The list of anti-environmental actions proposed by the Trump administration is already long, and it continues to grow. The flurry of executive orders that President Trump signed on his very first day in office made clear from the start that eliminating key environmental protections would be a top priority. As Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the marine biologist who co-founded the Urban Ocean Lab, remarked, “These orders will make our air dirtier, make people sicker, make energy more expensive and make our communities less prepared for extreme weather.”
The list of problematic proposals continues to both grow and shift, making a comprehensive list impossible. Furthermore, we’ve now been witness to the spectacle of the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lee Zeldin, not only slashing hundreds of key staff positions, but also giving a major speech highlighting how, through a series of radical proposals to eliminate decades of protections, EPA plans to prioritize business profits over human and environmental health. Instead, I will try to illustrate how these proposals mesh with broader efforts by the Trump administration to remove protective regulations, disempower both forces within government that oppose that removal and citizen voices that call for more protections, and roll back attempts to deal with societal injustices such as systemic racism. It will also highlight some of the most impactful proposals, including ones that have not received extensive coverage to date.
Interference with Scientific Integrity and Expertise
Across government agencies, the Trump administration is trying to stifle any science that doesn’t conform to their agenda. This includes research on racism, gender, sexuality, as well as more directly environmental concerns such as climate change, endangered species and the effects of toxic chemicals. Websites with research are disappearing, budgets are being cut and key staff are being fired. Furthermore, government funding to universities that conduct important research has been shut off, pending a variety of judicial cases. Scientific integrity and expertise must to be defended if we are to build a more just and sustainable world.
Ending programs that promote justice, diversity, inclusion and public input
In addition to the general targeting of DEI programs, both within and outside of the government, the Trump administration is seeking to dismantle the variety of protections and programs that address environmental justice. This again includes cutting staff positions and ending grant programs. Furthermore, governmental staff involved in issuing permits are being instructed to ignore how the facility in question will add to the emissions that have tended to fall more heavily on poor and minority communities. Rena Payan, chief program officer at nonprofit Justice Outside, stated that the cumulative effect of these efforts will be the “rolling back decades of progress in addressing environmental discrimination.”
A number of administration proposals are meant to discourage or prohibit sustainable energy sources.
Furthermore, many programs designed to solicit and even encourage public input on environmental decisions are being targeted. This will make it much harder for members of the public to raise concerns about decisions that directly affect their health and well-being.
Promotion of fossil fuels
Despite claims of an “national energy emergency” that are being used to try to justify a wide variety of actions designed to ignore or circumvent environmental and human health protections, there is no such emergency. Instead, as Gary Dirks, senior director of the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, has shown, “the reality is that the United States is well-supplied with energy in all of its forms. It’s important to note that the United States right now is the largest producer of oil of any nation in history. And we got to that point under the Biden administration, not because of the Biden administration’s policies necessarily, but because of policies that have been ongoing for four decades.”
The Trump administration is trying to stifle any science that doesn’t conform to their agenda. Scientific integrity and expertise must be defended if we are to build a more just and sustainable world.
Moreover, a number of the proposed actions, rather than increasing the overall energy supply, are meant to discourage or prohibit sustainable energy sources. It is clear that the actual goal is to promote greater profits by fossil fuel companies — at a great cost to our world now and even greater cost to future generations. Here are some of the most egregious proposals:
- Pulling out of the Paris climate agreement. As Ani Dasgupta, CEO of World Resources noted, “Walking away from the Paris Agreement won’t protect Americans from climate impacts, but it will hand China and the European Union a competitive edge in the booming clean energy economy and lead to fewer opportunities for American workers.”
- Attempting to gut the Endangered Species Act by declaring that energy development trumps any actions designed to protect endangered species.
- Opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for energy development, risking a fragile ecosystem, the destruction of which will also lead to increased greenhouse gas emissions.
- Attempting to ban offshore wind power.
- Revoking President Biden’s goals on electric vehicles.
- Attempting to cut off or even reverse grants designed to increase energy efficiency and promote sustainable energy sources.
Two proposed actions are worth looking at in more detail, in order to fully understand the potential impact of Trump’s efforts.
Striking down the “endangerment” finding
Countless scientific studies and governmental reviews have demonstrated the multitude of ways that climate change endangers human health, including increased deaths from heat waves, the spread of vector-borne diseases, deaths from extreme weather events and food shortages caused by climate change-induced droughts. Even this Supreme Court, in 2023, declined to review these findings. Furthermore, many past critics of the “endangerment” finding now accept it. For example, Marty Durbin, president of the Global Energy Institute at the United States Chamber of Commerce, which has long promoted fossil fuels, recently said, “We are not calling for reversing the endangerment finding, which has been settled law for over a decade, as we believe that we can both unleash America’s energy potential and continue to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
Despite all this, the Trump administration is actively seeking to reverse it. Why is this significant? Because there are no national laws in the United States that directly address climate change, all regulations of greenhouse gases to date have been based on the clause of the Clean Air Act that authorizes the government to regulate any forms of air pollution that endanger human health. Because most greenhouse gases are not directly toxic, overturning the endangerment clause would revoke any and all current regulations that call for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
While many legal analysts are of the opinion that any attempt to overturn the endangerment finding will ultimately fail, the process of defending it from the Trump administration’s attacks is likely to be both costly and lengthy. And during that fight, many regulations are likely to be put on hold, thereby giving the green light to the increased use of fossil fuels in the meantime.
