On the campaign trail in 2024 and since the November election, former president Donald Trump has not let up in denying the tie between fossil-fuel use and global warming. His supporters include the world’s largest petroleum companies and they are expecting to be paid back. But it won’t happen on ‘day one,’ as he claims. Paul Hockenos reports.

In a disheartening prelude to the upcoming Trump presidency, just days before his inauguration the president-elect responded to the out-of-control wildfires in southern California – the largest in the region’s history – with political denunciations and familiar disinformation. While President Biden stood next to the California governor, Gavin Newsome, in a display of willingness to help devastated California, Trump spewed venom. He excoriated ‘Newscum and his Los Angeles crew’ for the calamity. On social media, he said the Democratic governor ‘refused to sign a water restoration declaration,’ which Trump claims would have allowed millions of gallons of rain and snowmelt to flow south to the areas on fire. ‘Now the ultimate price is being paid,’ Trump wrote. ‘I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA!’

According to experts interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, Trump’s water proposals are most probably unrealizable and his claims about linking water deliveries to firefighting are factually incorrect.

During the first Trump administration from 2016 to 2020, the White House rescinded or softened more than 25 Obama-era policies related to air quality vehicle emissions standards and release of toxic air pollution from electricity generating and industrial plants. And Trump nullified energy efficiency regulations as well as requirements that the petroleum industries report methane emissions. Moreover, he announced the US’s pull out from the Paris treaty in June 2017, which went into effect only in 2020, after Trump’s election defeat – an illustration that overhauling a past president’s agenda is easier said than done.

Trump: climate denier

Trumps claims that his first moves as president will be to rescind all of the Biden climate legislation and rules, including the US’s reentry into the Paris process. At times, Trump refers to global warming as ‘a big hoax’ and heaps abuse on wind energy and electric cars (the latter more so before he buddied up with Tesla owner Elon Musk.) On the campaign trail, he claimed: ‘We don’t have a global warming problem.’ He also promised to eviscerate climate legislation, including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a $500-million spending bill investing in clean energy projects. Trump slams the IRA as the ‘green new scam,’ probably referring to the Democrats’ Green New Deal.  At other times, though, Trump seems to acknowledge that the climate is changing, but he attributes it to ‘nuclear warming,’ referring perhaps to the sun. He has said that in a new Trump administration the climate would ‘start getting cooler,’ without any details as to how this would happen.

But an illustration of how quickly things can change with Trump, he called the Tesla cybertruck received as a gift from Musk, as ‘beautiful’ and peddled back on EVs. Perhaps now he won’t scratch the IRA’s federal tax benefit of up to $7,500 (€7,282) for new US-made electric vehicles that he had previous vowed to eliminate.

Politico research before the election found that in a new administration, Trump could well wage ‘an all-out war on climate science and policies — eclipsing even his first-term efforts that brought U.S. climate action to a virtual standstill. Those could include steps that aides shrank back from taking last time, such as meddling in the findings of federal climate reports.’

His first task, as he has acknowledged, will be undoing the spate of climate initiatives that the Biden administration has implemented, many of them after the election. In January, in his last weeks in office, Biden banned new offshore drilling in most US coastal waters in order to protect, specifically, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and portions of Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea from future oil and gas leasing. ‘I will unban it immediately,’ Trump told a conservative radio host, reported in Euronews. ‘I have the right to unban it.’ Trump claims that the US will extract ‘oil and gas at a level that nobody else has and we’re gonna take advantage of it. It’s really our greatest economic asset.’

A Guardian editorial put Trump’s return to the White House as indicative of ‘an age of ‘hyper agency’ – where billionaires, rogue states, and corporations wield almost unchecked power, fuelling climate chaos and global instability. The mechanisms meant to hold power to account are being dismantled with ruinous consequences.’

The University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann is calling the US a ‘failed democracy’ and that poses ‘a major threat to the planet.’ Carbon Brief, a climate-oriented media outlet, calculated that a second Trump administration could add 4 billion tonnes of US emissions by 2030, in contrast to four more years of Biden policies. This, it computed, is the combined annual emissions of the EU and Japan, or the combined annual total of the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries.