The NPR Politics Podcast - Year In Review: Trump’s Environmental Policy

Episode Date: December 25, 2025

As we approach 2026, the NPR Politics Podcast is taking a look back at the year that was in different political areas. Today, we look at how America’s stance on environmental policy has shifted under the second Trump administration and what the potential impacts could be.This episode: voting correspondent Ashley Lopez, senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, climate correspondent Michael Copley, and automotive and energy correspondent Camila Domonoske.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And joining us today is Michael Copley, who covers climate for NPR. Good to have you with us, Michael. Hey, thanks for having me. And today on the show, we're taking a look at what steps the Trump administration has been taking, or rather not taking, towards tackling climate change, which is caused by mainly burning fossil fuels like oil and coal. But first, let's hear what the president has to say this year. about renewable energy. We're getting rid of the falsely named renewables. Fossil fuels, what works. The windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously. Coal is back with this country, too, by the way. You know, there's a reason they use it because it's good.

You know, it used to be global cooling. If you look back, it's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Wow, all over the place. Well, I do want a table set a little bit with both you, Tam, and Michael. Where did America stand on climate change before Trump came back into office? And how does this compare to like the previous administration? Yeah. So as you heard, President Trump has basically a vendetta against green energy.

He called the Green New Deal, the Green New Slam, even though the Green New Deal never actually did get passed by Congress or signed into law. But what was signed into law was the Inflation Reduction Act. That was one of President Biden's big initiatives. And despite the name, it actually included investments in a lot of things aimed at climate change, aimed at making green energy more affordable and readily available, aimed at promoting electric vehicles. When I was covering President Biden, he went on this trip out west and toured a facility that used to make those red cups that you see at keg parties, or we used to see at keg parties. or we used to see at Keg Parties. And then they were transitioning to make wind turbines. And he was talking about addressing climate change while also creating jobs.

However, President Trump won and U.S. policy took a complete 180. Yeah. So what we saw this summer was President Trump signing the one big beautiful bill. And what that did was when after a lot of. of the policies that we'd seen enacted under from President Biden. Under the Big Beautiful Bill, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are expected to fall by about 25% by 2035 compared to 2005 levels. That's not much of a change from where the country is now last year. Emissions were about 20% below 2005 levels.

When we look back to Biden-era policies, U.S. emissions were expected to fall by about 40% by 2035. So a big difference there. Well, I do want to dig in a little bit more into the tax and spending bill that was signed into law this summer. What did the legislation undo and what is it expected to impact? Yeah, so one of the big things that we've been following is it ends tax credits for wind and solar projects. That is not a death knell for the industry. Projects are still expected to be competitive. But without those federal incentives, the cost of wind and solar projects is expected to go up.

And that's expected to contribute to higher power prices across the country. It's important to note, I think, the context, too, here where the Trump administration is at the same time using federal agencies to try to slow or stop renewables development. And so taken altogether, the action by the administration, the action in Congress with the big beautiful bill, it's really sort of expected to add up to a lot less power from renewables being added to the U.S. grid in the coming years than was previously forecast. And it's happening at a time when power demand is rising faster than it has in decades. largely because of these new data centers that are going up, and renewables are seen as critical to meeting that demand in the next few years because they can be built quickly. For now, at least, renewables are still booming despite those political challenges. Yeah. And what I will say is that President Trump and Republicans are actually, in terms of the political rhetoric, they are blaming

Biden-era policies and they are blaming renewable energy for the rising costs in power because they say it's unreliable and it's terrible, what Democrats are saying, and I think even some Republicans in states that had seen a lot of green energy come in, they're saying, we just need more energy produced. And Democrats, especially in some of these elections that we saw back in November, were arguing that Trump's policies of trying to gut green energy are actually driving up energy costs. Michael, I would be curious whether you can sort through all of the rhetoric there and help us know what's actually happening. Yeah, there was a report that came out this fall from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

that looked at sort of the confluence of factors that influence electricity prices. And I've heard the same talking points as you that largely fall along sort of partisan lines, that renewables are responsible for rising power prices. And what this report said was that wind and solar renewables on their own are not generally to blame were connected to rising prices. Now, what they did find was some states use renewable energy mandates to try to drive up adoption. Some of those kinds of policies have been found or linked to rising prices. So there is some discussion about sort of policies about supporting renewables that may be influencing prices. But the technology on its own, based on this report, is not in

itself responsible for rising prices. I do want to talk about some other policy changes. Michael, you've done some reporting on the rise of home insurance and disaster costs. Can you talk more about that? Yeah, so big picture Americans are paying a lot more for home insurance. By one count, premiums have gone up about 24% on average across the country over the past few years. In Nebraska this year, Nebraska's the most expensive state for homeowners insurance. It really comes down to hail damage that that state and really that whole part of the country is susceptible to people are paying $6,400 on average this year. And those more expensive premiums reflect the fact that disasters are getting more expensive, and that's happening for a few reasons. Climate change is fueling more extreme weather that damages and destroys property. People keep moving to vulnerable areas.

