President Donald Trump is coming at climate policy with the ferocity of a wildfire.
He has ridiculed regulations on carbon emissions and gutted agencies designed to carry them out.
His Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, has vowed to eliminate rules wholesale, starting with his agency’s 2009 finding that greenhouse gases pose a public health threat, which undergirds most federal climate actions.
The EPA said in a statement that these moves will “Power the Great American comeback,” casting regulations as a drag on the economy. But this view exposes a basic misunderstanding of the fight against climate change. It is not only about restricting economic activity. Far more important to the effort — and what should excite this administration — is building stuff.
Fighting climate change should involve energizing the economy, including by expanding solar and wind power, which are already the fastest-growing sources of electricity in history and are proliferating in many Republican-led states.
The country also needs added transmission lines to make the electrical grid more resilient and to move energy around the country as needed.
And it needs advanced nuclear reactors, still in development, which have the potential to spark an energy renaissance. Other technologies, including batteries with expanded storage and more efficient electric vehicles, are important, too.
All such building projects could create jobs and boost gross domestic product growth while sharpening the United States’ competitive edge against its adversaries. Trump should view this not as some left-wing agenda, but as an opportunity.
Unfortunately, Trump — whose campaign was heavily funded by fossil fuel interests — has adopted a posture of “no.”
He has halted new leases for wind and solar projects on federal lands or waters, and is seeking to terminate $14 billion in grants already awarded for climate-friendly developments.
He paused about $3 billion in funding for the creation of electric vehicle chargers, while Republicans in Congress are considering scrapping tax credits for EV owners. And his tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico threaten to drastically limit developers’ access to equipment needed to build transmission lines.
This is a mistake, both politically and on policy grounds.
Seventy-eight percent of Americans want more solar energy, a Pew Research Center survey found last year. Seventy-two percent want more wind energy. And two-thirds of Americans, including 46 percent of Republicans, say that limiting their “carbon footprint” is either very or somewhat important to them.
Moreover, demand for electricity is projected to explode in the years ahead, largely due to the dizzying growth of energy-guzzling data centers.
The Trump administration no doubt wants to meet this need by expanding the production of fossil fuels, which has been at historic heights for years. But shutting out wind and solar makes no sense, and not only because doing so would worsen carbon emissions; it would also restrict energy supplies that the country needs.
The administration’s crusade to eliminate existing climate regulations is self-defeating as well.
