Trump’s Week One Ends With a Heap of Climate Rollbacks
The new president issued a barrage of orders seeking to boost fossil fuels and reverse policies that address global warming.
US President Donald Trump speaks while signing executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025.
Photographer: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPAPresident Donald Trump wasted no time in laying the groundwork for a sweeping anti-climate agenda, signing a series of executive orders just hours after being sworn into office that seek to unravel former President Joe Biden’s policies and double down on fossil fuel extraction.
That was just the beginning. The rest of the week brought even more executive orders, the deletion of White House climate webpages, postponing climate-related seminars, vows to shrink or dismantle the Federal Emergency Management Agency and more. Many of these efforts were signaled ahead of time and have repeated steps Trump took the first time he was in office, though on a more accelerated timeline. “It is all happening very fast,” says Michael Burger, executive director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.