'Not as easy': Trump faces significant obstacles in dismantling these Biden policies

17 January

President Joe Biden may be leaving the White House in a matter of days, but his environmental legacy may stick around for much longer than his successor would like.

The Washington Post reported Friday that President-elect Donald Trump's stated goal of rolling back Biden's climate and environmental policies could prove difficult over the next four years. This includes more than a hundred new regulations pertaining to oil drilling, air pollution, chemical safety and land conservation, among others. The incoming president has signaled that overhauling Biden's environmental agenda is a top priority.

"I will sign Day One orders to end all Biden restrictions on energy production, terminate his insane electric vehicle mandate, cancel his natural gas export ban [and] reopen ANWR in Alaska," Trump said in December.

In his first term as president, Trump often ran into a wall of litigation in his attempts to undo President Barack Obama's environmental agenda. The Post reported that Democratic attorneys general and environmental advocacy groups often got the better of the Trump administration in the federal judiciary, convincing judges to side with plaintiffs roughly 40% of the time when challenging Trump's EPA.

In the final weeks of his lame-duck period, Biden successfully managed to confirm a spate of federal judges, outperforming Trump's number of judicial appointees confirmed by one. Whereas Trump entered the White House in 2017 with 127 judicial vacancies to fill. He now has just 47, and that number may dwindle as some judges are expected to renege on their retirement plans in hopes of waiting out the second Trump administration. This could prove costly when the incoming administration faces legal challenges in its efforts to gut Biden's environmental policies.

“They learned the first time around that if you take shortcuts, you’re going to lose in court,” Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program director Jody Freeman told the Post. “It’s not as easy as waving your magic deregulatory wand.”

When Biden took over after Trump's first term, he successfully managed to roll back roughly three-quarters of his predecessor's environmental policies aimed at deregulating extractive industries and curtailing federal land protections. One of the Biden Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) major environmental wins is the phasing out of the production and importing of harmful hydrofluorocarbons used in HVAC products. Undoing that rule would require Congress to pass new legislation.

During his four years in the White House, Biden managed to put roughly 670 million acres of land and water under federal protection — more than any other administration in history, according to the Post. While Trump could pass new executive orders rolling back these protections, conservation groups are likely to challenge him in the federal judiciary.

Biden's EPA also succeeded in banning a carcinogen used in degreasing agents and auto repair products that's been known to cause liver cancer, kidney cancer and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The agency also imposed steep fees on methane emissions from oil and gas facilities — something that even the oil industry's chief lobbying organization supports.

"We do support the federal regulation of methane, and we want to work with this administration on making [Biden’s] methane rules more workable," American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers said on Monday.

Click here to read the Post's report in full (subscription required).

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