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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Alexis Madrigal. Coming up on Forum, President Trump is stepping up his attack on climate policy, this time with an executive order that takes aim at states like California for setting their own environmental rules. Big pieces of the state's climate strategy are at risk, like its cap-and-trade program and the push for electric vehicles.
It's part of a larger rollback. Trump's been cutting research funding and gutting environmental agencies. We'll look at how California can respond. That's next after this news.
Welcome to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Alexis Madrigal. California has gone a long way on its own on climate policy, you know, setting tougher emission rules, investing in clean energy, trying to speed the transition to electric vehicles. But the Trump administration is trying to halt all of that.
A new executive order would limit the state's ability to set their own agenda. And Trump's head of the EPA put it pretty bluntly. He said the administration is, quote, driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion, end quote.
Let's talk about what California can do in the face of the federal government's agenda here. We are joined by Ethan Elkind. He is director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at the UC Berkeley School of Law. He is also the host of a podcast called Climate Break. And Lisa Friedman, she is a reporter on the Climate Desk for The New York Times. Welcome to you both.
Lisa, I'd love to start with you. Just give us a lay of the land. What exactly was in this latest executive order from the Trump administration? Sure. And thanks so much for having me. Last week, the Trump administration issued a flurry of executive orders, and a lot of them were aimed at...
Protecting and boosting the coal industry in the United States. One of them, though, called protecting American energy from state overreach takes what legal experts have described to me as extraordinary target at state climate policies. You know, just to back up.
The Trump administration is very quickly -- President Trump denies the science, the established science of climate change. He has called climate change a hoax and a scam. His administration has been moving at a very rapid pace to eliminate as many environmental protections as there seem to be on the books, particularly those that address climate change -- cutting funding, cutting grants, cutting science.
That has meant that the work that states are doing to address climate change had become all the more important. And this latest executive order from the president not only tries to move back the federal government from addressing climate change, but is looking for ways to stop states from doing it as well. And how exactly how did he word it and how exactly would it work?
Sure. Well, it directs the Justice Department to take steps to prevent a number of policies from being implemented at the state level. You know, it's worth saying that this executive order is both extremely broad and extremely vague. So there's a lot of interpretations, which, you know, which
Others can say, but may have been the point of what this would attack. But it tells the Justice Department to block, quote, burdensome and ideologically motivated climate change, and climate change is in quotes, or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance. Includes a lot of things. States like Vermont and New York have passed laws that
could hold fossil fuel companies financially responsible for extreme weather events, other damage caused by the burning of coal, oil, and gas. It could be cap-and-trade policies. It could be, you know, that efforts in states to reduce emissions from gas
automobile tailpipes could be attacked. So far, we haven't seen new action from the Justice Department. But many states, I'm told, are waiting and watching and expecting. Ethan, the executive order contends that California has, quote, radical requirements related to carbon credits. What exactly is Trump referring to there? And are these requirements, in your opinion, radical?
Well, I don't think they're radical, but I believe this is referring to California's cap and trade program, which is a program that basically puts a cap economy wide on greenhouse gas emissions. It covers primarily big industrial sources because other sources that emit like tailpipes and some, uh,
some other types of sources, including buildings, for example, with natural gas burning in them. Those are covered under other programs, but this is largely a program that caps economy-wide emissions on industrial sources. And then basically, as that cap sort of ratchets down, it gets more strict. Businesses that are polluting under that cap have to either reduce their emissions, and if they can't do it or economically don't want to do it, they can buy credits from other businesses under the cap that have
exceeded their emission reduction requirements. And so that's where the trade part comes in. And so it's a cap and trade program. And the oil industry doesn't like it. It adds cost to their bottom line. And so they clearly have allies in the White House. And that's why you're seeing this attack on the cap and trade program. And I think it's just emblematic of the fact that
How much influence the oil and gas industry has in the White House and also the fact that these programs at the state level, like what we have here in California, are making a difference. They're starting to impact the bottom line of fossil fuel providers. And then the revenue that the state is generating from the cap and trade program is being reinvested in a lot of different climate technology. Some of that is you could argue with like high speed rail, for example, is funded under the cap and trade program, although once built, that would reduce emissions.
emissions too. And so I think it's really a mark of success at the state level. But I think it's also a function of the fact that they don't have the majorities in Congress to pass legislation to overturn these state level programs, which would be constitutional and would be statutorily based. Instead, they're trying to find...
kind of radical legal theories by instructing the Justice Department to find those theories and then go after states, but they don't have any statutory basis to overturn these state programs like cap-and-trade.
