Oil was a winner this week and wind a loser in the Trump administration’s first round of executive orders. The incoming president wasted no time in rolling back existing energy policy to favor the fossil fuel industry, notably lifting a ban on drilling in the ocean and across millions of acres of Alaskan wildlands and again pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. By withdrawing from the agreement, the U.S. joins Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the only holdouts — among the world’s least-progressive nations.
In the same flurry of activity, the president sought to block new offshore leases for wind power sites. Orsted, the Danish developer of South Fork Wind and Sunrise Wind, lost a big chunk of its stock value following the inauguration, as did some other green energy producers. President Trump also lifted a Biden-era ban on new facilities that would export liquefied natural gas and dealt a setback to electric vehicle incentives. In all, the measures would set back climate policy by a generation, hastening global warming through a sharp increase in petroleum-based energy.
Simply stated, the Earth is rapidly getting hotter as a result of more than a century of human influence. Last year was the hottest in human history.
Greenhouse emissions are led globally by burning fossil fuels for electricity and heat, followed by transportation, industry, farming, and deforestation. The results of all the warming include rising sea levels, more and larger weather events, drought, and biodiversity loss. Locally on the East End and elsewhere, risk exposures have prompted insurance companies to pull back on issuing new coverage and cancel many longtime customers. Flood insurance, backstopped by the federal government, passes much of the cost of disaster relief on to taxpayers across the country, hundreds of miles from any danger zone. The fires in Los Angeles are a large but not surprising result of human-caused climate anomalies. At macro scale, more than 140 million people could be uprooted by rising seas, drought, extreme temperatures, and other climate catastrophes, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In order to avoid the worst outcomes of the climate crisis, countries must continue to move toward net-zero emissions. To do this, they must put renewable energy front and center and seek to limit emissions in the transportation and other sectors of their economies. Without the United States, turning around the warming trend will be impossible. The best-hoped-for outcome now, a four-year setback in White House leadership, is all we have.