Trump vs. Biden on the climate
The next presidential election will have huge ramifications for the planet
This April, at a steak dinner with oil and gas executives at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, former President Donald Trump made a request backed by a hefty promise: If CEOs in attendance raised $1 billion to support his re-election bid, he would lower their taxes and eviscerate environmental and public health protections once he became president, clearing away the "regulatory burdens" that stand in their way of injecting more carbon into the atmosphere — and profiting handsomely from it.
According to reporting by the Washington Post, Trump promised to reverse dozens of Biden administration policies, including lifting the moratorium on liquefied natural gas export approvals, new restrictions on Arctic drilling and many public land oil and gas drilling reforms. For good measure, he’d also scrap electric vehicle mandates and bring an immediate end to all offshore wind development.
Judging from Trump’s record, he fully intends to fulfill these promises and then some. And his mission will be backed by a "playbook" — alarming for its extreme approach — fashioned by a right-wing coalition intent on dismantling the administrative state.
It’s astounding that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee can solicit a $1 billion bribe to sell out America’s public lands and not be immediately disqualified or even prosecuted. After all, one-time Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall was disgraced and tossed into jail for doing the same thing, an incident known as the Teapot Dome scandal. Even more dumbfounding is that, according to some polls, President Biden and Trump are statistically tied among young voters on climate change.
The reason for this is simple — and, I might add, simplistic. In March 2020, during a Democratic presidential debate, then-candidate Biden said his climate policy included, "No more drilling on federal land." He made a similar statement during a town hall in 2019. And yet, during the first four months of 2024, the Bureau of Land Management issued 969 permits to drill. So much for "no more drilling." And that’s not all: In 2023, the administration approved a scaled-back — yet still massive and highly destructive — version of the high-profile and controversial Willow drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope.
Climate advocates are right to hold Biden’s feet to the fire, and to count these moves as black marks on his record. But it is naive, foolish and destructive to let these missteps obscure the administration’s more subtle — yet ultimately more meaningful — actions to protect the climate and public lands from the fossil fuel industries. To see no difference between Biden and Trump is simply ignorant.
Biden’s public land and climate policies were all over the place during his first two years in office, but more recently he cemented his legacy as a conservationist. In late April I wrote about a slew of new public lands protections passed down by the administration. In the weeks since, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency implemented new rules limiting coal power plants’ greenhouse emissions and mercury and other toxic air pollutants, tightening regulations on coal ash disposal and clamping down on power plant wastewater releases. And the BLM proposed ending federal coal leasing in the America’s largest coal field, Wyoming’s Powder River Basin — a potential death knell to a declining industry. The BLM also cancelled 25 oil and gas leases on 40,000 acres rich with cultural resources in southeastern Utah.
Since a Donald Trump "climate policy" is a contradiction in terms, we’ll look at Trump’s energy aims instead, which consist of little more than "unlock(ing) our country’s God-given abundance of oil, natural gas, and clean coal" by shredding environmental and public health protections at the behest of billionaire petroleum executives. Never mind that those same executives have boasted about record-high domestic oil production and liquefied natural gas exports under the Biden administration. Never mind that ExxonMobil brought in $8.6 billion in after-tax profits during the first three months of the year — not too shabby for an industry purportedly under siege by radical environmentalists.
Since the Trump campaign lacks a concrete platform, a group of right-wing organizations calling themselves Project 2025 have taken it upon themselves to fashion an agenda for the next administration to "rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left." The coalition published a Mandate for Leadership "playbook" for each government sector, providing an eerie glimpse into a second Trump presidency.
The chapter on the Department of Interior was penned by none other than William Perry Pendley, a notorious anti-public lands zealot and Trump’s illegitimate acting director of the BLM. In it, Pendley unabashedly advocates for returning to the pre-multiple use days when the BLM was known as the Bureau of Livestock and Mining. He reiterates the absurd claim that wild horses pose an existential threat to public lands and calls for the immediate "roll back of Biden’s orders" and reinstatement of "the Trump-era Energy Dominance Agenda." Per the playbook: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the rest of the region would be reopened to drilling; the full Willow project (five drill sites rather than the scaled-back three) would be approved; coal-leasing would be restored; drilling permits would be expedited; methane emissions rules and other pollution limits would be rescinded; national monuments would be shrunk or eliminated; protections for sage grouse, grizzlies, wolves and other imperiled species would be removed; and the administration would try to repeal the Antiquities Act of 1906.
And that’s just the DOI chapter. The Energy Department and EPA sections strike similar notes, calling on Trump to: "Stop the war on oil and natural gas;" lift the moratorium on liquefied natural gas export approvals (and stop considering climate change as a reason to stop LNG projects); support repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, both of which have created thousands of jobs in the clean energy and climate change mitigation industries; shift the departments’ focus away from climate change and renewable energy; end greenhouse gas emissions reporting for all but a select few facilities; roll back coal plant pollution regulations; and so on.
The damage inflicted during Trump’s first term was somewhat mitigated by the administration’s incompetence. Project 2025’s 920-page playbook, drafted by conservative think tanks that would be instrumental in staffing a second Trump administration, looks to remedy that, supplementing Trump’s greed and power-hunger with corporate-backed ideology and expertise. In office, Trump would create an authoritarian regime that cracks down on civil liberties, criminalize immigrants and bolster the police state, while also letting corporate interests run wild at the expense of the planet and its most vulnerable people.
A recent report from Wood Mackenzie, a natural resource analytics firm, predicts that a Trump victory in November would bring an "immediate deceleration in support for decarbonization" and "unabated fossil generation would expand. … These steps would push the U.S. even further away from a net zero emissions pathway."
Biden may have broken a promise, but when it comes to Trump vs. Biden on the climate, the contrast couldn’t be more stark.