Governor Gavin Newsom called this executive order nothing more than a press release from the oil and gas industry. You kind of mentioned there that there is no legal justification, but how far can these go? Are they constitutional? Can they actually unfold and influence what states are able to do going forward?
They don't have any statutory authority to undermine or undo these state-level programs. These are wholly within state sovereignty to put these programs in place. And so I think they're going to have to come up with some, as I say, pretty radical legal theories to try to justify it. I think there was a hint of maybe claiming national security, energy emergency, that kind of thing.
And in a normal era, this really wouldn't go anywhere in the court system. But I think we've seen that courts have made some decisions, particularly at the Supreme Court. It's got three different Trump appointees who are fairly radical in their own view of the judicial system and our constitutional structure. And so you never really know.
It would be tested in court, but my guess is even a fairly extreme Supreme Court would not find these kinds of arguments very persuasive and the kind of legal theory that we're likely to see come out of the Justice Department. So we've got to wait and see because the executive order tells the Justice Department to report back in 60 days on whatever their approach is going to be. But I don't think it's very likely that there's really any statutory or constitutional basis that a court would uphold.
Lisa, give us a sense of how this is part of a larger move. There's been lots of layoffs. Some agencies have been gutted. What are some of the other climate rollbacks that the administration is doing right now to ensure that environmental policy is not able to be pushed forward? Sure. At the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the bulk of the regulations addressing climate change policies,
protections on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and automobiles, oil and gas wells. The administrator, Lee Zeldin, has said he intends to roll all of those back. In the meantime, many of those are not being enforced while they're still on the books. At the Interior Department, Secretary Doug Burgum is opening up
hundreds of thousands of new acres of federal lands for oil and gas drilling. They've also moved to eliminate requirements for things like environmental impact statements for certain new drilling. At the Department of Energy, offices that focus on clean energy development are being slated for closure under some of these
efforts to slash the size of government. Across the board, there are cuts and closures to climate change. Meanwhile, in Congress, the Trump administration is working with Republicans on the Hill to try to eliminate the Inflation Reduction Act, which is a law that was passed in 2022, signed by then President Biden.
that provided hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits and other funding to clean energy and to promote a clean energy transition in the United States. You know, we'll see how far those efforts get. But, you know, from stems to stern, climate policy is being overturned at the federal level.
Ethan, how does all of that compare, that agenda compare to what we saw in Trump's first term? It seems to me that he's using a lot more executive orders, a lot more emergency authority to get things through this time.
Yeah, well, it's sort of the same song we heard in the first Trump term, but at a much louder volume. They really took the four years out of power when President Biden was in office to really plot what they're doing now. And they're truly throwing the kitchen sink at it. What we saw in the first term was that they were making strong efforts to overturn all sorts of regulations that had passed under Obama. But what happened was they got gummed up in the courts and they had a
tremendous failure rate in the courts. They lost something like 80% of their cases in the courts because it was really ideologically motivated efforts to roll back regulations, which require a lot of technical knowledge and expertise, and government has to justify when they overturn regulations. And they were really terrible at doing that in the first Trump term. So they're not only trying that again this time around, but they're also trying to essentially nullify
regulations, environmental regulations, because they know it's going to take years to unwind these regulations. And they know that even friendly Trump-appointed judges and conservative judges may try to help them out when there's the inevitable lawsuits, but they know that it's going to be a long road for them to go through the proper way of deregulating. And so what they're trying to do is nullify by, first of all, stopping the enforcement of existing regulations and
Part of that is gutting the staff at EPA, at these other agencies that are out there, you know, making sure that polluters aren't polluting waterways and airways and neighborhoods and so forth. And so the lack of enforcement is definitely strategy number one. Number two, they're trying to nullify these regulations by using kind of fringe legal theories. So that's another tactic that they're taking. And basically, they're just trying to
demoralize the federal workforce. And Ethan, I'm going to have to let it go there. We'll be right back after this break to continue our conversation about Trump's attacks on climate. Support for KQED podcasts comes from San Francisco International Airport. At SFO, you can shop, dine and unwind before your flight. Go ahead, treat yourself. Learn more about SFO restaurants and shops at flysfo.com.
