Trump Is Unwinding Climate Science at a Dangerous Pace

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1:21Right now, get 10 % off at Hero.co with code iHeart. That's H-E-R-O dot C-O code IHEART. All figures per serving of Hero Bread. See Nutrition Facts on Hero.co. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Even as a journalist who spends a lot of time following the news, it can be hard to keep track of everything the Trump administration is doing on any given day. Tonight, the U.S. and China end trade talks in Stockholm. Take July 29th. Late summer, usually a sleepy time for news. Six consecutive days of all-time highs for the U.S. equity market. There were a lot of headlines to sift through that day.

2:05But there's one in particular that got climate journalists perking up. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin says the agency wants to hear from people to finalize a regulation that proposes to rescind the endangerment finding and... If finalized, today's announcement would amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States. That's Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, proposing to revoke the endangerment finding, a rule that has formed the bedrock of environmental regulation in the U.S. since 2009. It's basically saying greenhouse gas emissions do pose a threat to human health and giving EPA legal authority to actually regulate specifically greenhouse gas pollutions.

2:52That's my colleague, Bloomberg reporter Zahra Hirji. What it does is it binds a really vast global century scale amount of scientific research to law. And that's Eric Rosten, another climate reporter for Bloomberg. And says that this is a problem and it'll affect human health And therefore, we need to create policies that will prevent harm that we know is probably coming. Zahra and Eric say the EPA's proposal to reverse the finding was a huge deal. The agency claimed the rollback could save more than$54 billion annually by essentially undoing greenhouse gas emissions regulations. And that proposal is just one action that the Trump administration has taken to undercut the work that government agencies do to address pollution, climate change, disaster mitigation, and more.

3:48Zahra says it's part of a broader attack on the scientific establishment. The Union of Concerned Scientists did a tally, and they looked at anti-science actions total, and they found around or at least 400 just in the first six months, which was more than the entire total for the first Trump administration. When you look at climate science alone, the actions the administration has taken have impacted at least half a dozen agencies and disrupted billions of dollars in funding. So it can include everything from firing of scientists to putting them on administrative leave, as well as canceling programs or grants or taking down information from the web or reconsidering policies.

4:32The Trump administration has said that, quote, agencies are refocusing on their core missions and shifting away from ideological activism, unquote. The EPA has said environmental deregulation will create jobs and save Americans billions of dollars. But Zahra and Eric's reporting tells a different story. I'll say that you're sort of hearing two different things from them. Often the economy is invoked when they're talking about this stuff and it is sort of framed under we do want to save money. But then you're also just hearing from EPA's administrator Lee Zeldin or Energy Secretary Chris Wright just a very clear condemnation and questioning of climate science and people that work in climate.

5:19And while these anti-climate actions are expected to have profound economic impacts, they're not necessarily the ones the administration is touting. They could slow GDP growth in disaster-prone states, which could also impact national GDP growth. They could make it harder to prepare for extreme weather events, which have cost the global economy an estimated$2.8 trillion over the past two decades. It's hard to put a price on future disasters, but the cost to green energy projects is already quantifiable. In the first half of this year,$22 billion worth of green projects have been canceled. Once you start peeling back the impacts of climate change, it's a drag on the whole economy.

6:07I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, breaking down the Trump administration's war on climate science, one agency at a time, and calculating the impact it could have for decades to come.

6:26Zahra Hirji is a climate reporter for Bloomberg. She's been closely tracking the Trump administration's attacks on climate science since President Trump's inauguration in January. This administration is trying to pull back on a lot of climate policy all at once, and it's doing it in a lot of different ways. In just a few months, the Trump administration has cut funding, canceled grants, and fired workers at an alphabet soup of federal agencies. The EPA, FEMA, NOAA, the CDC, NASA, the DOI, and the DOE. They all handle aspects of the way the U.S. anticipates, mitigates, tracks, and responds to climate change and natural disasters, at a time when climate-related catastrophes are getting more intense and more expensive to deal with.

