I do not at all mean to be dramatic, but I interviewed experts about this, and they said people will die without that funding, without that program, people will die.

If you’re listening to a climate change with Matt Matern, I am not your host. I’m producer Brian, but Matt is out this week on some medical stuff, so I’ll be doing my best to cover for him. No pressure.

And today on the show, we’ve got Kiley Bense, who writes for insight climate news, and she’ll be talking to us about President Trump’s first 100 days in office, and what Trump 2.0 has done or undone on the climate front.

Now, full disclosure, today, we’re trying something completely new, so I just hope that I’m doing the show and Matt justice, here’s our conversation with Kiley.

Kiley, thank you for joining us today, and please bear with me. I have some big shoes to fill.

Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

So Kiley, in his first 100 Days, President Trump declared a National Energy emergency, he signed sweeping executive orders on immigration. He restructured major federal agencies and even attempted to overhaul the Department of Justice’s independence. But where I want to start today is what distinguishes Trump’s second term approach to environmental policy from his first.

So I think that the difference is mainly about scale. A lot of the things that the administration has been focused on in terms of environmental and climate policy in this second term. So far are similar to things that they focused on in the first term. So wanting to roll back environmental regulations, cutting the budget of the EPA. But I think the difference here is scale.

The scale of what they are doing or trying to do now is unprecedented, not just compared to the first Trump term, but to any term of any president that I know of. I’m not a presidential historian, but when I’ve interviewed experts who know a lot about the history of President, presidential power and executive power, this is something far beyond what we have seen before. So we’re talking about freezing funding, like millions of dollars of grant funds and government funding, firing thousands of people.

They propose cutting the budget of the EPA by 65% so these are huge changes. They are cutting so much at once that they perhaps are not even aware of everything that they’re cutting, which is why we’ve seen some like walk back. So for example, you know some of the things that have been challenged or reinstated, both because of like court challenges or because there was pushback.

So traditionally, new presidents shift course by undoing policies of the previous administration one at a time. And legal experts call this approach using a quote scalpel. The typical approach would be, you know, looking at one regulation and saying,

Okay, we want to rewrite this or we want to propose an amendment to this regulation, and sort of going piece by piece, like, here’s one function of the government that we want to change at a time that’s normal.

But Trump’s second term isn’t about precision. It’s about disruption.

What the Trump administration is trying to do is use dynamite. They’re trying to, like, blow everything up basically at once.

The approach is very similar to that of the Silicon Valley motto of move fast, break things. Entire agencies are being dismantled or defunded so quickly that even some in the administration don’t fully grasp what they’re eliminating, and that’s kind of the point. But what does this all mean on the ground? I asked Kiley about the long term consequences, especially for regulations meant to keep air and water clean.

It’s hard to know exactly what the consequences will be long term, because all of this is still happening unfolding. A lot of it is being challenged legally, but I think that we can expect that the staffing cuts, in particular, regardless of what happens with the other executive orders, will have a profound consequences and implications for the country’s ability to regulate pollution, for example.

And then there are some executive orders that the administration has advanced that relate to kind of like a mass rollback of environmental regulations. They have one that they want to kind of automatically repeal or sunset regulations after a set period of time, which, if you think about that, that has substantial to cause like basically chaos, in addition to making it a lot easier to pollute, the legality of that executive order in particular, has really been questioned by legal experts, and it seems unlikely.

That would hold up in court. But if that type of thing were to go forward, I mean, it would be, it could be devastating for, you know, our ability to kind of hold on to the gains that have been made since our kind of landmark environmental laws were passed in the 60s and 70s.

But for many Americans, especially those under 50, clean air and water kind of feel like a given, but that’s not how it used to be. And Kiley reminded me of just how far we’ve come since the 60s and 70s.

I think that like for younger Americans in particular, like we don’t know or remember what it was like before the Clean Air Act, before the Clean Water Act, before the EPA was created, but America looked very different then, and one of the reasons it looks different now is because of those laws and enforcing their regulations.

There’s been huge public health gains, for example, because of those laws. So like reducing respiratory illnesses that result from pollution. You know, we banned lead from gasoline, like that has huge public health implications. We banned DDT, and like the bald eagle, populations have recovered in a big way because of that.

There’s all kinds of things that have changed and improved because of those laws. And so if you were to go back to a time before them, we don’t really know what that future would hold.

Progress didn’t happen by accident. It came from policy, regulation and enforcement, and the rollback threatens not just climate action, but even just basic public health. The Trump administration claims that it’s just cutting red tape making it easier to do business in America, and that’s kind of how they’ve been positioning their messaging on Earth Day, a White House press release said, we finally have a president who follows science. It cited, quote, energy innovation and efforts to clean up toxins.