So coastal regions, vulnerable to hurricanes, forested areas prone to wildfires. And then when disasters happen, inflation has made rebuilding more expensive. So premiums are going up. That's weighing on household budgets, and it's making insurance hard to find in some cases. And so those added insurance costs are very much hitting sort of the pocketbooks of families right now. But in some of the worst hit areas, we're also seeing those higher costs seem to be weighing on home values. And that's because those higher premiums increased just sort of the overall cost of homeownership. When we're talking about politics, the politics of

climate change are pretty set and pretty partisan. But the politics of life getting more expensive are not nearly as partisan. And this is a real political problem for President Trump and Republicans, which is that stuff is expensive. The cost of living is expensive. Housing is expensive. In some states, homeowners insurance is making, owning a home almost unaffordable. In other states, energy costs are making it really, really difficult. Well, we've been talking a lot about domestic climate policy here, but I do want to pivot a little bit. Tam, Can you tell me what the president's stance on climate has been abroad? He has basically unsubscribed, I think is the best way to put it.

He pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord. The Trump administration did not attend the most recent global climate conference. This is not a priority for the Trump administration, and their policies reflect that. Yeah. And meanwhile, what we saw in sort of the latest U.N. meeting is, you know, a whole lot of other countries continue to be really worried about this. And, you know, we saw a lot of attention on there was this recent UN report that came out just before the conference a few weeks ago. And what it found was global temperatures are on track to rise by about five degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. And that's compared to sort of the mid-1800s.

That's way above the target. The world set a decade ago in the Paris Agreement to hold warming to about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit or 1.5 degrees Celsius. Beyond that level, climate impacts get much more damaging. storms, wildfires, and heat waves. Now, it's important, I think, for everyone to remember that countries can still take action to cut emissions faster than they are now to limit warming, but a lot more needs to be done. Under current policies, global emissions are set to fall by about 12% by 2035. NPR spoke to Alden Meyer.

He works at a think tank, climate think tank, called E3G. And what he says is emissions need to fall about five times faster than that to hit that temperature target. good. Well, Michael, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us. Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me. All right. It's time for a quick break. More on how Trump's climate policies might affect your wallet in a moment. And we're back. And now we're joined by NPR's Cars and Energy correspondent Kamila Domenoski. Hi, Camila. Hello, hello. So earlier in the show, we talked about how President Trump is prioritizing fossil fuels. Camila, can you tell us how this has actually played out for the oil industry? Yeah. And, you know, the president has always had kind of a contradictory stance on this, right? Because he both wants oil prices to be very low. He celebrates $2 gasoline. And he talks about drill baby drill and booming oil production. And you really can't have both of those things, right? High oil prices that consumers hate are what oil companies thrive on and what drives them to produce more. So in terms of where we actually are right now in the oil market, oil prices are quite low. You can't necessarily give Trump credit or blame for that either way, but globally, there's more oil than the world needs on the market. And so, in fact, with oil

prices where they are right now, the U.S. oil industry is not drilling baby drilling. The active rig count is actually lower now than it was a year ago, meaning oil companies are drilling fewer new wells, right? And so that's not great for the oil industry in terms of day-to-day, profits, income. They were, you know, making more money under Biden in a lot of ways. But what the oil industry has gotten from President Trump are things that support the industry long term, right? A lot of those changes that Michael was just talking about are things that directly benefit the oil industry in terms of making it harder to build renewables, things that lower the costs for oil companies, stripping away environmental regulations

that are quite expensive for them to comply with, favorable tax treatment. The president has also opened up more area to production on land and possibly even offshore and in the Gulf. Again, that doesn't help today necessarily, but companies are playing a long game here. I will also note that one of the very few climate policies that the Trump administration has maintained support for is carbon capture, which is something that a lot of oil companies support because they could really benefit from it. In fact, it could actually expand oil production. So again, these companies are playing a long game where maybe they're not feeling the immediate financial boost, but these are changes that structurally could lock in oil demand for years or decades to come. And as Camilla says, President Trump has made no secret of his desire to be very friendly to the oil and gas industry, do whatever they need to, as she said, drill baby drill.

That is his mantra. and he is, I would say, obsessed with gas prices. He talks about gas prices constantly, every day. He mostly says gas prices are lower than they actually are, but he is watching those prices. He wants them to come down. He's talking about it all the time. The idea being, you know, earlier I talked about the cost of living as a major political issue,

his view that he expresses regularly is that if gas prices are low, then people will have more money for other things. If gas prices are low, people will be happy. Yeah. And the oil industry sort of winces and ignores it every time he talks about $2 gasoline because they do not love that idea. But there's enough other things that they love that they can overlook it. And there is $2 gasoline at like a few stations around the country.

We are not there yet. Yeah. So, Tam, the White House has been making a lot of changes as well regarding electric vehicles. I mean, what can you tell us about that? The White House did move with Congress to end tax credits for electric vehicles. That was also part of the one big beautiful bill. They have revoked California's emissions rules that required car companies to make electric vehicles. One thing to know about the vehicle market is that California, for decades, has basically set the very stringent rules.

