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Talking executive orders, global conflict, and Greenland with the Center for Climate & Security’s Erin Sikorsky.
President Donald Trump signed 33 executive orders, memoranda, and proclamations after dinnertime on Monday, giving journalists, pundits, and concerned citizens plenty of material to work through after his first day in office. His Day One mandates included ordering federal workers to return to office full-time — never mind that the U.S. presidency is perhaps the most famous work-from-home job in the world — and formalizing his hatred of a two-inch-long fish. Trump also ordered an end to all wind permits, which my colleague Jael Holzman described as “the worst-case scenario” for the nearly $50 billion industry; paved the way to fire potentially thousands of civil servants; withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement (again); and followed through on his promise to wage all-out war on electric vehicles.
One more of the most significant implications related to climate, however, came buried in Trump’s sweeping reversal of 78 Biden-era executive orders: the overturning of Executive Order 14008, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.” Biden had signed the executive order during his first week in office and, in doing so, declared that the U.S. “places the climate crisis at the forefront of foreign policy and national security planning.”
To fully understand the consequences of Trump rescinding this order, I spoke with Erin Sikorsky, the director of the Center for Climate & Security, a nonpartisan think tank that specializes in the intersection of climate change and national security policies. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Last night, President Trump rescinded a Biden-era executive order designating climate change a foreign policy and national security priority. Why do you find that concerning?
Regardless of who’s in the White House, climate change continues apace — and continues to threaten U.S. national security and foreign policy interests. We just saw this in the past couple of weeks in Los Angeles with the wildfires there, which caused significant devastation to American lives and livelihoods, but also required the deployment of U.S. troops, threatened U.S. military bases, and interrupted other U.S. foreign policy objectives. President Biden had to cancel his last foreign visit to Europe, where he was supposed to meet with President Zelenskyy to talk about the war in Ukraine; he had to do the same thing during Hurricane Helene and cancel foreign visits that were about competition with China and the war in Ukraine. By sending the message that the U.S. administration is taking a step back from climate as a security issue, it creates a blind spot for the U.S. and creates risks.
When speaking to the press last night, Trump said his No. 1 foreign policy goal is keeping America safe. In your experience, how does climate change fit into that picture?
Keeping America safe means continuing to project military power and stand up to adversaries and competitors — and climate change is shaping all of that. It affects our military operations and our ability to deploy. It also affects Chinese national interests and the threat that China poses.
Our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, which are key to our military strategies for countering China in that region, are all threatened by climate change. Their airports, their economies, their military bases and structures, and the U.S. military facilities that are hosted in those places — they’re all threatened. If you’re not going to focus on that, or you’re not going to address it, then you’re creating a weakness. China’s overarching national security strategy includes environmental and ecological security. It is thinking about how climate affects its strategies.
In other words, our adversaries are acting on this, even if we’re not?
Exactly. And that’s the thing with stepping back from the Paris Agreement, as well: It creates a vacuum of leadership that China is more than happy to step into.
Would you expect the U.S. intelligence community or the Department of Defense to continue to act on climate change as it relates to foreign policy, just in less overt ways? Or do moves like this by the new administration hamstring those efforts?
The Department of Defense’s mission is still to be able to fight and win wars and to preserve its installations and operations. I expect that efforts to invest in resilience and adaptation will continue. There’s been bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for about a decade now to make sure that these issues are taken seriously. When Hurricane Michael decimated Tyndall Air Force Base on the Gulf Coast a few years ago, it was under the last Trump administration that they deployed money to rebuild that base. So I think that will continue.
The same will be true for the U.S. intelligence community, which remains independent from policy. It’s not the State Department, where you have to implement the president’s policies — you’re supposed to warn of risks. Your job is to give the president a decision advantage and warn of threats to the U.S., which means calling it like you see it.
Is there any particular region or conflict that could suffer from politicizing climate change in the coming years?
In Europe in the past year, Poland faced the worst floods in its history and had to deploy thousands of troops to manage those risks.
NATO has been a real leader in this space, partly because of the Arctic and the changes and challenges we see there. And so if the U.S. steps back, other leaders will continue to step forward. We’ve already seen that a bit from some European leader statements. Still, we risk U.S. resilience and dominance in the Arctic if we do not understand how climate affects our ability to operate there.
Speaking of national security in the Arctic, what do you make of the whole Greenland situation?
If the real concern is about U.S. security in the Arctic, there are a lot of other policies that the U.S. can pursue. I don’t think expanding our territory and threatening the purchase of other sovereign nations is the right way to go.
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The Senate’s reconciliation bill essentially repeals the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, abolishing fines for automakers that sell too many gas guzzlers.