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You're listening to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in today for Alexis Madrigal, and we are talking about Trump's moves on climate and the environment and how California might respond. We'd love to hear from you. What's your reaction to what you're hearing from our guests? Are you a government employee? Have you lost funding?
As a result of some of these moves, we'd love to hear your story. Give us a call now at 866-733-6786. Again, that's 866-733-6786. Or you can email your comments or questions to forum at kqed.org. You can also find us on all the social media platforms, Blue Sky, Instagram, or KQED Forum, or join our Discord community.
We are joined by Ethan Elkind. He is director of the climate program at the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at UC School of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law. Lisa Friedman is a reporter on the climate desk at the New York Times. And we are also joined now by Sonia Agarwal. She is CEO of Energy Innovation.
She is the CEO of Energy Innovation, which is a nonpartisan think tank based here in San Francisco that provides research and analysis on energy and climate policy. She also served as special assistant to the president for climate policy, innovation and deployment in the Biden administration. And finally, Abigail Dillon, who is president of Earth Justice, which is a public interest law group focused on the environment.
Sonia, we just heard there from Ethan about the layoffs at many of these agencies, federal agencies. You've worked inside the administration or the federal administration. What kind of expertise are we losing in all of these layoffs and these people that are no longer there?
Yeah, thank you for the question and thanks for having me. It is such a devastating time when it comes to the drain of incredible talent that we have had inside the United States federal government for decades.
These are thousands of civil servants working across departments and agencies on everything from what Ethan was talking about, enforcing basic environmental standards to make sure that our communities are not being dumped with pollution, that our kids are protected from asthma attacks, people who are really out there devoting their lives to making our lives better, losing their jobs.
Everything from the environmental side of things, but also the health agencies, you know, even the Department of Defense. There's, you know, people being laid off at the Federal Aviation Administration. And that is basic safety safety.
type impacts that we can see from those types of layoffs. And these are, you know, real human beings, right? I think sometimes that gets lost in all these numbers, you know, 2000 employees of the Department of Energy. 2000 is an almost unimaginable number when it comes to, you know, thinking about these human beings who are actually deep experts in how our energy system works,
how our industrial system works, and how we can make policy that continues to help cut costs for people on their energy bills, or how we can make policy that makes sure we have a reliable electricity system. These are the types of human beings who are being affected by all of these layoffs. Abigail, there's some hope potentially, or there's been some talk that maybe states, maybe universities, even private entities could potentially fill the gap. Is that at all possible?
It's very heartening to see civil society people, whether they're housed at universities or nonprofits, really stepping forward to try to preserve information, to try to find landing places for the incredible people who work in government and are making such an important contribution now so we don't lose information.
what they know and the work that they're doing. But I have to say there's no substitute for the federal government in terms of its funding, in terms of its reach, in terms of the structures that until a couple of months ago were in place to be able to do really what no other entity can do. And even the most well-respected
structured and effective programs that are housed in institutions, for example, Harvard, are now losing their federal funding. And so, you know, I think a lot of people are going to come forward and lead in place of the government now, and states, particularly California, will be more important than ever. But it's going to be incumbent on
Everybody who's listening to this show to make it understood in Congress and certainly at the ballot box that defunding the federal government has consequences that we're not going to accept. Speaking of everyone listening to this show, we would love to hear from those listeners.
What's your reaction to what you're hearing? What are some of your concerns about how Trump is handling climate issues? Maybe you're a researcher. Have you worked for a government agency to address the environment? What has your experience been? What concerns do you have now? Give us a call at 866-733-6786. Again, that's 866-733-6786. You can also email your comments, your questions to our guests.
You can just reach us at forum at kqed.org, or you can find us on all the social channels, Blue Sky, Instagram, Discord. We are KQED Forum. Ethan, you've talked a lot about how data is no longer being collected. A lot of it's being eliminated. Why does that matter?
