The Chilling Effect on U.S. Climate Policy
Recent policies spell disaster for the future of the scientific enterprise, climate investment, and trust in the federal government.
🌎 You’re On The Climate Beat, a brief overview of energy policy and environmental governance.
☀️ Today is Thursday, April 17th, 2025. Yesterday’s global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was 430.07 parts per million, up from 424.92 ppm one year ago.
Here’s the most recent data.
This article is 1,122 words — a four-minute read.
🧭 Reversing Trends in U.S. Science Policy
Last month, a letter signed by 1,900 scientists — all members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine — announced that “the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.” The administration, in its first few months of office, has successfully dismantled parts of the federal government’s globally-cherished scientific enterprise.
If our country’s research enterprise is dismantled, we will lose our scientific edge. Other countries will lead the development of novel disease treatments, clean energy sources, and the new technologies of the future. Their populations will be healthier, and their economies will surpass us in business, defense, intelligence gathering, and monitoring our planet’s health. The damage to our nation’s scientific enterprise could take decades to reverse.
The National Institutes of Health is expecting to sunset their work on the health effects of climate change. The National Science Foundation has reduced its support for research projects by half. The Department of Defense, which has documented the risks and impacts of climate change in great detail for decades, will eliminate programs related to the study of the climate.
Preliminary copies of the administration’s spending plans suggest that NASA’s science budget next year would be cut in half and NOAA’s budget would be cut by more than a fourth — with the budget for climate modeling and hurricane forecasting cut by 74%. This comes as the U.S. is about to experience potentially the worst hurricane season yet.
The proposal would also cancel the next generation of Earth-observing satellites necessary for climate forecasting and monitoring aerosols and sea-level rise.
The proposed cuts aren’t final, given Congress’s role in passing the proposed budget sometime later this year — but given the recent dismantling of federal programs, the layoffs of thousands of federal workers, the administration’s allies in Congress married to the White House’s agenda, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility.
🏛️ A Disruption in U.S. Statecraft
On inauguration day, the U.S. president signed the following executive orders:
Withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Agreement (for the second time),
Maximize the development of oil drilling and pipeline infrastructure in Alaska,
Shutter government programs protecting vulnerable communities from pollution,
Suspend permit approvals of all new wind farms across the country,
and several others canceling his predecessor’s executive orders related to climate change mitigation efforts. The administration has halted federal grants for battery factories, electric vehicles, solar panel installation, pollution cleanup, biofuel development, and other congressionally authorized programs. Congressional Republicans are also working to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate and energy-related investment in U.S. history.
This not only represents a massive change in climate and energy policy but also a disruption in the faith of federal governance by industry, nonprofits, and states. The Inflation Reduction Act (2022) and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (2021) provide tens of billions of dollars in grants to institutions that make investments in infrastructure, whose costs incurred were promised to be reimbursed by the government. The administration has frozen these grants, potentially making the federal government in breach of contract. Two federal judges have ordered that the government unfreeze money for these programs, but some agencies are still withholding funds, resulting in projects being delayed, workers furloughed (and potentially laid off), and uncertainty in the confidence that comes with a bill that has passed both houses of Congress and signed by the president.
Stiffing U.S. companies and workers on legally-binding obligations lawfully allocated by Congress puts future infrastructure projects at risk as producers weigh the risk that the executive branch (in this or future administrations) could alter or cancel incentives. This comes as the current administration seeks to re-industrialize the United States economy by establishing manufacturing facilities domestically, a large task at hand now that trust has been shaken.1
“Bringing a lot of this manufacturing back to the United States would be tricky even in the best case. You need massive amounts of political determination and policy clarity to pull this off. And when that’s lacking, things start to get very messy.”
📝 Permitting Reversal Spooks Investment in Wind Energy
The previous administration had approved eleven offshore wind farms off the coast of New England. Five have since begun construction. Plans to build additional wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean are currently — forgive the expression — dead in the water. This week, the Department of the Interior ordered that Empire Wind, off the coast of New York, suspend all construction activities, despite being a fully permitted project already employing 1,500 people.
“These political reversals are bad policy, whether applied to pipelines or wind farms... Doubling back to reconsider permits after projects are under construction sends a chilling signal to all energy investment.”
The Interior secretary described the reason for the stop work order as requiring further review of the project approvals, claiming that the previous administration rushed the approval process without sufficient analysis. The project did go through an extensive environmental impact study, transparently documented and communicated to the public.
Under normal circumstances, a lawsuit that legally identifies the precise issue in the permitting process can halt work on infrastructure projects. The decision by the Interior is unprecedented, and the order to halt construction was made without identifying the specific problem in the project’s permitting history.
“Stopping work on the fully federally permitted Empire Wind 1 offshore project should send chills across all industries investing in and holding contracts with the United States Government. Preventing a permitted and financed energy project from moving forward sends a loud and clear message to all businesses – beyond those in the offshore wind industry – that their investment in the U.S. is not safe.”
Years ago, offshore wind projects seemed like the U.S.’s strongest contender in building renewable energy infrastructure, with developers proposing to spend a collective tens of billions of dollars to dot either coast with hundreds of wind turbines. Supply chain disruptions, rising interest rates, and inflation led to skyrocketing costs and massive delays, reducing projections to just a couple dozen turbines. (Europe has over six thousand, by the way). The cost of doing business, combined with a lack of federal investment and the yanking of permits, will spell the death of the U.S.’s fledgling offshore wind industry (and likely, those onshore as well).
“No one with any kind of an energy project can rely on the permits that have been issued if this administration, for whatever reason, legally or illegally, rightly or wrongly, decides that they want to call into question permits that have already been issued,” said Allan Marks, senior fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Sustainable Investment. “That should scare any investor in any energy project, not just offshore.”
🤷♂️ What’s Next?
The administration’s stated aims are to “drill, baby, drill” and “bring back manufacturing to America.” A scientific enterprise in decline, in general — a pivot away from climate investment, in particular — and the degradation of trust in federal government commitments puts the U.S. in a position where it may not be possible to re-industrialize nor decarbonize.
In 2024, the world passed a key threshold. It was the first year where global temperatures averaged beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. The 2015 Paris Agreement, signed by nearly every country on Earth, (including the United States — twice removed) sought to limit carbon emissions to stop short of this threshold. We’ve now raced past the marker at breakneck speed, with no signs of stopping.
Related: “Manufacturing jobs are never coming back” by Dylan Matthews.