When the Trump administration put the brakes on New York City’s congestion pricing program in February, city officials and environmental groups sued to block the move, arguing the new tolling program has reduced traffic congestion and tailpipe pollution in Manhattan’s busiest neighborhoods.
And when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency moved to claw back billions of dollars in federal funding earmarked by Congress for states to address climate change and fund renewable energy projects, state attorneys general from Maine to California took the federal agency to court.
The legal challenges are among dozens filed by mostly Democratic-led states which invested heavily in climate change projects under the Biden administration but now face a loss federal funding and assistance with Trump clamping down on his predecessor’s green policies.
“The climate crisis is here, now, and it is just unconscionable that the Trump administration has abandoned federal leadership on this issue,” said Dawone Robinson, managing director of advocacy for climate and energy at the Washington, D.C.-based National Resources Defense Council.
“The states have been left to pick up the ball and run with it, and that’s exactly what they’re doing.”
Robinson said states are battle-tested by the first Trump administration, which tried to roll back scores of environmental rules protecting air, water and soil quality. Federal courts struck down many of those rollbacks after legal challenges, he said. He said Trump’s second-term agenda won’t go unchallenged.
“We’ve seen this before,” he said. “States are being forced to take matters into their own hands amid a failure of leadership at the federal level.”
Trump has pledged to weaken air-pollution regulations, reverse efforts to slow climate change and continue to boost oil and gas production. He argues that environmental policies are holding back the American energy industry and putting the squeeze on consumers’ wallets with higher gas and electricity costs.
The president has withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement and declared a national emergency on energy. He also put the brakes on efforts by his predecessor, Democrat Joe Biden, to encourage electric vehicle adoption.
In March, the EPA announced it was rolling back dozens of federal rules, ranging from pollution limits on gas-powered vehicles and coal-fired power plants to stricter air pollution standards from the energy and manufacturing sectors.
The agency, with Trump-appointed Administrator Lee Zeldin in charge, boasted that the “historic” rollback of regulations was aimed at fulfilling Trump’s “promise to unleash American energy, lower the cost of living for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, restore the rule of law, and give power back to states to make their own decisions. “
Environmental groups condemned the rollbacks, saying they not only compromise years of progress on addressing climate change, but would also impact Americans’ health from an expected increase in air and water pollution.
“The result will be more toxic chemicals, more cancers, more asthma attacks, and more dangers for pregnant women and their children,” said Amanda Leland, executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund. “Rather than helping our economy, it will create chaos.”
Targeting blue states’
green policies
Trump is also taking aim at Democratic-led states’ green policies by issuing an executive order this month to block the enforcement of state and local laws passed to reduce the use of fossil fuels and combat climate change.
“Many states have enacted, or are in the process of enacting, burdensome and ideologically motivated ‘climate change’ or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security,” Trump wrote in the order.
The directive asks the attorney general’s office to identify state laws dealing with climate change, environmental justice and carbon emissions, and take legal action to block them. It specifically cited laws in New York and Vermont that fine fossil-fuel producers for their role in climate change, and California’s cap-and-trade policy.
“These state laws and policies weaken our national security and devastate Americans by driving up energy costs for families coast to coast, despite some of these families not living or voting in states with these crippling policies,” the order states.
Not surprisingly, the oil and gas industry welcomed the order, which was issued shortly after Trump signed another directive opening up more federal lands to coal mining, part of a broader effort to prop up the fossil fuel industry.
“We welcome Trump’s action to hold states like New York and California accountable for pursuing unconstitutional efforts that illegally penalize U.S. oil and natural gas producers for delivering the energy American consumers rely on every day,” Ryan Meyers, senior vice president with the American Petroleum Institute, said in a statement.
“Directing the Department of Justice to address this state overreach will help restore the rule of law and ensure activist-driven campaigns do not stand in the way of ensuring the nation has access to an affordable and reliable energy supply,” he added.
