President Trump, who was officially sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday, has announced immediate moves to reverse policies and pacts to curb heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions while boosting fossil fuel extraction. These actions come amid increasingly dire warnings from scientists that the world’s largest industrial economies must swiftly phase out coal, oil, and gas, the burning of which is the primary source of human-caused climate change, to avoid irreversible climate catastrophe.
Instead, on the first day of his return to power, Trump signed a dizzying array of executive orders that prize fossil fuel extraction, transportation, and combustion while annulling policies intended to encourage a green energy transition. During his inaugural address, Trump said he will declare a national energy emergency centered around his campaign promise to “drill, baby, drill.” He pledged to “bring prices down, fill our strategic [petroleum] reserves up again, right to the top, and export American energy all over the world.” Referring to oil and gas as “liquid gold,” the president claimed that maximizing their production will be key to making the US a “rich nation again.” The United States is already the largest oil and gas producer in the world.
Soon after his speech, Trump signed an executive order pulling the United States out of the Paris Agreement. The US will now join a club of only three other nations—Iran, Syria, and Yemen—that are not party to the landmark climate treaty. The international accord establishes the goal to limit global heating to well below 2°C and strive to avoid exceeding 1.5°C. The planet hit that threshold formally for the first time last year—multiple climate monitoring organizations announced earlier this month that 2024 was Earth’s hottest year on record and the first full year in which global average temperature surpassed the 1.5°C mark—an ominous sign that the climate goal may be already falling out of reach.
Last year alone, 27 extreme weather and climate disasters supercharged by fossil fuel emissions resulted in nearly $183 billion in damage costs, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The 2025 Los Angeles wildfires are estimated to have already exceeded that cost figure, with some estimates pinning the damage at around $250 billion alone.
“Such a move is in clear defiance of scientific realities and shows an administration cruelly indifferent to the harsh climate change impacts that people in the United States and around the world are experiencing.”
Other executive orders Trump signed on Monday include directives to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization; freeze pending environmental regulations; remove protections that prevent oil drilling in deep oceans; undo a ban on drilling off most of the coastal US; and slash racial equity and transgender protections while removing federal programs that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. There’s even one titled “Putting People Over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism” that follows through on a widely debunked conspiracy theory, repeatedly platformed by Trump himself on Truth Social, blaming protections for the endangered Delta smelt fish as the cause for the LA wildfires.
In addition to an order proclaiming an “energy emergency,” Trump signed several executive actions aimed at facilitating unrestrained fossil fuel extraction—including drilling in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—and nixing Biden’s climate and clean energy policies.
“The president will unleash American energy by ending Biden’s policies of climate extremism, streamlining permitting, and reviewing for rescission all regulations that impose undue burdens on energy production and use, including mining and processing of non-fuel minerals,” a statement posted to the White House website says in outlining some of Trump’s initial priorities.
That includes eliminating rules intended to make vehicles more fuel-efficient and less polluting and ending energy-efficiency standards and incentives for a whole assortment of home appliances, from showerheads and washing machines to lightbulbs. The American Climate Corps will be terminated, and disbursement of funds for things like EV charging stations, made available through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, is to be paused. There is also a directive for the EPA administrator to consider eliminating or reversing the social cost of carbon calculation and the 2009 endangerment finding for greenhouse gases. The science-based endangerment finding obligates the EPA to regulate CO2 and other heat-trapping gases emitted from sources like motor vehicles and power plants.
While the Trump administration will be prioritizing energy production on federal lands and waters, wind energy development is specifically prohibited. Trump signed an executive order withdrawing all areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from offshore wind leasing, and halting onshore and offshore wind project permitting pending a federal review of wind project impacts.
Top climate scientists and experts warned in the 2024 state of the climate report published in October that our society is “currently going in the wrong direction, and our increasing fossil fuel consumption and rising greenhouse gas emissions are driving us toward a climate catastrophe.… Rapidly phasing down fossil fuel use should be a top priority,” they wrote.
“Trump’s declaration of a national energy emergency leverages a false premise to encourage expanded fossil fuel production at a time when the United States is already the top oil and gas producer in the world.”
Climate and environmental advocates swiftly criticized the new administration’s announcements on energy and climate. “Trump’s declaration of a national energy emergency leverages a false premise to encourage expanded fossil fuel production at a time when the United States is already the top oil and gas producer in the world. As fires still rage across Los Angeles and communities impacted by hurricanes and floods still struggle to recover, we must rapidly reduce our dangerous fossil fuel production and dependence—not increase it,” Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food and Water Watch, said in a statement.
Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center, called the national energy emergency a “paper-thin ruse to deepen the exploitation of public lands, communities, and the climate in service of further boosting record fossil fuel company profits.”
Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement, while not unexpected, is a “travesty” that ignores science, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). “Such a move is in clear defiance of scientific realities and shows an administration cruelly indifferent to the harsh climate change impacts that people in the United States and around the world are experiencing. Pulling out of the Paris Agreement is an abdication of responsibility and undermines the very global action that people at home and abroad desperately need,” Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist for the climate and energy program at UCS, said in a statement.
“Donald Trump’s failure to even begin to understand the magnitude of this moment is as clueless as it is cruel, said Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous. “Withdrawal from this agreement is nothing more than a symbol of his selfish and empty acts that only emboldens other nations who see yet another opportunity to lead where we refuse to. At a moment when the world is looking toward the United States to lead and use its power for good, Donald Trump has instead abdicated his responsibilities to save lives and protect our planet.”