Regulations have often been reversed as a direct response to petitions from oil, coal and gas companies and other industry groups, which have enjoyed a much closer relationship with key figures in the Trump administration than under President Barack Obama.
Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has frequently met with industry executives and lobbyists. (As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Mr. Pruitt sued the agency he now oversees more than a dozen times to try to block Obama-era rules.) The E.P.A. has been involved in nearly one-third of the policy reversals identified by The Times.
Here are the details for each policy targeted by the administration so far — including who lobbied to get the regulations changed. Are there rules we missed? Email climateteam@nytimes.com
Weather is not climate. Weather refers to day-to-day conditions; climate is about long-term trends. And the long-term trends show a planet that is warming, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. Even with occasional Arctic blasts of bitter cold, which we’ve seen in much of the United States in recent years, 2017 had the second-highest surface temperatures ever recorded, surpassed only by 2016 — which was the third “hottest year” in a row. The trends are clear, even if you can make a snowball in March in Central Park.
]]>Since taking office last year, President Trump has made eliminating federal regulations a priority. His administration — with help from Republicans in Congress — has often targeted environmental rules it sees as overly burdensome to the fossil fuel industry, including major Obama-era policies aimed at fighting climate change.
To date, the Trump administration has sought to reverse more than 60 environmental rules, according to a New York Times analysis, based on research from Harvard Law School’s Environmental Regulation Rollback Tracker, Columbia Law School’s Climate Tracker and other sources.
WASHINGTON — If the world wants to avoid drastic global warming this century, we’ll need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions sharply in the years ahead.
For now, however, we’re still moving in the opposite direction: Carbon dioxide emissions from the use of coal, oil and natural gas increased 1.4 percent globally in 2017 after holding steady for the previous three years, the International Energy Agency reported on Thursday. That’s the equivalent of adding 170 million new cars to the road worldwide.
The energy agency, which called the findings “a strong warning for global efforts to combat climate change,” detailed several big reasons CO₂ emissions are increasing again. Here’s a look at the main ones:
Roughly two-thirds of last year’s emissions increase came from Asia, where fast-growing countries like China, India and Indonesia continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels as they lift themselves out of poverty.
China, which is responsible for one-quarter of the world’s industrial greenhouse gases, saw its emissions rise 1.7 percent in 2017, fueled by rapid economic growth and an increase in oil and natural gas use. The rest of developing Asia, including India and Indonesia, saw their overall emissions increase 3 percent.
Renewable energy — including wind, solar and hydropower — was the fastest-growing energy source worldwide in 2017. China alone installed as many solar panels last year as the entire solar capacity of France and Germany combined. And the prices for renewable technologies keep falling.
The catch? Last year’s “unprecedented” growth in renewables, the I.E.A. said, satisfied only about one-quarter of the increase in global energy demand as the world’s economy boomed. Fossil fuels supplied the rest. “The overall share of fossil fuels in global energy demand in 2017 remained at 81 percent,” the agency’s report said, “a level that has remained stable for more than three decades despite strong growth in renewables.”
If the world wants to cut emissions quickly and meet the climate goals laid out in the Paris Agreement, the I.E.A. said, clean energy will need to grow about five times as fast each year between now and 2040 as it did last year
Over the past few years, coal demand has plummeted around the world as countries like the United States and China shift away from the most carbon-intensive of all fossil fuels. China, for instance, has been pushing to phase out coal use in residential heating in order to clean up the severe air pollution that is choking its cities.Demand for oil rose 1.6 percent last year, much faster than the average annual pace over the previous decade. As oil prices have declined, more people in the United States and Europe are buying larger S.U.V.s, pushing up transportation emissions further.