President Donald Trump has done more to unravel U.S. climate policy in the past 30 days than during the entirety of his first administration. He’s just getting started, write Benjamin Storrow and Jean Chemnick. Despite the widely accepted scientific consensus that the planet is warming to dangerous levels — and with an escalation of disasters to back it up — the Trump administration has cast global efforts to zero out carbon pollution as a malevolent tactic of governments to acquire power. “Net Zero 2050 is a sinister goal,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told conservative leaders attending a conference in London this week. “It’s a terrible goal.” The planet, meanwhile, has six years before it surpasses a critical warming threshold. Expect an uptick in the severity and frequency of dangerous heat waves, storms and wildfires — paired with a federal government that may lack the resources and technical know-how to respond and recover. At worst, rising temperatures could bring on the collapse of numerous ecosystems, crop failure on a massive scale, rapid ice sheeting melting, extensive coral bleaching, extended heatwaves, droughts, floods and other potentially irreversible events — all of which are likely to cost the U.S. lives and billions if not trillions of dollars. Gutting the government: Trump has trounced Biden-era clean energy programs, decimated the federal workforce and dammed the flow of climate and infrastructure dollars — sometimes flouting court orders to reverse course. He has fired hundreds of staff at the nation’s already-strained disaster response agency and threatened to dismantle it entirely. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is expected to soon release a list of regulations it plans to rescind and replace with weaker standards, or no standards at all. Even the core EPA finding from 2009 that greenhouse gases endanger human health — the basis for all U.S. climate rules — is not safe. One symbol of Trump’s newfound speed on climate policy: Eight years ago, he waited more than four months into his term in office to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. This time, he quit the pact on Day 1. Taken together, Trump’s actions mark a vast and coordinated attack on U.S. environmental, energy and climate policy that analysts say is threatening to reverse decades of painfully slow progress to curb the worst of climate change. “It’s not just a situation where we’re going to let the best technology win,” said Rob Jackson, an earth systems professor at Stanford University. “We’re going to actively spite green technologies and clean energy because they’re clean and because they help climate. That, to me, is messed up.”
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