Yeah, this is a major problem. If you're trying to hold polluters accountable, if you're trying to craft regulations that are sensible, you have to have a data set. You have to know what the problem is. You have to be able to measure it. You have to be able to measure it over time to understand changes in patterns. So the laying off of our, essentially our entire science apparatus within government, and it's largely because the science is
telling folks who are in the Trump White House things they don't want to hear. I mean, we kind of saw this movie with COVID, right, trying to deny the reality of how deadly COVID would be, how likely it would spread. And we heard the Trump administration the last term essentially deny that science. Now we're seeing the same thing play out where they wouldn't really want to deny the science of climate change because it's telling them that some of their fossil fuel industry supporters are causing a lot of damage.
and that this problem is getting worse and we need to take steps to fortify the country and become more resilient to what mother nature is now throwing at us. And so by laying off the scientists and eliminating in some cases these data sets, it becomes in some cases really irreparable damage because once you have breaks in the data, you lose that continuity, you lose the ability to compare data over time. So this is a major problem. The science is what underpins our responses, our
policies and our knowledge of what's going on and also our ability to protect ourselves and our community. I mean, we have to understand weather trends, for example, to know when to expect and how to prepare for flooding events, wildfires, et cetera. So this is an
a major cause for alarm or should be a major cause for alarm for people all across the country. And I really would strongly second what Abigail was saying in terms of, you know, letting your elected officials, your elected representatives know how important this is, because this really is irreparable and it puts people's lives and communities at risk.
A listener writes, can California continue to move towards an all-electric vehicle future by 2035, which is the goal right now? Given all the headwinds that Trump is putting in place, I think this is so important as well as an electrified transportation grid of high-speed rail buses, etc. Sonia, answer there?
Yeah, well, the good thing is that we have a lot of fundamentals on our side when it comes to electric vehicles. If you are making the choice between going to your plug or going to the pump, in every state it is actually cheaper to fill up your vehicle using your plug than it would be to go to the pump to drive the same vehicle.
number of miles. Uh and we're really seeing electric vehicle sales taking off all over the world. In fact um California still has incredibly high uh sales rates of electric vehicles and in China we saw at the end of last year um
Basically, one of every two cars being sold was electric. And China has been investing in a lot of manufacturing of those vehicles and the batteries. And, you know, a reversal of those types of policies that we were able to put in place over the last four years in Washington, D.C., here in the United States,
really puts us at a competitive disadvantage in a world where the International Energy Agency says that one of every two cars globally is
by the 2030s will be electric as well. So we really need to continue the investments that we were making and that we have been making that our domestic auto manufacturers have been making here in producing those electric vehicles and people really like them. So I think we have a lot of momentum on our side, but there's a lot of damage also that a new administration can do on these policies. Abigail,
Given the context of this conversation, the DOJ has been gutted. How does that move play into how all this will play out?
Just beginning to see, but just to be clear, what's happened at the Justice Department is not only the scale of purges so that there's less staffing to do the work of that important department, but the senior lawyers who have been the teachers, who have been the guides of the
federal legal positions over time have been either sidelined, they've quit, or they've been fired. And so you now have a department that's run by Trump loyalists and has been politicized as never before. So
Earthjustice over the last 50 years has seen administrations come and go and very sharp policy pivots, but there has been a reliable sense of what the government will defend, how the government will respond to its constitutional demands.
obligations over time and certainly a baseline of environmental protection that administrations, Republican and Democratic, have always respected and that the Justice Department has upheld. And so even in the first Trump administration, where you had a very hostile agenda with respect to a lot of things, including environmental protection,
It's my view, although I might not have been so aware of it at the time as I am now, that the Justice Department actually played a mitigating role. And you weren't seeing the government take radical positions that would really rock the foundations of environmental protection in the country. But that's what we're seeing now. Stacey writes,
I'm a faculty member at UC Davis where our main campus, our medical campus, and our veterinary school all depend on federal funding to provide education as well as patients. Losing these funds will result in closures of entire programs, damaging the UC's reputation as an
engine for social mobility, but also is our region's largest employer. I also want to note that Governor Newsom is imposing an 8% budget cut on our campuses right now. He has so far failed to respond to the emerging reality that if the federal and state governments de-invest in our work simultaneously, we're going to have to close up shop. Let's go to the phones. Mike in Santa Clara, you're on the air.
Hey there, thanks for taking my call. So I really appreciate you guys doing the show. I'm curious to know, what do you guys think that we can do as citizens to help support and, you know, fund, you know, probably at a much lower level, these types of programs? Ethan, do you want to take that?