7:11To cite a prominent example is like last September, a year ago, a hurricane came to the mountains of western North Carolina. That's climate reporter Eric Rosten. And in December, two or three months after the storm, the state of North Carolina put the damage estimate like$59 billion. So like that's$59 billion that somebody's going to pay for by building new things or that nobody's going to pay for and people will move or not build back or find new jobs. As catastrophes get more expensive, the administration is making big changes to the organizations that deal with them most directly. Some of the biggest changes have come for the Environmental Protection Agency, led by Lee Zeldin.

7:55The former New York congressman's history includes voting against environmental legislation. And Zahra says, perhaps unsurprisingly, Zeldin has been pushing the EPA to take some new positions. We're used to thinking about the EPA as this key environmental regulatory agency. And instead, under Zeldin's lead, they're really pushing quite openly a deregulatory approach. In March, Zeldin announced dozens of rollbacks to regulation. The American Revolution Agency is initiating 31 historic actions to fulfill President Trump's promise to unleash American energy, revitalize our auto industry, restore the rule of law, and give power back to the states.

8:41Then in July, Zeldin announced that the EPA would also try to reverse the landmark endangerment finding, which we talked about earlier. Zeldin and the EPA haven't officially revoked the rule. But Zahra says the fact that it's even on the table says a lot about Zeldin's priorities. They're also looking at reconsidering car emission standards, power plant pollution rules, facilities having to report on some of their emissions. And the new direction for the EPA goes beyond deregulation. They announced in July that they're moving to close their Office of Research and Development, which is like their key research office that's looking at future environmental risks.

9:24And like many other federal agencies, they're bleeding staff. Over 2 ,000 EPA staff have taken kind of the deferral program or this incentive program, which means that they haven't been working, but they've been paid for a couple months and will eventually leave the agency. Zara says these changes to the EPA could leave permanent scars. It might not all be super visible to someone on the ground right now, but in the coming months, in the coming years, as experts leave, as things stop showing up on the website, it's not just the protections that we've come to expect that exist today, but the people looking for what is the next thing that we need to be worried about.

10:08And we will be caught potentially flat-footed with whatever the next future threat is. It's a similar story at FEMA, the agency that prepares for and responds to disasters like floods, fires and hurricanes. People most know FEMA for when a major disaster happens, they can come on the ground and help and they can provide funding. And we've already started to see that actual disaster aid funding has been less than in previous years. And they've certainly stopped providing hazard mitigation, something that used to just be an automatic, yes, extra money to help states. Then there are the funding and staffing cuts that affect the scientists who help predict disasters before they happen.

10:52The scientists at NOAA. It is a very kind of immediate impact that people can see because these are meteorologists that are tracking to see if there's a tornado and helping put out tornado alerts, for example, or if there's a hurricane or if there's a flood. Because of this, there's actually been a lot of response, a lot of criticism. Members of Congress have spoken up. And so now actually the agency is hiring back. Then there's the Department of the Interior and the Department of Energy. Grant programs, permitting, and tax incentives for clean energy projects typically run through these agencies.

11:31Now, previously approved projects are finding that their permits or their funding are in peril. So you have a lot of companies in the space that are scrambling because they thought they had projects, they thought they had tax incentives that they would be able to use, and now those are disappearing. And beyond what's been lost at the DOE, Eric says he's also been paying close attention to what kind of climate-related research is being done there. The Department of Energy issued a report by five scientists who are known within the scientific community for being skeptics of the, I don't even want to call it mainstream, it's just of the science.

12:10Their report was published in July, and it said global warming projections are exaggerated, and that some policies to reduce emissions may do more harm than good. It was immediately sort of swarmed by enormous amounts of scientific scrutiny. In early September, a group of 85 scientists published a 400-page rebuttal to the DOE report, writing that the scientists behind it appear to have been, quote, personally recruited by the Secretary of Energy to advance a particular viewpoint favored by DOE leadership. However contested its findings, the paper is already shaping environmental policy. It came out within a week of the Trump administration announcing they'd be reconsidering the endangerment finding.

12:55And Zahra says it helped the administration bolster its argument. This is them putting out a report with effectively alternative science. It's not just pulling back on the work, but they're kind of pushing an alternative narrative, which goes a step beyond. After the break, unpacking the economic and human consequences of slashing climate funding and how reversing course on green investments could undermine the U.S. on the global stage. Amazon Health AI presents Painful Thoughts I, um, I can't stop scratching my downtown Yeah, but I'm not itching to go downtown and tell a receptionist I'm here to talk about my downtown Some things you'd rather type than say out loud There's no question too embarrassing for Amazon Health AI Chat your symptoms and get virtual care 24-7 Healthcare just got less painful.

