opens up much more land to oil and gas drilling.

The bill at one point contained a tax on renewable energy like wind and solar, but that was taken out before it was passed. Hooray. However, Trump signed an executive order days after the bill passed that attempts to make it so renewable energy projects will no longer receive tax incentives they have received for many years—long before the IRA existed.

Obviously, all of this makes it significantly harder for the U.S. to transition away from fossil fuels. These acts are not just stupid in an environmental sense but in so many other ways. Renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy, so it's stupid economically. China is beating us in clean energy manufacturing, so it's stupid in a competitive sense, because pretty much every reasonable person agrees renewable energy is the energy of the future.

Furthermore, Trump's EPA is trying to get rid of something called the "Endangerment Finding," which said that CO2 was a pollutant that needed to be regulated by that agency. If they succeed in that, then countless greenhouse gas regulations could essentially be nullified.

"The EPA Endangerment Finding attack is more sweeping. Without that, the justification for any climate-based policies is gone," Daniel Kammen, a distinguished professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley, tells Madness.

"I am hopeful that some spines will be grown on Capitol Hill, but I see little evidence for that yet," Kammen says. "Trump is hurting the U.S. economy, U.S. competitiveness and the planet, in no particular order."

Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of Earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania, says the "fox is in the henhouse." The fossil fuel companies are in control, essentially. He also notes that much of what's happening was outlined in Project 2025.

"The world is moving on, and those countries—like the U.S. under Republican rule—that resist the inevitable clean energy transition will become pariahs," Mann says. "Weaker, poorer and increasingly irrelevant. I am not hopeful for the U.S., but I am still hopeful for the planet."

The thing about climate change is that degrees matter. A projection that said the planet will heat up by 2.5 degrees Celsius instead of 2.2 degrees Celsius, for example, would be very bad news. Every little bit of warming can have catastrophic effects.

Trump is going to make the U.S. more reliant on antiquated, expensive energy sources. He's going to make us less competitive globally. He's doing serious damage to innovation that could help in the climate fight by attacking universities and scientific research generally. He has harmed relationships with countries that we need to work with to beat climate change. All of this is bad news for our climate future.

"It will be up to other nations to take the necessary punitive actions against the U.S., including border adjustments and, if necessary, increasingly stiff economic sanctions," Mann says.

The good news is that Trump isn't all-powerful. While he is trying, he can't stop the momentum that the renewable energy industry has been building up for years, and we will continue to see progress. States can also act to push climate progress forward. He's just making everything significantly harder. He's throwing obstacles in front of a fast-moving vehicle.

I'm not a doomer. I'm not saying Trump has made it so we will be unable to win the climate fight. Humanity isn't ending. I'm simply saying we were starting to see good things happen in the fight against climate change, and Trump has truly screwed a lot of things up. He's an agent of the fossil fuel industry, and that's how he's behaving. It's terrible for our country and the planet.