De-escalating Climate Policy

Environmental advocates should work to construct a new template.

Over the last twenty years, the United States has experienced steadily escalating climate politics. It’s obvious this has not been good for the climate, or for politics.

Let’s start with President Obama, the first president to enter office with climate change as a significant matter of public interest. Despite ambitious rhetoric on the subject, Obama did not actually place a high priority on climate policy.

Much to the consternation of his environmentalist supporters, the Obama Administration put considerably more political effort behind economic recovery, health care, financial regulation, and immigration. Whatever one thinks of these policies, they did in fact pass, unlike the carbon pricing program that died in Congress and the proposed emissions regulations that never went into effect. President Obama did direct tens of billions toward clean energy infrastructure and innovation under the Recovery Act and other measures, and made symbolic gestures toward environmentalists, such as rejecting the Keystone Pipeline. But climate change was not the focal point of the federal policy agenda that it would eventually become.

And so after his surprise victory in 2016, Donald Trump’s first Administration proceeded to prune, not uproot, Obama’s climate accomplishments. Yes, Trump referred to climate change as a “Chinese hoax” and disowned the Paris Climate Agreement. But Trump 1.0 did not actually cancel Obama’s proposed emissions regulations, instead opting to replace them with a narrower regulatory framework. Over the course of 2017-2020, federal energy innovation investments rose substantially, and Trump signed into law major new investments in nuclear energy, carbon removal, and other low-carbon technologies and infrastructure. President Trump increased funding for public lands and the National Parks, and the last bill he signed into law before leaving office in 2021 extended tax credits for solar, wind, and other clean energy technologies.

Then came the Biden Administration. Responding to pressure from the environmental movement, Biden placed a much higher priority on climate change than did his Democratic predecessor, amping up the rhetoric and the policy commitments. In his first week in office, President Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement and outlined “a whole of government approach to put climate change at the center of our domestic, national security, and foreign policy.” That “whole-of-government” approach described many things, including relatively small-bore stuff like Postal Service vehicle electrification and federal agency emissions reporting. But it also described the Biden Administration’s marquee policy agenda, which included trillions of dollars in new spending on energy and infrastructure, a new edict that federal spending disproportionately benefit “environmental justice communities,” and significant regulations on the transportation and electric power sectors.

Then the pendulum swung back again. And over the course of the first year back in office, the second Trump Administration has responded to Biden’s escalation in kind.

President Trump obviously exited the Paris Agreement once again and repealed Biden’s executive orders on agency emissions and environmental justice. But he’s gone far beyond the actions of his first term in office, cutting hundreds of billions in clean energy spending passed by the Biden Administration and rescinding the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse emissions at all.

The result of all this escalation has been an increasingly polarized climate politics, but not much change in the trajectory of US greenhouse gas emissions. As my Breakthrough Institute colleagues and I showed in an analysis last year, the rate at which the American economy has been decarbonizing has been steady since domestic emissions peaked in 2005. Emissions will likely tick up over the next few years, driven partially by the slowing deployment of solar and wind under the Trump Administration’s tax and permitting policy. But the major force pushing emissions upward is secularly rising energy demand, driven by AI data centers, manufacturing, and the electrification of vehicles and buildings. A counterfactual second Biden Administration, in other words, likely would have watched emissions rise on its watch too, even after passing historic, if highly partisan, climate legislation.

The obvious response to escalating and polarizing climate politics is to de-escalate and depolarize by reforging the bipartisan energy politics that preceded the era of the climate hawk. Fortunately, there are already signs of such a reforging in the bipartisan permitting reform taking place right now in Congress. As of this writing, over half a dozen bills have been introduced by representatives from both parties to streamline America’s sclerotic environmental permitting regulations. These include the SPEED Act, which would dramatically curtail requirements to conduct environmental review of major infrastructure projects, and the ePermit Act, which would modernize regulations using AI and other digital tools. There are other promising areas of agreement, including on nuclear energy policy and minerals development critical to domestic energy production, all of which offer promising terrain on which to build new bipartisan partnerships on energy and environmental policy.

Whatever becomes of permitting reform and these other issues in the coming months, environmental advocates of all stripes should work to construct a new template for ongoing climate and energy policy, rather than a return to the tit-for-tat escalation that has defined climate politics and rhetoric for a generation.

Alex Trembath is the Deputy Director at The Breakthrough Institute. Follow him on X @atrembath.