But critics say that this messaging is just a smoke screen. So I asked Kiley about the Trump administration’s communication strategy.

It seems like this administration does really want to engage with the press, and they want to get their messaging out there and spread their perspective, their point of view. But I think that the messaging that we see, it kind of like, takes the typical political spin and goes way beyond that. If you read this press release like on its face, it seems pretty positive.

You know, they are talking about how they’re promising a healthier future for Americans, and they’re promoting energy innovation, and they’re protecting public lands and protecting wildlife. But when you look at each point and start to compare it to their policy so far, and their actions and the executive orders that have been signed, they’re actually doing the opposite of all of those things.

You know, for example, they said that they’re protecting public lands, and this is at the same time that they’re kind of gutting the agencies and departments that protect public lands, and also saying that they want to increase drilling and logging.

And I think that this it can be dangerous, obviously, because for most Americans, if they even have time to read a press release, they don’t have time to fact check every sentence, they’re kind of just gonna get like the headline, and if you take this at face value, you’re gonna miss what’s really happening.

The breadth of Trump’s changes doesn’t really fall equally. Programs meant to protect frontline communities, which happen to be mostly communities of color, have been wiped out. The EPA is environmental justice offices gone, a key tool that showed which neighborhoods are hit hardest by pollution deleted.

And it’s not just the EPA that’s being gutted. The Department of Health and Human Services is also getting hit, and that matters, because climate change isn’t just an environmental issue, it’s also a public health crisis. A lot of what HHS did tied directly or indirectly to climate related health now, much of that work is either paused or gone completely.

Here’s Kiley.

I did a story a couple weeks ago about the firing of the staff that allocates funding for LIHEAP, which is a Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. This is a program that sends funding to the states that is then dispersed to low income people and families who need help paying their cooling and heating bills.

And because the entire LIHEAP staff was fired, there’s no one to allocate the funding. There’s millions of dollars that are in limbo right now that haven’t been allocated for this season. And you know, it’s May. We are heading into the summer, for a lot of states that have extreme heat or deal with heat waves, that funding is really critical for helping people keep their air conditioning on.

I do not at all mean to be dramatic, but I interviewed experts about this, and they said people will die. Without that funding, without that program, people will die. Another big one is kind of the focus on FEMA, which is the emergency, you know, deals with disasters emergencies as a federal agency that is really key for helping states and different parts of the country recover.

However, when there’s a major hurricane or a wildfire, the Trump administration, and Trump himself has said a few times that he wants to get rid of FEMA entirely, and when we’re talking about climate change, like that is a huge thing to say, because, you know, as we know, severe weather is getting worse in the United States and around the world.

You know, it’s becoming more frequent, and FEMA is really key for our ability not only to prepare for and mitigate disasters, but also to recover. A lot of people don’t understand that FEMA not only, like, disperses funding to the States when there’s a disaster, but FEMA also helps coordinate the response, which, when you have like a huge incident.

Like, for example, the California wildfires, or if you have like a multi state, like Hurricane Helene, where there’s like, multiple part parts of the country affected, you really need somebody who’s kind of like, you know, controlling the whole response and, like overseeing because it’s hugely complicated.

And here’s the irony, states like Florida, Louisiana and Texas, which are Trump’s strongholds, have been among the biggest recipients of FEMA disaster relief, and these places are already starting to feel the heat. Literally.

In general, the administration is really pushing for more fossil fuel extraction, more coal mining, more drilling. In particular, there seems to be this focus on coal and on the, you know, the flip side of that, that kind of like trying to get rid of or kill clean energy projects and anything renewable energy projects that would have helped us reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

And again, that has huge implications for the future and for you know, if we aren’t able to reduce our emissions, it’s only going to make climate change and severe weather worse.

Kiley also broke down where the US currently stands on the global climate conversation.

The Trump administration has once again withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement. Sciences have been cut off from international research efforts. Major clean energy investments have been canceled or delayed, and while the rest of the world continues to move forward, the US, once again, is choosing the sidelines.

I think it’s important to note that this is at a time when we are well on our way to surpassing the target set by the Paris agreement at 1.5 degrees Celsius, unless there is dramatic change. We will surpass that threshold, some scientists think that we already have.

And the US is the largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in history. We also continue to emit huge amounts of greenhouse gasses. I think only China is ahead of us. And so if the US is not involved in climate diplomacy and in working together with the world to reduce emissions. You know, there’s only so much that can be accomplished without us there.