Boosting coal
Trump is also trying to reinvigorate the U.S. coal industry with executive orders outlining steps to protect coal-fired power plants and expedite leases for domestic coal mining.
“I call it beautiful, clean coal,” the president said in recent remarks. “It’s cheap, incredibly efficient, high-density and it’s almost indestructible.”
In recent decades, the U.S. has seen a seismic shift from coal to natural gas for electricity use, which environmentalists point out is one of the main reasons greenhouse gas emissions have declined over that period. Coal-burning plants generate less than 20% of U.S. electricity, a drop from 50% in 2000, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Most states aren’t considering new plants, primarily because of pollution and the costs. Growth in solar and wind power generation have also edged coal further out of the energy equation. New England’s last coal-fired plant is set to close by 2028.
“Trump’s coal orders take his worship of dirty fossil fuels to a gross and disturbingly reckless new level,” Jason Rylander of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute said in a statement.
“Forcing old coal plants to keep spewing pollution into our air and water means more cancer, more asthma and more premature deaths.”
Red states side with president
Trump’s pledges to reinvigorate the nation’s fossil-fuel industry are resonating in states like Texas and New Hampshire, where Republican leaders are seeking to replicate the federal rollback of green policies.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott opted to ignore a February EPA deadline to identify which Texas counties violate new health limits for air pollution after the state’s Attorney General Ken Paxton attacked the EPA’s legal basis for the tougher air-quality standards previously set by the Biden administration.
Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas, said Abbott’s decision to “willfully flout clean air protections” puts the health of Texans at risk and likely wouldn’t have happened if the governor wasn’t “emboldened” by the Trump administration’s rollback of environmental regulations.
Metzger said the federal government has often been a “backstop” against efforts in Texas — which is home to one of the nation’s largest concentrations of petrochemical plants — to roll back environmental regulations, but said the Trump administration is unlikely to continue those efforts.
“We just don’t have an EPA that is going to check Texas’ worst impulses,” he said. “Until now, we’ve always counted on the federal government to set limits on pollution, chemical plant emissions and other protections.”
In New Hampshire, Democrats are pushing to tighten the state’s environmental policies since Trump was sworn into office in January, but they have been largely blocked by Republicans who control the state Legislature and governor’s office.
Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers are advancing plans to eliminate several existing climate-related policies, including one that would phase out the state’s renewable energy standard, which currently requires utilities to generate about a quarter of their power from renewable energy.
But Robinson said there are “a lot of misconceptions” that clean-energy policies are only in Democratic-led “blue” states.
He pointed to the bipartisan Inflation Reduction Act, signed by former Democratic President Joe Biden in 2022, that diverted billions of dollars to Republican-led “red” states, including Georgia and Texas, for clean-energy projects.
“Georgia is experiencing a boon in renewable energy production right now, particularly in solar power development,” he said. “And Texas is the nation’s leader in solar and wind, and has been so for a long time because it’s cheap and efficient and it creates jobs and people want it.
“The politicians can fight along political lines all they want, but the economics speak for themselves,” Robinson added.
States digging in
Brad Campbell, president of the New England-based Conservation Law Foundation, said cuts in federal environmental funding will force states to dig deeper into their budgets to fund clean energy and environmental protection.
“It’s unlikely that the states can replace that funding dollar for dollar,” he said.
Campbell said states need to “exert bolder leadership to help fill the gap left by the federal government’s retreat from core functions in environmental protections, particularly enforcement.”
One way states will likely push back on the Trump administration’s policies is by banding together to create regional climate-change initiatives, observers say.
Robinson pointed to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, an emissions reduction initiative created about 20 years ago by Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states to reduce excess carbon emissions from power plants by using a cap-and-trade system.
“Throughout history, we have seen progress happen at the state and local level,” he said. “In the years ahead, I think you’re going to see states really up the ante and do what they can to counterbalance the abdication of responsibility on climate leadership that we’re seeing on the federal level.”