As Donald Trump prepares to return to the presidency, experts fear his climate and environmental policy goals could destabilize the work underway in Vermont.

The president-elect has campaigned on abandoning climate change policies and relaxing or abandoning environmental regulations.

As a small state, Vermont relies on federal funding and regulatory frameworks to support a range of environmental programs. Vermonters and the agencies that work for them are therefore likely to directly feel the policy change.

The former president is expected to take office during a period of unprecedented global warming and human-caused climate change impacts, including the historic back-to-back floods that hit Vermont in both cases. July 2023 And 2024.

“2023 was the hottest year on record,” said Justin Mankin, associate professor of geography at Dartmouth College. “It is now virtually certain that 2024 will be the hottest year on record. The march of warming continues and the impacts associated with this warming continue to manifest themselves.

Trump has called climate change a “scam” and plans to increase fossil fuel production. He plans to repeal what he can about the Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark climate law passed by the Biden administration.

“Overall, 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 just about everything that Biden did,” said Patrick Parenteau, professor emeritus. and a senior fellow in climate policy at Vermont Law and Graduate School.

The portrait of federal funding

In a typical year, about a third of the Vermont Natural Resources Agency’s roughly $200 million budget comes from the federal government, according to its head, Secretary Julie Moore. Under the Biden administration, the agency received an additional $100 million through legislation such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

From there, that money was spread across a long list of projects across the state. A portion went to State Revolving Fund programs, which provide low-interest loans to municipalities for water and wastewater improvements. Part was devoted to the rehabilitation of industrial wastelands, and more to programs aimed at maintaining healthy soils and conserving forests.

Over the past three years, the state has received money from the bipartisan infrastructure law to manage PFAS, long-lasting “permanent chemicals” that have contaminated drinking water and pose harmful risks to health.

Money from the Inflation Reduction Act was also transferred to a number of state agencies, including the Department of Civil Service, for projects such as upgrading electrical panels for people at low-income weatherization work and Solar For All, a program that helps low-income people. Vermonters are installing solar panels.

Thanks to the 2022 law, individuals can also claim tax credits when they purchase electric vehicles, install solar panels or take a range of other actions that can help reduce global warming emissions. planet.

Parenteau said it’s unclear how much of the Inflation Reduction Act money has already been committed through contracts and is therefore safe. Trump would need congressional approval to rescind or withdraw credits already granted, he said. Even with a Republican-controlled Senate and House, it could be difficult for the president to convince Congress to repeal the funding, said Parenteau – the majority of whom were drawn to Republican districts.

Although Parenteau said it was possible for Trump to “significantly scale back some of his programs,” the Inflation Reduction Act also gave the private sector momentum toward the clean energy transition, which Trump did not probably won’t be able to reverse.

“A lot of the market forces that are happening in the transition of the electricity sector and the transportation sector to electric vehicles – those trends in the market are going to continue regardless of Trump,” Parenteau said.

Moore said she hoped some of Trump’s campaign promises “might moderate some” due to general bureaucracy and the influx of more votes on each policy, but she acknowledged that “the funding situation federal government is going to change quite dramatically.

Deregulation mandate

Recently, Trump announced his intention to nominate Lee Zeldin, a former Republican member of the House of Representatives from Long Island, to head the US 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 investments in cleaning up the Long Island Sound and supporting PFAS regulation.

“He is not a climate denier,” Parenteau said. “He thinks the answer to climate change lies more in carbon capture and technologies to continue using fossil fuels, as well as accelerating the construction of nuclear power plants and so on. »

Vermont agencies collaborate in many ways with the Environmental Protection Agency, such as to ensure the state’s water and air quality meets federal standards. The agency oversees Vermont’s work to clean up the water quality of Lake Champlain and other bodies of water, and holds the state accountable if additional action needs to be taken.

The EPA could also take some actions outside of Vermont that would impact the Green Mountain State. For example, when California proposed a rule banning the sale of new gasoline-powered cars 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 in the federal Clean Air Act, thanks to a waiver the state obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency , and other states can only adopt these regulations if they match California’s rule. . Trump has declared his intention to revoke California’s waiver, meaning the 2035 regulations could be “on the chopping block,” Parenteau said.

Zeldin would also oversee strategies for managing toxic chemicals, including PFAS. Recently, the federal government set a stricter drinking water standard for PFAS, and enough time has passed that Trump cannot repeal the regulations, 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) could be someone you could negotiate at least some issues with,” Parenteau said. “But the real question is: will he benefit from this latitude? His mandate is to deregulate and overturn Biden’s rules.”

A warming planet

Moore, who took over as head of Vermont’s natural resources agency when Trump took office in 2017, said discussions about federal funding were important at that time.

But for her, “the biggest difference in the environmental field between my first four years in this position and the next four years in this position was the absence of federal leadership during the first four years.”

During his previous term, Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, an international treaty aimed at reducing climate emissions. He plans to do it again — Biden rejoined the deal on his first day in office. Without federal commitment, states joined the Climate Alliance, pledging to take action to reduce global warming pollution in accordance with the Paris Agreement. From there, Vermont’s Global Warming Solutions Act 2020 was born.

Climate experts, however, fear that state action will not be enough to meet current needs. Vermont’s own climate policies there may be a difficult path to follow after this month’s national elections, in which Republicans made significant gains in the Legislature after campaigning against state climate policies.

“There are more red states than blue states right now, and unfortunately climate has become a partisan issue, and so you’re going to have a patchwork,” Parenteau said.

And if climate action slows, the world will in turn warm, increasing the risk of danger from extreme weather.

Events such as the recent flooding in Vermont “are not going to stop — in fact, they are going to get worse,” Parenteau said. This means that “states like Vermont will face enormous costs in disaster damage, relief and adaptation,” which could “fall on taxpayers.”

It is not yet clear whether Trump plans to make significant cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He has said he intends to deprive California of wildfire aid unless the state adheres to his policies, a position that worried Dartmouth’s Mankin.

A report released earlier this year found that Vermont is among the states that have received the highest number of federal disaster declarations due to extreme weather.

Mankin fears that if Vermont were to request a disaster declaration, “and if the Trump administration decides that for some reason this is a point of influence with something they’re interested in in Vermont, it could refuse this declaration request. or refuse it while waiting for some kind of concession from the State.

Vermont has relied on FEMA funding not only to respond immediately after a flood, but also to rebuild in ways that reduce flooding or divert water away from populations.

Mankin said that if Trump was truly motivated to act on climate change, it would come after witnessing tangible economic losses.

“The way the Trump administration will realize that climate change is a problem that needs to be solved is that it’s going to impact everyone and cost everyone something, which means real suffering and real loss,” Mankin said.