Yeah, it's a great question. And I think it's been said already on this program that it's going to be really hard to replace what the federal government provides. The federal government is just orders of magnitude greater in terms of the amount of dollars. And I do worry that, you know, as the pie shrinks of funding,
from the federal government for environmental causes, but also public health research and on and on that it's really going to be hard for private philanthropy and states to backfill it. But that's really our best hope is trying to make the case to state leaders that they need to step up and maybe it's, it's,
politically challenging, but find new sources of revenue, uh, to fund and backfill what the federal government was supporting. I remember we saw that with the, uh, final term of the governor Jerry Brown administration here in California, when Trump was threatening to stop monitoring, uh,
Climate change impacts, and Governor Brown said, we're going to launch our own damn satellites. So, you know, states and then private philanthropy and in some cases, universities can step in to fill those gaps. But ultimately, we're going to need changes in the leadership at the federal level to restore what's been lost. Lisa, how are red states responding to all of these policies and all of these actions? Hmm.
That's a great question. And I think the answer to it is quietly. There are a number of lawmakers, Republican lawmakers, who have been having, you know, sidebar conversations with the administration about keeping various programs. You know, for example, early on in the administration, one of the
pieces of funding that had been blocked was for a biofuels facility through the Department of Energy's loan office in Montana. The administration had stopped all of the loans that were in process and Senator Deans put out a press release saying, "I've talked to the administration and I've got this restarted."
It is unclear without, you know, a connection in the administration how, you know, how states are faring. But I think we're seeing a lot of these conversations that are happening behind the scenes, you
with members of the administration to try to preserve some of these projects, which mean factories and jobs and employment in many of these communities. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, 80% of nearly of the funding from the Inflation Reduction Act was going to Republican states and districts.
We're talking about Trump's moves on climate and the environment and how California might respond in the face of those attacks. We are joined by Ethan Elkind. He's director of the Climate Program, the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Lisa Friedman is a reporter at the Climate Desk for The New York Times. Sonia Agarwal is CEO of Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank.
And Abigail Dillon is president of Earth Justice, a public interest law group. We'd love to hear from you. What are your concerns about how Trump is handling the climate issues? Have you lost funding or maybe a government position as a result of Trump's moves?
Maybe you're a researcher and you've lost some of your grant funding. We'd love to hear your story or your concerns, your questions for our experts. Give us a call, 866-733-6786. Again, that's 866-733-6786. Or shoot us an email.
to forum at kqed.org or find us on our social media, Blue Sky, Instagram. We're at kqedforum, or you can join our Discord community. Let's go to the phones, Shet, in Point Reyes Station. You're on the air. Yes.
This is not about Trump making it more difficult. It's about Governor Newsom and the California Public Utilities Commission making it more difficult. They are now changing from what was called Energy Meeting 2.0, where...
The consumer bought and sold renewable power at the same rate to net energy metering 3.0, where you buy it at retail and you sell it at wholesale, which is one-eighth the price of retail. The consequence is that it no longer pays for a consumer to put in solar panels. And that we don't have Trump to thank for, but Governor Newsom.
Shet, my brother actually is having that same issue in Idaho. He regrets putting his solar panels on his roof because of this issue. Sonia, do you have any sense of how Trump is going to deal with either this issue or solar in general?
Yeah, this is a really important issue, I think, for all of us. So during the last administration, I think Ethan mentioned this a bit earlier in the program, the Inflation Reduction Act, which is essentially a series of domestic energy incentives, got across the finish line. And that by across the finish line, I mean it was passed into law by the United States Congress. And that program had
a bunch of different incentives for lots of clean energy resources, giving people about 30% off the cost of these things like putting solar panels on your roof. Now, with that law, luckily, because it was passed by Congress, it needs an act of Congress to take that away. So there's been a lot of noise about, you know, we're going to
take away all of those incentives and take us backwards, rising energy costs for people. That's not the message they use, but that's exactly what it would do if you take those away. That just directly increases energy costs for people and for businesses across America. So that is actually something that is still being discussed and debated in Congress. And to be determined, I hate to interrupt you there, but we are going into a break. We'll be right back with
with a conversation about how Trump is attacking environmental policies. Stay with us. We'll be right back.
