Donald Trump says he's not worried about climate change.
Before becoming a presidential candidate, he said that global warming was a “hoax” invented by China to weaken the American economy.
“The climate has always been changing,” he shrugged recently.
Trump says that if elected president, one of his priorities on “Day One” would be to increase oil and gas production — or as he puts it: “Drill, baby, drill!”
With more fossil fuels, he promises, “we will become rich again and happy again.”
These positions are at the heart of Trump's campaign to regain the White House. They also put him on a collision course with California, where the Democratic-led government, with the support of most voters, has made a clean energy economy a major goal.
“It is astonishing how easily this man can be manipulated,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “His only interest is pleasing the CEOs of big oil companies, and mortgaging our children and the planet in the process.”
A large majority of Californians support their state's ambitious climate goals, the Public Policy Institute of California found in a survey last year. Nearly two-thirds said they believe protecting the environment should be a priority even at the risk of curbing economic growth.
In attacking the state's environmental agenda, Trump frequently portrays California as a disaster zone, often in greatly exaggerated or made-up tales.
“If you look at California, they have blackouts and blackouts every day,” he said in a campaign video last year. “People can't turn on their air conditioners.” (Incorrect; California has not had major problems with its power grid since 2020.)
If he wins a second term, Trump plans to cancel President Biden's programs that encourage renewable energy. He said he would provide tax breaks to oil, gas and coal producers. eliminating federal support for solar, wind, and other renewable energy projects; He defeated Biden's efforts to encourage the use of electric cars.
“On my first day in office, I will end all of that,” Trump said last year, referring to tax credits for electric vehicles and other subsidies. (In fact, he couldn't eliminate the tax break on day one — that would require a congressional resolution — but he could add requirements to limit the cars and trucks eligible for the subsidy.)
Trump is also likely to revive two of his first-term goals that sparked clashes with California: rolling back the state's strict vehicle emissions standards and opening more federal waters to oil drilling, including off the Pacific coast, former aides say.
He failed on both counts partly because of opposition from California and other states but also because of the incompetence of his administration.
“In the first term, the Trump administration took a kind of heavy-handed approach. Their proposals were not well thought out. “It's often not subject to careful review,” said Richard M. Frank, a professor of environmental law at UC Davis School of Law. “Now it seems like they're trying to learn from those mistakes. … They can be more strategic the second time around.
The clearest example of this is Trump's attack on California's strict car emissions standards.
The Clean Air Act of 1970 allows the federal Environmental Protection Agency to limit air pollution caused by automobiles. It also allows California to impose stricter standards because of its decades-long battle to reduce smog, under a “waiver” that the EPA typically grants each year.
Congress also allowed other states to adopt California's standards; 17 states and the District of Columbia have done so.
In 2019, after automakers complained that California's standards were a burden, Trump announced that he would eliminate the state's exemption “in order to produce vehicles that are much less expensive for the consumer.”
His decision was part of a broader effort to roll back federal rules that require fleets to reduce fuel consumption.
Newsom then come. Gen. Xavier Becerra sued the federal government, accusing the EPA of overstepping its authority. The case wound through the courts until Biden took office and restored California's exemption.
Trump has not spoken out about attacking California's exemption again. But last year, the conservative Heritage Foundation assembled a team of former Trump aides to put together a policy agenda called “Project 2025.” The nearly 900-page document includes a detailed strategy for repealing or reducing California's emissions standards.
The report notes that instead of eliminating the exemption, the EPA could limit California's standards to smog-producing pollutants like ozone, not greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. If that fails, the EPA could try to prevent other countries from adopting greenhouse gas standards, the agenda says.
“They realize they screwed up the first time and are creating a road map to try to do better the second time,” said Dan Baker, an environmental attorney at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. “They're basically picking all the areas that California can work in and going after every single one of them.”
Baker said this strategy may be aimed at taking the case to the Supreme Court, where a second Trump administration could try its luck against a 6-3 conservative majority.
If a second Trump administration tried to revoke the exemption, the state would go to court again, Newsom said at a press conference in February.
“We know the rules of the game,” he said. “We have succeeded time and time again [in Trump’s first term] “In the courts, we have confidence that this will continue.”
Exploring oil at sea may lead to another confrontation.
In 2018, Trump proposed opening federal waters along the entire Pacific coast, as well as Alaska and the Atlantic coast, to oil and gas drilling. That sparked a firestorm of opposition, including — to Trump's surprise — from Republicans.
The Trump administration found itself constrained by the federal rulemaking process.
“They made procedural errors that slowed everything down,” said Cassie Siegel, a staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.
If he wins a second term, Trump will have broad power to open the continental shelf to oil contracts, but he will face other problems.
The first is economics: drilling in the deep waters of the North Pacific is expensive and risky. Oil companies are more interested in exploring in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, where known reserves are larger.
The other is local politics. In 2018, when Trump proposed opening the Pacific Coast to drilling, the California Legislature quickly passed a law prohibiting the construction of new oil pipelines, piers or other infrastructure within three miles of shore. This can make transporting oil from offshore wells to refineries or onshore terminals expensive.
Oil companies know that any attempt to drill new wells off the coast of California would spark widespread opposition. A 2021 PPIC poll found that 72% of Californians, including 43% of Republicans, opposed the idea.
The third potential conflict: the wind. Offshore wind farms are a big part of California's clean energy plans, which aim to provide about 13% of the state's energy supply by 2045. But wind is Trump's least favorite energy source.
“Windmills rot. They rust. They kill birds. “It's the most expensive energy there is,” he said last year. There's a lot more to be said about that, and I'll come back to it in a later column.
Newsom says he doesn't think Trump will get a second term.
“It won't happen,” he said at the February press conference. However, if that happens, “we are certainly trying to future-proof California in every way, shape and form.”
“We are not just a punching bag on this matter,” the governor added. “We are trying to assert ourselves.”
But environmentalists are still concerned.
“The problem is that Trump’s second term will come when the climate crisis is more serious than it was in his first term,” Baker said. “Everything scientists predicted is happening much faster than they expected. … But Trump doesn't think it's a problem, doesn't want to solve it and will only make it worse.
Which helps explain why many environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters, supported Biden's reelection, even though they criticized many of his decisions: They considered the alternative.