Eliminating the Social Cost of Carbon and raising discount rates
Dubbed the “most important figure you’ve never heard of” by its creator Michael Greenstone, the former chief economist under the Obama administration, the social cost of carbon is an attempt to quantify the costs — in human health, ecosystem destruction, property damage from fires and storms, and so on — of each additional metric ton of CO2 emitted. As Greenstone said, a monetary figure “was needed because otherwise the benefits (from reducing greenhouse gas emissions) will always be measured in tons of carbon, and the costs (of preventing such emissions) in dollars, and the dollars will always win.
While the endangerment finding gives the US Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate greenhouse gases, it is the social cost of carbon (SCC) that justifies the level of regulation. The higher the SCC, the greater the recognition of global harms from climate change, and thus the greater need for regulation. Now, the Trump administration is seeking to prohibit the use of SCC, as if that would make the costs the SCC measures disappear as well. It’s a little like trying to stop the world from going to hell in a handbasket by prohibiting handbaskets!
Even if the SCC doesn’t disappear with a wave of magic Trump administration wand, they are likely to try to reduce it to insignificant level from its present value of $190/metric ton, which would have the same practical effect as its total elimination. One way they justify such a reduction is by increasing another obscure, critically important number — the discount rate used in calculations of costs and benefits resulting from government regulations.
Economists have long posited that most people prefer receiving benefits, such as money, now rather than in the future. Thus, the claim goes, future benefits are worth less than current ones, and so they should be discounted at a certain percentage each year. While this might be true in some circumstances, numerous studies have now shown critically important situations when people behave as if their personal discount rate was quite low or even zero — such as when we consider the well-being of our children.
To put it in concrete terms, let’s imagine that a certain regulation will bring $100 in health benefits to your child in ten years. The costs of putting such a regulation into practice all come in the present and so (quite conveniently for industries seeking to avoid regulations) they are not discounted at all. At the discount rate the Biden administration used in its cost/benefit calculations of around 2%, $100 in benefits ten years out are equivalent to about $82 in benefits now. At the rate the Trump administration wants to put into effect, 7%, $100 in benefits 10 years out is worth about $48 dollars. In other words, your child, according to the Trump administration is “worth” half as much every 10 years. When we consider the time frame of climate changes, with many benefits being half a century out or more, even significant figures vanish with a 7% discount. For example, a million dollar benefit that accrues 50 years out would, according to the Trump administration, be worth just a little more than $25,000. If this goes through, we’ll be putting future generations on a fire sale!
So what can we in the Jewish community do to fight back against this destructive agenda? There are of course practical, activist steps one can and should engage in. One can support secular environmental groups that will be fighting battles on many fronts simultaneously. Given that much of these battles will take place in the courtroom, groups such as Earthjustice that focus on using the legal system to fight for the health of people and the planet will play an especially important role. Earthjustice has partnered with faith-based environmental efforts many times in the past, and they hope to do so as they proceed to take on the Trump administration.
There are currently a good number of national, regional and even local efforts within the Jewish community to address environmental concerns in a variety of different ways, and all are worthy of support. They include Adamah, which has directed the Jewish Climate Leadership Network, a program that seeks to reduce the carbon footprint of Jewish institutions; Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action, which has focused its advocacy and educational efforts exclusively on climate change; the Jewish Earth Alliance, a volunteer-led effort to encourage Jews around the country to engage in environmental advocacy, the Shalom Center, which includes climate change as one of its top priorities, and the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, which is currently playing a role in the formation of a new global Women Faith & Climate Network and will be spearheading multifaith efforts to push back against efforts to reverse the endangerment finding, eliminate the social cost of carbon and raise the discount rate.
Which brings me to a less direct but no less important effort I urge you to consider. Especially with abstract concepts like endangerment, SCC, and the discount rate, but to some extent with all environmental advocacy, it is critical that we put a face on and highlight the moral dimensions of the problem, that we make real and compelling the consequences of the Trump administrations actions and inactions. That is something that everyone can engage with.
It is the stories of people affected, people fighting back, people inspired by their traditions, that we in the faith community are uniquely capable of bringing forward.
We are blessed to be the inheritors of millennia of storytelling traditions. Our ancestors intuited that a narrative framework could simultaneously put a face on a problem and highlight its moral dimensions. Part of the impetus behind the Women Faith & Climate Network is for people of faith around the globe to share and lift up such stories around climate change and environmental injustices. The scientific facts have been clear for years if not decades — and they aren’t enough. The economic consequences can feel simultaneously too abstract and too overwhelming. It is the stories of people affected, people fighting back, people inspired by their traditions, that we in the faith community are uniquely capable of bringing forward.
Purim has just passed, but the Book of Esther can serve as one such story. When Esther is hesitant to approach the king because of the risk involved, Mordechai replies (Esther 4:14), “umi yode’a im la’et kazot higat lemalkut/who knows — perhaps it is for just such a time as this you have attained Malkhut.” Malkhut in its narrowest sense is queenhood; more broadly, it means sovereign power. But our mystics used Malkhut as one of the names of Shekhinah, the indwelling, feminine presence of God. If we hear this verse in the right way, it reminds not only of our duty and our power, but also that we are not alone — that we undertake these efforts inspired by the Presence that pervades the world.