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You're listening to Forum. I'm Leslie McClurg. I'm in for Alexis Madrigal today, and we are talking about Trump's moves on climate and the environment. We are joined by Ethan Elkind. He is director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment at the UC Berkeley School of Law. Lisa Friedman is a reporter on the Climate Desk at the New York Times. Sonia Agarwal is CEO of Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank. And Abigail Dillon is president of
Earthjustice, a public interest law group. We'd love to hear from you. What's your reaction to what you're hearing? Have you lost funding or maybe a government position as a result of Trump's moves? What policies that you're hearing about concern you the most?
Give us a call at 866-733-6786. Again, that's 866-733-6786. Or find us on social media. We're at KQED Forum. Or you can shoot us an email at forum at kqed.org. A listener writes, I'm all in favor of thinning out forests to handle wildfires, but I understand that the Trump administration
administration is opening up forests for logging without environmental protections to do that. It seems weird to me that Trump is trying to make all these moves and at the same time is firing the people who are supposed to oversee or be in charge of these moves. How are they going to log forests if they fire all these people? Abigail?
Well, I think what they're thinking is that they can privatize. So they're not interested in careful wildfire management. They're not interested in implementing policies that advance anything in the public interest. What they want to do is really raise the whole system of, and I mean R-A-Z-E, destroy the whole system of environmental regulation in the country permanently.
and open up, whether it's our public lands, whether it's our oil and gas reserves, onshore, offshore, whatever can be exploited in the country. And I know that I'm sounding very broad-based, but really what the president has directed every agency to do is identify all of the regulations that prevent easy extraction, including logging,
oil and gas drilling, etc. They just want to make it available to private actors who want to come cut down a forest, even if that is the kind of idea that's been discredited for decades.
Ethan, on that note, you know, talking about federal lands, Trump has talked about selling off hundreds of thousands of acres to developers. Talk about that. And if that happened, could the states regulate the development that would happen on those lands potentially? Yeah.
Well, I think this really ties back to that earlier question you had for Abigail and that the listener wrote in that when you're gutting the federal workforce, it becomes really hard to make these moves. The federal government doesn't just make, isn't able to just effectuate something immediately. There's often a very long process involved with
government action. And that can frustrate people on both sides of the political divide or all sides of the political divide that we have in this country. But it does take a long time to do it, and you need the staffing to do so. So a lot of these moves, even to sell off federal land, have to go through a process. And if you don't have the staff in place to do it, you can't get it done as quickly. You can't survive court challenges to some of these moves. But assuming that
federal land is able to be sold off, then yes, states would have the land use authority. They could devolve that to counties and cities that would have jurisdiction if the cities were to incorporate some of that land. So that is one of the strategies, I suppose, that we'll see what happens there. But I do think, just to go back to that earlier point that Shet was making about
California's rooftop solar policies. I think it's really important to keep in mind just how much states can still do on their own, even in the face of this federal onslaught of rollbacks, that states do have sovereignty over their electricity grids. They have sovereignty over things like rooftop solar policies. Although I'd note that rolling back subsidies, I think, was appropriate given that's
solar panel costs have come down. And I think it also points to how much, you know, states really should be doing even under, you know, favorable administrations to environmental protection, like under the Biden administration, Obama administration before that, that states are going to be the leaders because often people at state level are going to be much more pro environment and states like California and New York, Vermont, than at the federal level as a whole. So
I think even regardless of what the administration is doing, states need to be doing all they can to be reducing emissions and in turn helping to reduce cost of living. I mean, I think of housing policy, for example, which is a really important climate policy to make sure we build more homes near transit and walkable communities, allowing more homes to be built that help also reduce the cost of living, reduce transportation costs. That's something that states can be doing now. So, you know, even with all this federal onslaught,
I do think that we should, for those who care about climate action, environmental protection, focusing on state level policies is always a very critical step in a really critical course of action. Even staying with you,
Obviously, some states are going to be hurt worse than others, because as we've talked about, you know, there are state environmental protections that may help their residents, but some states will be hit really hard if they don't have those layers of protection. You know, talk about Cancer Alley and how a place like that in Louisiana, you know, might be really hit hard by this onslaught.