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15:33Tallying the economic impacts of the Trump administration's many attacks on climate science is tricky. How do you account for the costs of a disaster that hasn't happened yet? How do you model how more pollution could lead to higher spending on health care? Climate change, there's obviously a ton of ways to talk about it. But an important way is that soup to nuts, it's an economic problem. Climate reporter Eric Rosten again. On the front end, it's an economic problem because the prices of incumbent energy don't really match up with the cost on society. Economists call that an externality, a cost that society absorbs, but that producers don't.

16:12Halting climate science research also has other more direct economic impacts on private companies, like companies that work on climate projects supported by federal funding or that rely on federal climate data to inform their business strategy. Take the National Climate Assessment as an example. This is a document that companies talk about on earnings calls. Chipotle and Marriott and Travelers have all cited the NCA in public disclosures. But in April, the administration dismissed hundreds of outside scientists who had volunteered their time to write the next version of the report. and the government website hosting past reports has been taken down.

16:51People just want to make good decisions. And taking away scientific information that is paid for by the public and presented to the public that is increasingly rare, people have come to expect it because they've come to realize that they need it. Climate reporter Zahra Hirji says that some companies have been particularly vocal about how important it is for the government to continue to invest in climate science. Rivian, which is this electric vehicle company, was among those that had spoken up at this four-day hearing in August. That was a hearing over the proposed endangerment finding reversal.

17:31Offering comments about the EPA's move to reconsider the endangerment finding, and they specifically were speaking out against it and about the harms that could have for the automotive industry and consumers writ large. I mean, you just think about the regulatory environment. Businesses often thrive on having a stable regulatory environment. So any dramatic or shift changes to that can just be rough, especially if that leads to states having their own rules and then they're dealing with an environment where they have 50 different rules to deal with rather than when they just had one federal environment.

18:08And I think especially when you're hearing from the world of clean energy, clean energy tech, solar companies, wind companies. They've been specifically targeted by this administration. I mean, the impacts have been pretty dramatic, and those companies are speaking out. Speaking out, and sometimes taking legal action. The energy firm Orsted, along with the states of Rhode Island and Connecticut, sued the Trump administration for halting a wind farm project that was nearly complete. So these effects are real and they're trickling down. And I think we'll start to hear more, too, as more of these changes come down.

18:47If the U.S. stops investing in these spaces, how might the country fall behind on the global stage and who is best positioned to take the lead here? China already owns most of the new economy. You just look at any clean energy technology or like part for a technology, and China provides the world with probably, you know, it's insane, like 50 to 80 percent of it. So in a lot of ways, we're already losing. And if you take a long view, the world we live in has grown and been sustained by decades of U.S. spending more money on science than just about anybody else. It's not clear who was going to step forward and replenish that.

19:32And other countries that do invest in this stuff may not also be democratic countries. And therefore, the science doesn't come along with a mandate for transparency. One of the biggest places to stand to benefit, and we've heard this from our sources, is China, as well as potentially Europe. They may have engineering advancements or kind of business advancements in spaces where we're just not operating or the companies don't have the space for. But they're also looking to poach literally the experts who work here. This is something where we're going to start seeing in the coming years who may benefit because they're trying to grab up all this talent that's sort of being left on the floor when we have all of these funding cuts and these staffing cuts.

20:19And while so much of the U.S. government's climate science work has been reversed in just a matter of months, Zahra says rebuilding will take much longer. I don't think this administration has been shy about this, but I think there's a sense that maybe the private sector or other people will step up. And the reality is, you know, from me talking to local emergency managers, is if the federal government's support for their efforts go away, it's just not going to happen. No one's actually going to step in. There have been a lot of efforts specifically in climate where if the Trump administration has ended a rapport or ended a program or ended a data set, some of those people are trying to find ways where within civil society they can resurrect it in some way.

21:06But not everything will be resurrected. And we're still waiting to see what's actually going to be around at the end of the four years.

21:17This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. If you like this episode, make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

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