And then other states have followed or car companies have basically made. made vehicles to the California standard, and that has affected the standard nationwide. The White House is like, we don't like your standard, and we're taking away the waiver you had to allow you to do that. And then just sort of big picture, the policy has been gas good, electric vehicles. I mean, if you're into that kind of thing, I guess, is basically the White House position. And Camilla, I think that we've actually seen the industry make change. changes. We've seen what the Ford F-150 electric truck is going to be a thing of the past already. Yeah, they stopped making the all-electric lightning and there will be no more. They will come out with a plug-in hybrid version, so it'll have a gas tank. And this is in part, you know, demand has been slower than expected for these vehicles. But the Trump administration's really dramatic policy change here is also playing a role, right? They're taking away these incentives like the tax credit. They're also taking away requirements like emissions rules and fuel economy rules that pushed companies to make these. Those are.

in the process of being rolled back, but they actually already got rid of the penalties. This was part of that one big, beautiful bill act. They got rid of the penalties for not complying with fuel economy rules. So companies are building more big gas-guzzling trucks because they can. The industry is also really watching what's happening with chargers, where the federal government has, under Trump, frozen spending that Congress had allocated for chargers. And that's something that has prompted several lawsuits from states. Obviously, charger availability is a huge factor for people who are thinking about EVs. Possibly, you know, I've heard an argument that that's more important than the tax credits are in terms of changes in federal policy on this. But it's been

another complete 180 from this administration. Yeah. So the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed reversing its endangerment finding that has basically been the basis of federal climate regulations for over a decade now. Although the Supreme Court has already ruled that greenhouse gas emissions are covered by federal law, Tam, what is the White House's argument for this proposal? The White House argument is that the EPA doesn't have that authority to regulate greenhouse gases and that there's no reason for them to be regulated at all. This is still in the proposal phase, which means that it hasn't been finalized yet. But if it were to be finalized, that would mean that all EPA standards based on fighting climate change would be void. So, Camila, if this proposal were finalized, how could that affect the auto industry?

What would like the real world implications of this be? Yeah, you know, again, we are already seeing changes to what companies are doing while these changes are still underway, right? They have to plan years ahead and they're sort of reading the tea leaves that under the Trump administration, they're not going to have to make these electric vehicles. But at the same time, the auto industry isn't going to it. It really can't pull back completely from electric vehicles and from hybrids, things that these regulations encouraged, right? And partly that's because of market demand. There are people who really want to buy EVs who like having fuel-efficient cleaner cars, right? And then they also are global companies.

They sell vehicles globally. The rest of the world is still significantly more interested in cleaner vehicles. And Chinese electric vehicles are kicking the Western automakers' butts right now globally. So they have to bring something to compete with that. And one more point is they know that the policies could change again. Right? There has been a just series of whiplash in terms of the federal government's position on fuel economy standards and these emission standards. Every new president, there's a completely different set of rules. And so they sort of have to be prepared for multiple futures. And if gas prices were to go up for some reason and your backup at $5 gallon gas, all of a sudden, a lot more people want EVs. Demand will be there for EVs. Yep. We've been talking a lot about consumer prices. I am curious how all this affects the prices of cars for folks.

Yeah, I mean, it's complicated. So certainly the Trump administration argues that easing these regulations will make cars cheaper. It could, in some cases, make a specific car cheaper, not to have to try to make it more fuel efficient. But that's canceled out by the fact that the person who buys that car will need to buy more gasoline. Also, to the extent that these policies encourage very large trucks to be sold, those are expensive vehicles, right? Meanwhile, gasoline is cheap right now. Again, no matter who is president. I say this over and over again. The president doesn't actually set gasoline prices. So hard to attribute that to Trump policies directly, but that's certainly helping drivers right now. And then, you know, the Trump administration has also established these tariffs, which car companies have mostly eaten the cost of, which is interesting, but they've increased prices a little bit. On the other direction, there's this interest deduction for car purchases that could help middle class car buyers a bit. Lower interest rates would help. a lot. So there's a lot of factors. It's messy. I do think nobody should hold their breath expecting

car prices to plunge, right? That would be extremely surprising. Yeah, Camilla, you've also done some reporting on increasing car insurance rates. Like, what's happening there? Why are they costing more? Yeah, you know, just like those home insurance rates that Michael was talking about, it's that the insurers are having to pay more. Costs went up for parts, for replacement cars, for repairs, medical bills went up. Crashes also got worse. during the pandemic because when roads emptied out, people drove faster and the more serious crashes. Anyway, this all has to get passed along to the rate payer, and the rates for car insurance have gone up extraordinarily. And what this means for people, we are seeing more people driving without

car insurance, which is illegal in almost every state and risky in multiple ways. More people are underinsured on their cars, meaning if they got in a catastrophic accident, they'd be in a really tough spot with the payout not being able to cover the cost of a car. More people are giving things up to afford their car insurance. You know, I will just note that every expert who I've talked about this says shop around for car insurance. Don't just assume that you have the best rate. And if you're in the market for a new car, price out the insurance before you decide because it is such a significant part of the cost of car ownership for folks right now. Wow. All right. Well, let's leave it there for today. It was great chatting with you, Camila. Oh, thank you. It was a

pleasure. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.