Yeah, you know, fortunately, for those of us who live in states like California, we've got pretty robust state-level protection. So when we see these federal regulatory rollbacks, there's often state backstops in place. But it's those, you know, red states and places like Cancer Alley and the Gulf Coast, which is highly industrialized, highly polluting, you know,
really unprecedented levels of public health challenges, cancer, et cetera. And a lot of experts attribute that to all the industrial activity and pollution. Those states don't have that kind of backstop residents in those states because, you know, they're often victims of more conservative state governments that the backstop was the federal government. That's, you know, many,
reasons why we needed a federal Clean Air Act. California had a state-level version of the Clean Air Act. We needed a federal Clean Air Act to make sure that there was essentially a level playing field for environmental protection and level standards across the United States. So I do worry the most for those residents in places like Louisiana, Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast, other states where they really don't have the state-level environmental protection that the federal government was stepping in to play that role. So I think that really just will...
reinforce the inequities in our society, the idea that disadvantaged, lower-income communities are going to really be facing the brunt of the impacts, while wealthier, higher-income states like California and New York are going to have the resources and the political will to protect people from pollution. A listener writes, Trump issued an executive order about the water flow in showerheads. How is this even an issue that the president cares about, much less issues an executive order on? Lisa?
The president has cared about the water flow in shower heads for quite some time. It's been a particular obsession of his. What is interesting, one of the things that is interesting in this executive order he issued is, and it would have, it would have,
eliminated limits on the water. It will eliminate limits on the water flow in shower heads. You know, as others were saying, typically the creation of regulations and also the elimination of regulations goes through a process. His executive order essentially says that the justification should be done because he says so. He said notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal.
It's a pretty extraordinary move. And, you know, of course, decades to contrary to decades of administrative law.
Fascinating. A listener writes, recently KQED played a piece talking about how Tesla earns enough carbon credits to sell carbon credits, utilizing cap and trade to increase revenue. Tesla is currently showing a decline in sales affecting their carbon credit market capabilities. This combined with Trump administration efforts to reduce clean energy influence could hit Tesla's bottom line. Any idea how this might affect other companies that are trying to stay afloat like Rivian or Lucid? Sonia?
Yes, I think this comes back to the discussion we were having earlier about the federal incentives and also California's
really nation-leading and world-leading electric vehicle policies. Fourteen other states follow California's electric vehicle policies, and that really has stimulated a much broader market for electric vehicles than we might have seen otherwise across the United States. So the executive order that you raised at the very beginning of this show about how
the Trump administration is trying to limit states
authority and capability to advance their own policies in these realms, that is definitely going to have an effect on these companies. In addition, the defense of the domestic clean energy incentives in Congress that we were discussing earlier, there are great incentives for domestic manufacturing of electric vehicles that really are helping our unions
United States car companies stay competitive globally and if those incentives are rolled back or made ineffective repealed by this administration and this Congress that will have a very negative effect on these businesses.
You know, the clean investment drove more than half of total private investment growth in the two years after those domestic clean energy incentives were passed during the last administration. So this kind of investment is driving the entire economy, not just those clean energy companies.
Ethan, the president has often said that we are in an energy emergency and that these are all necessary. These actions are necessary because of this energy emergency. Is there any truth to that?
I mean, I'm trying to almost stifle a laugh because to say there's an energy emergency, but then to take steps to shut down offshore wind, for example, or undermine solar energy deployment or talk about repealing tax credits that would go to all sorts of clean energy deployment. I don't know how you could say, you know, there's an energy emergency on one hand, but then yet.
Yet we don't need all this clean energy to be deployed. So we absolutely are not in an energy emergency. That is basically a pretext to try to inflate and subsidize the value of dirty fossil fuel energy, coal mining, oil and gas, et cetera, and support those industries that are favorable to Trump. But there is no energy emergency. And if there was, there truly would be an all of the above approach. But we're not seeing that at all from this administration.
Abigail, what should California lawmakers do in response to this onslaught? Well, as we've had this discussion, we've, I think, really fleshed out what's wrong with what's happening. And we also have to remember that all of it is illegal. And that's why we're seeing judges do their jobs, issue orders. I mean, to the
that Sonia has been making about these really historic investments. Just yesterday, we saw two judges ruling to unfreeze billions of federal dollars.
