| By Ari Natter and Jennifer A Dlouhy President-elect Donald Trump is poised to invoke emergency powers as part of his plan to unleash domestic energy production while seeking to reverse President Joe Biden's actions to combat climate change, according to people familiar with the matter. The move is set to be among an array of actions Trump will take — starting hours after he's sworn in on Monday — to deliver on campaign promises to boost domestic energy output. The president-elect is prepared to compel policy shifts that would enable new oil and gas development on federal lands, while directing a rollback of Biden-era climate regulations, said the people who asked not be named due to the confidentiality of the information. While many of the executive actions will simply kick off a lengthy regulatory process, they're set to touch the full spectrum of the US energy industry, from oil fields to car dealerships. They also underscore Trump's determination to reorient federal government policy behind oil and gas production, a sharp pivot from Biden's efforts to curb fossil fuels. Trump is widely expected use executive authority to lift a moratorium on new US licenses to export liquefied natural gas, making good on a campaign pledge to rescind the measure enacted by Biden and order his administration to roll back federal incentives for electric vehicles. He's also expected to trigger a retreat from a set of stringent government regulations covering vehicle pollution and fuel economy that together form what he has called an "EV mandate." Other planned first-day actions include ordering a reversal of Biden's decision to withdraw some 625 million acres of US waters from being available for oil and gas leasing. Read the full story on Bloomberg.com. Just how much can Trump hamper US climate progress? | By Zahra Hirji As Donald Trump begins another term as US president, environmentalists are dreading the effects of his vows to "drill, baby, drill," yank the US out of the Paris Agreement, end tax credits for electric vehicles and more.  Trump speaks during a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, on March 2, 2024. Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg Already it's expected President-elect Trump will invoke emergency powers on Monday to unleash domestic energy production, while seeking to reverse President Joe Biden's actions to combat climate change, according to people familiar with the matter. These moves, along with others to expand oil and gas development, would help slow US progress on reining in greenhouse gas emissions. Yet there are clear indicators that a climate skeptic in the White House can't completely undo the nation's roughly two-decades-long decline in emissions. Whatever Trump does, "it's not going to change this fundamental trend," says Billy Pizer, president and CEO of the environment-focused research nonprofit Resources for the Future. Still, Trump doesn't have to reverse or even pause US emissions declines to tip the scales towards more catastrophic levels of warming. At a time when the entire world, not just the US, is already behind on tackling climate change, any further slowdown guarantees more warming, meaning more devastating disasters. To best understand where US emissions stand as Trump takes office again, and where they could go over the next four, 10 or 20 years, it's helpful to first look at the past. Total gross US emissions peaked in 2007 and have been largely declining ever since. But two years in particular "really stand out" — 2009 and 2020, says Catherine Wolfram, an applied economics professor at MIT Sloan School of Management who briefly served as deputy assistant secretary for climate and energy economics in Biden's Treasury Department. Those two years were both marked by economic recessions. Both times, US emissions dipped dramatically, showing how "energy and economic growth are so intimately intertwined," Wolfram explains. Looking at the longer-term trend, there's one primary driver behind the recent declines: the shift away from coal in the power sector. The fracking revolution that started in the mid-2000s led to the rise of cheap natural gas, says Ben King, associate director of Rhodium Group's energy and climate practice, causing gas to increasingly displace the more carbon-intensive coal as an electricity source. At the same time, there was also "increasing availability of renewable resources like wind, solar and batteries," King says. On top of further reductions in coal, steep declines in the power sector will increasingly come from renewables out-competing gas, but it will be tough for clean power sources to best gas without policy measures when gas is so cheap. That's why the Biden administration took several steps to encourage the buildout of renewables, including approving 11 offshore wind projects that would collectively generate more than 19 gigawatts. This is one area where Trump could have a chilling impact. He does not like wind, and he's reportedly considering temporarily halting new offshore wind projects. Analysts at BloombergNEF don't see this as an idle threat, cutting their US offshore wind projections for 2024 to 2035 by 29%. Another factor complicating what may happen with power sector emissions under Trump is the rising demand for electricity, driven in part by hotter summers and the rapid growth of AI and data centers. Apart from the power sector, emissions for all the other major sectors — transportation, buildings, industry — have largely "been idling along, with little variations here and there," says King. Some of the big climate moves under the Biden administration were designed to start changing this, especially in the transportation sector, like new vehicle pollution standards and the consumer incentives for EVs in the Inflation Reduction Act. Such efforts matter because as US power sector emissions have declined, the transportation sector became the nation's top source of emissions. But the impacts of these policies are only starting to be realized, just as Trump is poised to unravel them. BloombergNEF cut its projections for the EV share of new passenger vehicle sales in 2030 from almost 50%, before Trump won the election, down to 33%. Consequently, experts are pessimistic about what the next four years may bring. While it's unclear exactly how much of Biden's climate legacy will be undone, Pizer says, there's little doubt that climate policies won't advance or get stronger. "Time is being lost," he says. Read the full version of this story on Bloomberg.com. | 
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