President Trump has made dismantling environmental regulations a priority during his time in office. While some of these moves remain mired in legal uncertainty, the Trump administration has successfully unraveled the majority of Obama-era climate policies, including the Clean Power Plan, fuel economy standards for passenger vehicles, and efforts to curb potent greenhouse gases (GHGs) from refrigerants and air conditioning. Just last month, the administration eased regulations preventing methane leakage from oil and gas facilities. Rhodium Group has analyzed the isolated implications of each of these regulatory rollbacks on US GHG emissions in previous research. In this note, we examine their aggregate effect. We find that Trump’s major climate policy rollbacks have the potential to add 1.8 gigatons of CO2-equivalent to the atmosphere by 2035. This cumulative impact is equivalent to nearly one-third of all US emissions in 2019.

Published Sep 17, 2020

Hannah Pitt, Kate Larsen, M. Y. (2020). The Undoing of US Climate Policy: The Emissions Impact of Trump-Era Rollbacks. https://rhg.com/research/the-rollback-of-us-climate-policy/