And so I think it's very important for state attorney generals. We have an incredible attorney general in Rob Bonta in California continue to press their legal cases in the courts. Lisa was talking earlier about the executive order directing the Justice Department to come after states for their climate policies and
protective health policies. Ethan, I think, made the terrific point that those cases are unlikely to succeed, even in courts that have become more conservative, particularly in terms of the justices who are now on the Supreme Court. So what I hope listeners are taking from this conversation is that there are many bad things happening.
And they are part of a cohesive agenda to actually hold back clean energy transition in a clean economy, to tear down the services that only our federal government can provide. But that states can fight back, they must fight back, both by continuing to have innovative policy
and defending it strongly when they come under attack, and by bringing their own lawsuits, because everything that this administration is doing has impacts on the constituents of Governor Newsom. You know, everyone in California, everyone in every state is going to feel the impact. And so states have, and governors have, and attorneys generals have amazing power to fight back
And this is the time to do that. As long as we let ourselves have the perception that this is unstoppable, it will become so. But it is illegal. Judges are alarmed by what's happening and they want to do their job to stop it. Victor writes, as a resident of San Francisco and a voter of deep blue California, I am frustrated that calling my representative is essentially preaching to the choir.
I am a naturalized citizen, and I am increasingly apprehensive to make my voice heard on social media as more and more stories break of citizens being detained and their phones inspected for anti-government content when returning from travel. What can we do to bring about change without feeling like we are just yelling inside an echo chamber and without risking retaliation from the government? Ethan?
Well, I feel bad for what Victor is going through and many other people. This is really a terrifying time for a lot of people in the society are very vulnerable and we're seeing really unprecedented attacks on civil liberties. You know, I think there's sort of a short term game of mobilizing and organizing and doing what we can. But there's a long term game to this, too. I mean, California is a part of the United States and a lot of the structural problems that I think are giving rise to our political instability now come because of
policies that states like California have when we think of how much wages have basically been falling for people without college degrees, workers without college degrees who make up the majority of the workers in this country since 1980. Those wages have essentially been flat while cost of living has been increasing all in inflation-adjusted terms. So states like California can do a lot to try to put in place policies that lower electricity costs, housing costs, transportation costs, and I think climate action can play a really important role
role in that and also providing good jobs, getting union level wages back for those manufacturing industries to produce the kind of clean technology we need, energy storage, solar panels, wind turbines, et cetera. So I think California should be getting its own house in order. We have some of the highest costs of living in the United States. We could be a more welcoming environment for people who don't have college degrees to make it possible to afford to live here, to get
access to the economic prosperity that has been way too concentrated in the blue areas of the United States and not been going out to those red areas where we're now experiencing that backlash. So I think there's a short-term game to be played, but in the long term, blue states need to get their economic house in order to contribute to broad-based prosperity in this country and help really bring down the tension and political instability that we're suffering through right now.
Abigail, we're coming up against the end of the hour here. So short answer to this listener. Listener asks, Trump has flooded the zone. And I'm curious about which particular program being lost concerns the guest the most. It's so hard to keep up with all this. I'd appreciate some specific information about a program that I should be paying attention to. Can you flag something for this listener, Yapi?
I would say that we have to not just pick one program to save. We have to save the principals now. And thank goodness there are enough folks at nonprofits like mine to be able to bring a comprehensive fight. But when I think about the most important things we need to save, it is the historic legislation, particularly around tax credits, that will keep the private sector moving on clean energy. And I think we can save those in Congress.
It is the 31 rules that EPA Administrator Zeldin has targeted. Those represent years of litigation to get people healthier and have climate solutions. And so our eyes are really on that big swath of deregulation and protecting the historic investments.
A listener asks, or says, I was feeling sad that the days of leadership by America, because our great research, our science are fading. But I am encouraged by these guests who are moving the cause forward. This show is giving me some hope. We've been talking about Trump's moves on climate and the environment. We've been joined by an excellent panel. Sonia Agarwal is CEO of Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank studying energy and climate policy. Thank you, Sonia.
Abigail Dillon is president of Earth Justice, a public interest law group focused on the environment. Ethan Elkind is director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment at UC Berkeley School of Law. Thank you, Ethan and Abigail. And Lisa Friedman is a reporter on the Climate Desk at New York Times. Thank you so much to our listeners for all your great comments and questions. I'm Lesley McClurig. I'm in for Alexis Madrigal. Stay with us for another hour of Forum Ahead with guest host Scott Schaefer.
Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
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