By Emma Cotton/VTDigger
As Donald Trump prepares to return to the presidency, experts worry that his climate and environmental policy goals could destabilize ongoing work in Vermont.
The president-elect campaigned on tossing out policies related to climate change and loosening or abandoning environmental regulations.
As a small state, Vermont leans on federal funding and regulatory frameworks to support a range of environmental programs, so Vermonters and the agencies that work for them are likely to feel the policy shift directly.
The former president is slated to take office during a period of unprecedented climate warming and impacts from human-caused climate change, including historic back-to-back floods that hit Vermont in both July 2023 and 2024.
“2023 was the hottest year on record,” said Justin Mankin, associate geography professor at Dartmouth College. “It is now virtually certain that 2024 is going to be the hottest year on record. The march of warming continues, and the impacts associated with that warming continue to manifest.”
Trump has called climate change a “scam,” and plans to expand production of fossil fuels. He plans to repeal what he can of the Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark climate law passed by the Biden Administration.
“Across the board, I don’t think any agency, any law, any regulation that deals with the environment is safe, frankly, from a serious effort to deregulate and repeal pretty much everything Biden did,” said Patrick Parenteau, an emeritus professor and senior fellow for climate policy at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
The federal funding picture
In a typical year, about one-third of the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources’ roughly $200 million budget comes from the federal government, according to its leader, Secretary Julie Moore. Under the Biden Administration, the agency has received an extra $100 million through such legislation as the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
From there, that money has been dispersed to a long list of projects throughout the state. Some has gone to the State Revolving Fund programs, which give low-interest loans to municipalities for water and wastewater upgrades. Some has gone to the remediation of brownfield sites, and more to programs that keep soil healthy and conserve forests.
In the last three years, the state has received money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act to manage PFAS, long lasting “forever chemicals” that have contaminated drinking water and pose harmful health risks.
Money from the Inflation Reduction Act has also flowed through a number of state agencies, including the Department of Public Service, for projects such as electric panel upgrades for low-income people, weatherization work and Solar For All, a program that helps low-income Vermonters install solar panels.
Through the 2022 law, individuals can also claim tax credits when they purchase electric vehicles, install solar panels or take a slew of other actions that could help reduce planet-warming emissions.
Parenteau said it’s hard to know how much of the money from the Inflation Reduction Act has already been obligated through contracts and is therefore safe. Trump would need approval from Congress to cancel or withdraw appropriations that have already been made, he said. Even with a Republican-controlled Senate and House, it could be tricky for the president to convince Congress to repeal the funding, Parenteau said — the majority of which has been designated for Republican districts.
While Parenteau said it’s possible for Trump to “substantially reduce some of its programs,” the Inflation Reduction Act has also given the private sector momentum toward the clean energy transition that Trump won’t likely be able to reverse.
“A lot of the market forces that are underway in transitioning both the electricity sector and the transportation sector through EVs — those trends in the marketplace are going to continue regardless of Trump,” Parenteau said.
Moore said she’s hopeful that some of Trump’s campaign promises “may moderate some” by virtue of general bureaucracy and the influx of more voices on each policy, but she acknowledged that “the federal funding picture is going to change pretty dramatically.”
Mandate to deregulate
Recently, Trump announced plans to appoint Lee Zeldin, a former Republican member of the U.S. House from Long Island, to run the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Zeldin does not have expertise in environmental policy and has not held related positions in the past.
Despite that, Zeldin has done “some good things,” Parenteau said, including supporting investment in the cleanup of Long Island Sound and backing regulation of PFAS.
“He’s not a climate-denier,” Parenteau said. “He thinks the answer to climate is more to do with carbon capture and technologies to allow continued use of fossil fuel and also ramping up construction of nuclear power plants and so forth,” Parenteau said.
Vermont agencies collaborate with the Environmental Protection Agency in many ways — for example, to ensure that the state’s water and air quality meet federal standards. The agency oversees Vermont’s work remediating the water quality of Lake Champlain and other water bodies, and holds the state accountable if more needs to be done.
The EPA could also take some actions outside of Vermont that impact the Green Mountain State. For example, when California advanced a rule banning new gasoline powered cars from being sold in-state after 2035, Vermont — and 15 other states — followed suit.
But California is the only state that can set stricter standards for automobiles than what’s laid out in the federal Clean Air Act, due to a waiver the state obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency, and other states can only adopt those regulations if they match California’s rule. Trump has stated his intention to revoke California’s waiver, which means the 2035 regulations could be “on the chopping block,” Parenteau said.
Zeldin would also oversee strategies to manage toxic chemicals, including PFAS. Recently, the federal government set a stricter drinking water standard for PFAS, and enough time has passed so that Trump wouldn’t be able to repeal the regulation, Moore and Parenteau said. But Vermont may not receive much funding to manage the chemicals, which can be a costly process.
“Left to his own devices, [Zeldin] might be somebody who you could negotiate with on at least some issues,” Parenteau said. “But the real question is, is he going to be given any of that latitude? His mandate is to deregulate and to reverse Biden’s rules.”
A warming planet
Moore, who took the helm of Vermont’s natural resources agency as Trump took office in 2017, said conversations about federal funding were significant in those early days.
But for her, “the biggest difference in the environmental space between my first four years of this job and the second four years in this job was the absence of federal leadership in the first four years.”
During his earlier term, Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, an international treaty to reduce climate emissions. He plans to do so again — Biden rejoined the agreement on his first day in office. Without a federal commitment, states signed on to the Climate Alliance, pledging to take action to reduce planet-warming pollution in line with the Paris Agreement. From there, Vermont’s 2020 Global Warming Solutions Act was born.
Experts in the climate field worry, however, that action from states won’t be enough to meet the moment. Vermont’s own climate policies may have a tricky path forward after this month’s state elections, in which Republicans made major gains in the Legislature after campaigning against state climate policies.
“You’ve got more red states than blue states right now, and unfortunately, climate has become a partisan issue, and so you are going to get a patchwork,” Parenteau said.
And, if climate action slows, the world in turn is all but sure to heat up, increasing the risk of danger from extreme weather.
Events such as the recent flooding in Vermont aren’t “going to stop — in fact, if anything, it’s going to get worse,” Parenteau said. That means “states like Vermont are going to be saddled with enormous costs of damage and disaster relief and adaptation,” which could “fall on the taxpayers.”
It’s unclear yet whether Trump plans to make any major cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He has said he intends to deprive California of disaster aid for wildfires unless the state subscribes to his policies, a stance that has left Mankin, of Dartmouth, concerned.
A report issued earlier this year found that Vermont is among the states that has received the most federal disaster declarations for extreme weather.
Mankin is worried that, if Vermont were to request a disaster declaration, “and if the Trump administration decides that, for whatever reason, this is a point of leverage with something that he has interest in in Vermont, that he could withhold that declaration request or turn it down pending some kind of concession from the state.”
Vermont has relied on FEMA funding not only to respond immediately after a flood, but also to build back in a way that reduces flooding, or diverts waters away from people.
Mankin said that if Trump does become motivated to take action on climate change, it would come after witnessing tangible economic losses.
“The way that the Trump administration will wake up to climate change being a problem to contend with is that it’s going to impact everybody and cost everybody something, and that means real pain and real loss,” Mankin said.