A new provision in the Senate reconciliation bill would neuter the country’s fuel efficiency standards for automakers, gutting one of the federal government’s longest-running programs to manage gasoline prices and air pollution.
The new provision — which was released on Thursday by the Senate Commerce Committee — would essentially strip the government of its ability to enforce the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, or CAFE standards.
The CAFE rules are the government’s main program to improve the fuel economy of new cars and light-duty trucks sold in the United States. Over the past 20 years, the rules have helped push the fuel efficiency of new vehicles to record highs even as consumers have adopted crossovers and SUVs en masse.
But the Republican reconciliation bill would essentially end the program as a practical concern for automakers. It would set all fines issued under the program to zero, stripping the government of its ability to punish automakers that sell too many polluting vehicles.
“It would essentially eviscerate the standard without actually doing so directly,” Ann Carlson, a UCLA law professor who led the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2022 to 2023, told me.
“It says that, ‘We have standards here, but we don’t care if you comply or not. If you don’t comply, we’re not going to hold you responsible,’” she said.
Representatives for the Senate Commerce Committee did not respond to an immediate request for comment. A talking points memo released by the committee on Thursday said that the new bill would “[bring] down automobile prices modestly by eliminating CAFE penalties on automakers that design cars to conform to the wishes of D.C. bureaucrats rather than consumers.”
Since 1975, Congress has required the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (pronounced NIT-suh) to set annual fuel efficiency standards for new cars and light trucks sold in the United States. The rules generally require new vehicles sold nationwide to get a little more fuel efficient, on average, every year.
The rules have remained in effect — with varying levels of stringency — for 50 years, although they have generally encouraged automakers to get more efficient since Congress strengthened the law on a bipartisan basis in 2007.
In model-year 2023, the most recent period for which data is available, new cars and light trucks achieved a real-world fuel economy of 27.1 miles per gallon, an all-time high. The vehicle fleet was set to hit another record high in 2024, according to last year’s report.
Opponents of the fuel economy rules argue that the regulations increase the sticker price of new cars and trucks and push automakers to build less profitable vehicles. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that published Project 2025, has called the rules a “backdoor EV mandate.”
The rules’ supporters say that the standards are necessary because consumers don’t take fuel costs — or the environmental or public health costs of air pollution — into account when buying a vehicle. They say the rules keep gasoline prices low for all Americans by encouraging fuel efficiency across the board.
The strict Biden-era rules were projected to save consumers $23 billion in gasoline costs, according to an agency analysis. The American Lung Association said that the rules would prevent more than 2 million pediatric asthma attacks and save hundreds of infant lives by 2050.
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has targeted the fuel economy rules as part of a wide-ranging effort to roll back Biden-era energy policy. On January 28, as his first official act, Duffy ordered NHTSA to retroactively weaken the rules for all cars and light trucks sold after model-year 2022.
On Friday, Duffy separately issued a legal opinion that would restrict NHTSA’s ability to include electric vehicles in its real-world estimates of the country’s fuel economy rules. The opinion sets up the next round of CAFE rules to be considerably weaker than existing law.
But the new Republican reconciliation bill, if adopted, would render those rules moot.
Under current law, automakers must pay a fine when the average fuel economy of the vehicles they sell exceeds the fuel economy standard set for that year. Automakers can avoid paying that penalty by buying “credits” from other car companies that have done better than the rules require.
The fine’s size is set by a formula written into the law. That calculation includes the number of cars sold above the fuel-economy threshold, how much those cars exceeded it, and a $5 multiplier. The GOP tax bill rewrites the law to set the multiplier to zero dollars.
In essence, no matter how much an automaker exceeds the fuel economy rules, the GOP reconciliation bill will now multiply their fine by zero.
The original CAFE law contains a second formula allowing the government to set even higher penalties if doing so would achieve “substantial energy conservation.” The new reconciliation bill sets the multiplier in this formula, too, to zero dollars.
The CAFE law’s penalties can be significant. The automaker Stellantis, which owns Fiat and Chrysler, recently paid more than $426 million in penalties for cars sold from model year 2018 to 2020. Last year, General Motors paid a $38 million fine for light trucks sold in model year 2020.
The CAFE provision in the GOP mega-bill seems designed to skirt past the Byrd rule, a Senate rule that policies in reconciliation bills must affect revenue, spending, or generally have more than a “merely incidental” effect on the federal budget.
But Carlson, the former NHTSA acting administrator, doubted whether the provision should really survive a Byrd bath.
Zeroing out the fines is “not really about revenue,” she said, but about compliance with the law. “This is a way to try to couch repeal of CAFE in revenue terms instead of doing it outright.”
