A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

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Donald Trump began his presidency by making climate denial more or less the official position of the United States government. He did this, TNR’s Emily Atkin observed in 2017, by first nominating a bevy of climate deniers to key positions: Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Rick Perry as energy secretary, Kathleen Hartnett White to the Council on Environmental Quality (this was later withdrawn), and Oklahoma Congressman Jim Bridenstine to head NASA. Meanwhile, Department of Agriculture employees were instructed to avoid the term “climate change” in favor of euphemisms like “weather extremes.”

Before his resignation the following year, Pruitt accrued so many bonkers ethics scandals—a soundproof phone booth, four-figure spending on fountain pens, use of a military helicopter to visit a coal mine, and a really great deal on a Capitol Hill rental owned by an energy lobbyist—that sometimes his policies flew under the radar. In 2018, for instance, Pruitt announced a boring-sounding new rule blocking the EPA from considering studies that contained confidential information about human subjects. The upshot, as Emily Atkin wrote at the time, was that the EPA could no longer use “much of the research showing how pollutants damage public health.… If science based on confidential human health information couldn’t be used by the government,” she wrote, “the tobacco industry likely never would have been subject to strict regulation.” Pruitt also attempted to gut the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, a crusade that his successor, Andrew Wheeler, continued—despite the EPA calculating that this would result in an extra 1,400 premature deaths per year. (The plan was halted by a federal appeals court.)

As the Trump administration entered its final year, Trump’s long-announced withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Agreement became official, the Senate passed his climate-hostile replacement to the North American Free Trade Agreement, or Nafta, and his administration’s effort to gut environmental regulations went into overdrive. Miranda Green chronicled the dizzying timeline for TNR that summer:

Since March, the Environmental Protection Agency has weakened mercury air pollution standards, permanently lowered regulations for vehicle tailpipe emissions, and finalized a reinterpretation of the Clean Water Act that opens the door to expedited pipeline development.

At the White House, Trump has been just as busy. In June he signed an executive order that allows companies to bypass key environmental reviews on infrastructure projects like mines and issued a proclamation to allow commercial fishing in a protected monument off Maine’s coast that was created specifically to limit such activity.… As of May 20, [the administration] has revoked, replaced, or weakened 66 environmental rules, according to a count by The New York Times.

By the time of The New York Times’ final update on its deregulation count on Inauguration Day, that list of scrapped environmental rules had risen to 98, with 14 more in progress. Less than a week before Election Day 2020, the administration also attempted to open more of the Tongass National Forest—part of the world’s largest intact coastal temperate rainforest—up to logging.

This isn’t even close to an exhaustive list of Trump-era climate and environmental policy. It’s intended, instead, as an attention exercise. Whether Trump committed multiple felonies during the 2016 presidential election matters. But it’s far too easy, in cases like these, to get sucked into the daily drip of drama that seems to accompany the former president. This court case, even if it results in a conviction and scuppers Trump’s 2024 presidential bid (a long shot), is hardly the final word on the lasting impact of the Trump era. In 2050, as we plausibly approach a once unfathomable two degrees Celsius of global warming, the Trump legacy people may find most appalling is the one which lacked any salacious headlines.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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