States need to prepare now to fight President-elect Donald Trump’s fully developed plans to erase major gains in addressing climate change and transform the agencies created to protect our health and environment into vassals of the fossil fuel industry.
Trump’s first term featured sweeping rollbacks of important climate and pollution protections. His policies allowed more toxics in our air and water, more health- and climate-damaging pollution from power plants, and more destruction of wetlands needed to protect communities from raging waters and extreme heat.
That legacy was extended in the Biden years by Trump justices on the Supreme Court, which overturned settled law, invented novel doctrines, and abused emergency powers to systematically hobble administrative agencies, with particular hostility to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Trump clearly intends more of the same, as seen in the Project 2025 agenda and second-term cabinet nominees hostile to the laws that Congress charged their department or agency with enforcing.
As president of CLF, I continue to believe that bold leadership at the state and regional level can accelerate progress on climate change and the environment in the next four years, just as it did – albeit still too slowly – during Trump’s first term. New England serves as a powerful example of how regional action can drive meaningful change, even when national efforts lag.
Advocates have secured strong climate laws in all New England states except New Hampshire, with six of these laws (along with New York’s) passed or strengthened in the Trump years. In New Hampshire, litigation pursued by CLF and Sierra Club in the Trump years was the death knell for the last two dirty coal plants in the region. While Trump‘s EPA abandoned Barack Obama’s climate rule for power plants and the Supreme Court later invalidated it, state mandates and a multi-state regime started in response to George W. Bush’s policies achieved greater reductions in power plant pollution in this region than Obama’s plan would have, even before the Supreme Court struck it down.
New industries are working with New England states to cut pollution and seize the opportunities offered by the clean energy transition, bolstered by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Offshore wind is proceeding off our coast despite some hiccups, a promising fusion energy pilot plant is being completed at breakneck pace at the former Devens military base, and a zero-carbon cement plant is rising from a disused industrial site in western Massachusetts. Last month, Vicinity Energy broke ground on the nation’s largest zero-emission heat pump and electric boiler to replace a gas-fired plant delivering steam for heating and cooling to major hospital facilities in Cambridge.
States, cities and towns, and advocacy groups like CLF also are holding the fossil fuel industry accountable for climate change in courts and statehouses in ways that neither the Trump nor Biden administration was willing to do. Following devastating floods, Vermont recently enacted a first-in-the-nation law to bill fossil fuel companies for their fair share of damage caused by climate-driven weather extremes.
Notably, climate progress is not the exclusive domain of blue states or Democratic elected officials. The top eight producers of renewable energy are Republican-led states. Red states are so far getting the lion’s share of IRA funding, which will make a clawback of that more difficult. Major automakers remain committed to an electric vehicle future, which now has a major MAGA booster in Trump acolyte Elon Musk.
But have no doubt: Without an opposition firewall in either House of the U.S. Congress, Trump’s efforts to stop and reverse this tide of progress will go further this time. Damage will be done, and communities most vulnerable to extreme weather and long overburdened by pollution will bear most of it. Organizations like ours need to scale up, speed up, and marshal far greater resources to sustain a dramatically increased workload to blunt Trump’s policies, reverse unlawful decisions, and hold the fossil fuel industry and its abetters accountable under the law.
Strangely, we have both great momentum and the fight of our lives ahead of us. And to prevail in that fight we need state officials committed to climate and environmental progress to step up their game. It won’t be enough in this second Trump term, politically or practically, merely to oppose Trump’s worst.
Leaders with strong climate laws like Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey – who emerged as a climate hero as Attorney General in countering Trump – must speed up the implementation of those laws. They must work with their Attorneys General to set and defend tougher standards and provide new avenues for enforcement and remedies that will not be coming from Washington anytime soon. And they must lead in designing a clean energy transition that speaks to, rather than exacerbates, economic anxiety among disaffected voters.
If Trump’s past presidency is prologue for his next, climate and environmental wins will remain in reach even if harder to achieve. This is a time to double down, not back down, in our fight for a healthy environment and climate.