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nassau County, New York – Opponents of Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project are now suing to stop construction after the Trump administration quietly lifted its stop-work order.
2. Somerset County, Maryland – A referendum campaign in rural Maryland seeks to restrict solar development on farmland.
3. Tazewell County, Virginia – An Energix solar project is still in the works in this rural county bordering West Virginia, despite a restrictive ordinance.
4. Allan County, Indiana – This county, which includes portions of Fort Wayne, will be holding a hearing next week on changing its current solar zoning rules.
5. Madison County, Indiana – Elsewhere in Indiana, Invenergy has abandoned the Lone Oak solar project amidst fervent opposition and mounting legal hurdles.
6. Adair County, Missouri – This county may soon be home to the largest solar farm in Missouri and is in talks for another project, despite having a high opposition intensity index in the Heatmap Pro database.
7. Newtown County, Arkansas – A fifth county in Arkansas has now banned wind projects.
8. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – A data center fight is gaining steam as activists on the ground push to block the center on grounds it would result in new renewable energy projects.
9. Bell County, Texas – Fox News is back in our newsletter, this time for platforming the campaign against solar on land suitable for agriculture.
10. Monterey County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire story continues to develop, as PG&E struggles to restart the remaining battery storage facility remaining on site.
A conversation with Biao Gong of Morningstar
This week’s conversation is with Biao Gong, an analyst with Morningstar who this week published an analysis looking at the credit risks associated with offshore wind projects. Obviously I wanted to talk to him about the situation in the U.S., whether it’s still a place investors consider open for business, and if our country’s actions impact the behavior of others.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
What led you to write this analysis?
What prompted me was our experience in assigning [private] ratings to offshore wind projects in Europe and wanted to figure out what was different [for rating] with onshore and offshore wind. It was the result of our recent work, which is private, but we’ve seen the trend – a lot of the big players in the offshore wind space are kind of trying to partner up with private equity firms to sell their interests, their operating offshore wind assets. But to raise that they’ll need credit ratings and we’ve seen those transactions. This is a growing area in Europe, because Europe has to rely on offshore wind to achieve its climate goals and secure their energy independence.
The report goes through risks in many ways, including challenging conditions for construction. Tell me about the challenges that offshore wind faces specifically as an investment risk.
The principle behind offshore wind is so different than onshore wind. You’re converting wind energy to electricity but obviously there are a bunch of areas where we believe it is riskier. That doesn’t mean you can’t fund those projects but you need additional mitigants.
This includes construction risk. It can take three to five years to complete an offshore wind project. The marine condition, the climate condition, you can’t do that [work] throughout the year and you need specialized vehicles, helicopters, crews that are so labor intensive. That’s versus onshore, which is pre-fabricated where you have a foundation and assemble it. Once you have an idea of the geotechnical conditions, the risk is just less.
There’s also the permitting process, which can be very challenging. How do you not interrupt the marine ecosystem? That’s something the regulators pay attention to. It’s definitely more than an onshore project, which means you need other mitigants for the lender to feel comfortable.
With respect to the permitting risk, how much of that is the risk of opposition from vacation towns, environmentalists, fisheries?
To be honest, we usually come in after all the critical permitting is in place, before money is given by a lender, but I also think that on the government’s side, in Europe at least, they probably have to encourage the development. And to put out an auction for an area you can build an offshore wind project, they must’ve gone through their own assessment, right? They can’t put out something that they also think may hurt an ecosystem, but that’s my speculation.
A country that did examine the impacts and offer lots of ocean floor for offshore is the U.S. What’s your take on offshore wind development in our country?
Once again, because we’re a rating agency, we don’t have much insight into early stage projects. But with that, our view is pretty gloomy. It’s like, if you haven’t started a project in the U.S., no one is going to buy it. There’s a bunch of projects already under construction, and there was the Empire Wind stop order that was lifted. I think that’s positive, but only to a degree, right? It just means this project under construction can probably go ahead. Those things will go ahead and have really strong developers with strong balance sheets. But they’re going to face additional headwinds, too, because of tariffs – that’s a different story.
We don’t see anything else going ahead.
Does the U.S. behaving this way impact the view you have for offshore wind in other countries, or is this an isolated thing?
It’s very isolated. Europe is just going full-steam ahead because the advantage here is you can build a wind farm that provides 2 or 3 gigawatts – that’s just massive. China, too. The U.S. is very different – and not just offshore. The entire renewables sector. We could revisit the U.S. four or five years from today, but [the U.S.] is going to be pretty difficult for the renewables sector.