President Donald Trump's rollback of Obama-era climate regulations will cause the United States to pump an extra 1.8 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere between now and 2035, at a time when scientists say the world needs to slash its carbon pollution dramatically to avoid catastrophe, researchers said Thursday.
The forecast from the climate research firm Rhodium Group is one of the most detailed and comprehensive estimates to date of how Trump’s regulatory U-turn will affect the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide coming from tailpipes, leaking oil and gas wells, power plants and refrigerants. It concludes that if Trump's rollbacks remain in place, U.S. climate pollution 15 years from now will be 3 percent higher than current projections indicate.
The cumulative additional amount of greenhouse gases would exceed the current annual output of Russia, the world’s fourth-biggest carbon polluter. The United States is No. 2, behind China.
“It seems to me that a president ought to be paying attention to something that is as big a threat to our way of life as this is, and doing something about it,” said Janet McCabe, the former acting Obama EPA air chief who wrote many of the climate rules Trump has rolled back.
