Soon after he began his second term, President Trump — who has referred to global warming as “a make-believe problem” and asked oil executives to contribute $1 billion to his 2024 campaign — issued executive orders expanding coal mining and offshore drilling of oil, blocking enforcement of state and local laws restricting carbon emissions and slashing the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In July, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin moved to rescind the agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding” that pollutants from burning fossil fuels constitute a threat to public health. Officials indicated that the decision was based in part on a report of five climate contrarians commissioned by the Department of Energy. Committed to ending regulations on automobile emissions, reducing limits on power plant emissions and releases of carbon dioxide and methane, Zeldin denounced “people, who in the name of climate change, are willing to bankrupt the country ... and basically regulate out of existence a lot of segments of our economy.”

The Interior Department is now conducting “consultations” that

© The Hill