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 US and China and trade talks in Stockholm a waiting for US take July twenty nights, late summer, usually a sleepy time for news.
I think six consecutive days of old time highs for the US anquity market as fenche.
There are a lot of headlines to sift through that day, but there's one in particular that got climate journalists perking up.
EPA Administrator Lee Zelden 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 de regulatory action in the history of the United States.
That's Lee Zelden, the EPA administrator, proposing to revoke the Dangerment Finding, a rule that has formed the bedrock of environmental regulation in the US since two thousand and nine.
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.
That's my colleague Bloomberg reporter Zara Hirg.
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.
Zara and Eric say the EPA's proposal to reverse the finding was a huge deal. The agency claimed the rollback could save more than fifty four billion dollars in 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. Zara says it's part of a broader attack on the scientific establishment.
The Union of Concerned Scientists did itally, and they looked at anti science actions total and they found around or at least four hundred 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.
To conclude everything from firing of scientists putting them on administrative leave, as well as canceling programs or grants, or taking down information from the web or reconsidering policies.
The 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 Zara 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 Zelden or Energy Secretary Chris Wright, just a very clear condemnation in questioning of climate science and people that work in climate.
And 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 and 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 and estimated two point eight trillion dollars 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, twenty two billion dollars 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.
I'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 you could have for decades to come. Zarahirjee is a climate reporter for Bloomberg. She's been closely tracking the Trump administration 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, NOAH, the CDC, NASA, the DOI, and the DOE. They all handle aspects of the way the US anticipates, mitigates, tracks, and response to climate change in natural disasters at a time when climate related catastrophes are getting more intense and more expensive to deal with.
To 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 Roston.
And in December, two or three months after the storm, the state of North Carolina put the damage estimate like fifty nine billion dollars. So, like, that's fifty nine billion dollars. Is 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 Zelden, the former New York congressman's history includes voting against environmental legislation, and Zara says, perhaps unsurprisingly, Zelden 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 Zelden's lead, they're really pushing quite openly a deregulatory approach.
In March, Zelden announced dozens of rollbacks to regulation.
Agency is initiating thirty one 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.
Then in July, Zelden announced that the EPA would also try to reverse the landmark endangerment finding, which we talked about earlier. Zelden and the EPA haven't officially revoked the rule, but Zara says the fact that it's even on the table says a lot about Zelden'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, and like many other federal agencies, they're bleeding staff.
Over two thousand 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 exists today, but the people looking for what is the next thing that we need to be worried about, and 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. Then they can provide funding, and we've already started to see that actual disaster aid funding has been less than in previous years when they have simply stopped providing hazard mitigation, something that used to just be an automatic, Yes, extra money to help states.
Then there are the funding and staff and cuts that affect the scientists who help predict disasters before they happen, the scientists at NOAH.
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. Now, 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 only want to call it mainstream. It's just of the science.
Their report was published in July, and it's said global warming projections are exaggerated, that some policies to reduce emissions may do more harm than good, and.
Was immediately sort of swarmed by enormous amounts of scientific scrutiny.
In early September, a group of eighty five scientists published a four hundred page rebuttal to the DOE report, writing that the scientists behind it appeared 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, and Zara 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 slash and climate funding and how reversing course on green investments could undermine the US on the global stage. Seing 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 healthcare?
Climate change. There's obviously a ton of ways to talk about it, but an important way is that souped and nuts, it's an economic problem.
Climate reporter Eric Roston 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.
Halting 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 earnings calls.
Chipotle and Marriott and Travelers have all cited the NCAA 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.
People 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 Zarahirji 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.
Offering comments about the 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 and 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 fifty different rules to deal with rather than
when they just had one federal environment. And I think, especially when you're hearing from the world of clean energy, clean energy tech, solar companies, wing 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 it 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.
If the US 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 in China provides the world with probably you know, it's insane, like fifty to eighty 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 us spending
more money in science than just about anybody else. It's not clear who was going to step forward and replenish that in 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 and 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.
And while so much of the US government's climate science work has been reversed in just a matter of months, Zara 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 other people will step up. And the reality is from me talking to local emergency managers, is if the federal governments 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. But 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.
This 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 dot Com. Subscribe today at Bloomberg dot com Slashed podcast offer. If you liked 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