The US still spends a huge amount of money on scientific research compared to other countries, and previously, we’ve been leaders in climate science and clean energy technology. You know, I was just reading this article from 2024 where nature called the US the World Science superpower. And so without us leadership and investment in science, there will certainly be fewer advances and breakthroughs in those fields.

One small example, do you know what the Keeling Curve is? It’s kind of an iconic climate change graph that shows how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing. And they started taking those measurements in 1958 and it was the curve was created by an American scientists, and the measurements that make the Keeling Curve are taken at this Observatory in Hawaii.

They’ve been taking them since 1958 very consistently. And it’s one of those things that shows how climate change is increasing, and this administration had threatened to end the lease of that Observatory, which would end the measurements and the careful research that has gone into creating this curve.

It kind of reminds me of reminds me of when we repeat COVID, and a lot of states weren’t reporting on their cases and and it’s like, we just don’t have COVID. Well, we don’t have COVID Because you’re not reporting the cases.

Right? We can see, like, some of that attitude and some of the administration’s actions. It was reported that they want to stop NOAA, the the science and research and weather agency from tracking how much money is spent on severe weather disasters.

Who fills in for us when we’re when we’re out like, who, who steps up?

I mean, I think there’s a lot of other countries that are interested in stepping up and want to step up and will, and there’s certainly many other countries, smaller countries, countries that haven’t contributed anywhere near as much to global warming, who, you know, have a real vested interest in changing this because, you know, for example, they’re low lying countries that will be dramatically affected by flooding, and in some cases, already are.

I think that part of the problem is when the US, you know, at this point we’ve. Withdrawn or started to withdraw from the Paris Agreement twice in the span of a few years. It just undermines the credibility of the whole enterprise. It makes it seem like withdrawing from that agreement at any time is acceptable, and it kind of paved the way for other countries, when they have a change in political leadership, to do the same thing.

So here’s the question, how much of this can actually be undone. A lot of what we’ve seen from the Trump administration has come from either executive orders or public announcements, not formal policy or legislation. And that might sound like good news, because it means that some of this could, in theory, be reversed. But not everything is so easy to walk back.

A lot of the things that they’ve done are announcements and executive orders and press releases, they’ve done very little like actual administrative work or legislative work. And what that means is that a lot of that stuff will be easier to reverse, you know, if there were a future president who had different policies than Trump.

Because, you know, they’re not laws, these things, they’re, they’re executive orders, their announcements, they’re they’re they’re not as binding as you know, for example, doing the difficult administrative work of formally changing a regulation that’s much harder to undo than some of these other orders that Trump has issued.

And in terms of the courts, like I think that we’ve already seen some pushback from the courts. There’s been legal challenges. Some funding has been unfrozen, some groups of federal workers have been rehired. You know, there is some evidence that that sort of like legal battle will make a difference, but I think that some of the things that the administration has done will be much harder to reverse.

So the staffing cuts, for example, you know, moving ahead with more logging and drilling on public lands. I think in the article, we said that $8 billion worth of clean energy projects were canceled by the private sector. You know, these are the kinds of things that are years long endeavors, and you can’t just, like, pick up and get started again.

So like a build out of fossil fuel infrastructure, more drilling that will increase our emissions for years to come. And then the flip side of that, you know, the ending of climate mitigation efforts and of clean energy projects, like all of that would take years to reverse or change.

And while a lot of the damage we’ve seen so far has come through executive action. There’s more on the way this time from Congress. Just last week, the House passed what Republicans are proudly calling the big, beautiful bill.

It’s being marketed as a sweeping economic package, but buried inside our major rollbacks to environmental protections, we’re talking about fast tracking fossil fuel development, gutting clean energy funding and even weakening oversight on pollution and public lands, that bill is now going to the Senate, where Republicans hold the majority.

Kiley. Thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell us how people can find you and find the work that you’re doing?

Well, you can read my work on insideclimatenews.org We also have newsletters you can sign up for about clean energy, or if you just want to get Pennsylvania news, we have great newsletters that cover the climate and environmental news of the day, and I do post my stories on blue sky if you want to follow me there.

Kiley Bense is a reporter with insight climate news. Her investigation titled, in his first 100 Days, Trump launched an all out assault on the environment is available at insightclimatenews.org. You can read this and more by subscribing to their newsletter. That’s all I have for you today. Hope I did a decent job again, I’m Brian. Thanks for listening.

To learn more about our work at A Climate Change and how you can help us reach our goal planting 30,000 trees in the Amazon this year. Visit aclimatechange.com, don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend. See you next time.