Trump’s new Executive Orders signal full-scale climate and environment backlash

Brussels, 9 April 2025

On April 8, 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed a sweeping series of executive actions that mark a decisive pivot toward fossil fuel expansion and a direct dismantling of climate-related regulations. Promoted under the banner of “energy dominance,” the orders prioritize coal, gas, and oil production—recasting coal as a “critical mineral,” suspending environmental protections for power plants, blocking state-level climate policies, and redirecting federal agencies to dismantle clean energy preferences. The administration frames this agenda as vital to economic growth and national security, but critics warn it constitutes a profound rollback of federal climate commitments and could significantly undermine global emissions targets.

Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry and Amending Executive Order 14241

Source: Executive Order + Fact Sheet

President Trump’s executive order to reinvigorate the coal industry marks an aggressive ideological and structural intervention into federal energy governance. By reclassifying coal as a “mineral” under Executive Order 14241, it aligns the fossil fuel sector with fast-tracked mining privileges previously intended for critical materials.

The move sets a clear policy priority: making coal a central element of U.S. domestic energy and export strategy. This reclassification is not symbolic—it entitles coal to preferential treatment in permitting, leasing, and development across federal lands, which could significantly undermine environmental safeguards that previously slowed or blocked extraction.

The order also calls for a coordinated dismantling of climate-forward agency practices. Federal agencies are instructed to review and rescind any guidance or programs that discourage coal investment or promote energy transition—a sweeping directive that affects the EPA, Treasury, Commerce, and even the Export-Import Bank.

Particularly notable is the requirement for agencies to identify and eliminate any “preferences against coal,” including those in international development financing. These provisions seek to reverse years of interagency alignment with climate goals, both domestically and globally.

An equally bold component of the order is its direct linkage between coal and emerging technologies. It mandates the identification of coal-powered infrastructure to support artificial intelligence (AI) data centers—implicitly pitting fossil fuels against renewable integration in the tech sector.

The administration positions coal not as a sunset industry but as a strategic foundation for AI, steel, and energy-intensive industrial growth. This rhetoric not only ignores market signals favoring cleaner alternatives, but it also attempts to re-anchor coal as a future-proof energy source despite its declining share in power generation and increasing global divestment.

Taken as a whole, this executive order reframes coal as a national security asset and development imperative. Its language dismisses environmental constraints as ideologically motivated and frames deregulation as patriotic. While politically coherent within Trump’s energy nationalism, the policy runs counter to global climate trajectories and risks deepening friction with allies and investors increasingly committed to net-zero pathways.

Executive Order: Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry and Amending Executive Order 14241

Source: Full Executive Order

This comprehensive executive order goes far beyond symbolic support for coal—it lays out a detailed interagency framework to resuscitate the industry across every dimension of federal energy and development policy. It mandates an overhaul of permitting, leasing, environmental review, and export promotion mechanisms in order to treat coal as a “critical mineral.” This classification entitles coal to fast-tracked regulatory treatment and positions it as an indispensable strategic asset. In doing so, the order not only revives Trump-era energy dominance rhetoric, but also embeds it into administrative practice with lasting institutional effects.

The order is sweeping in scope. It commands agencies to identify and reverse any regulations, guidance, or financial instruments that disincentivize coal use, including in multilateral development banks. It requires a detailed audit of federal land access, coal reserve mapping, and leasing prioritization. Notably, it also mandates that environmental impact assessments under NEPA adopt categorical exclusions for coal-related projects, dramatically weakening procedural safeguards that have long enabled environmental and community objections to mining and combustion infrastructure. In short, it carves out coal from the regulatory apparatus built over decades to control the industry’s externalities.

A particularly audacious element is the mandate to evaluate coal’s role in powering artificial intelligence data centers and its classification as a “critical material” for steel production. By associating coal with AI innovation, national defense, and industrial policy, the administration attempts to give a 20th-century fuel a 21st-century mandate. This alignment with digital infrastructure is designed to justify long-term investment, despite growing market evidence that data centers are moving toward renewables for both cost and reputational reasons. It also introduces the troubling precedent of tailoring energy infrastructure policy to support politically favored fuels over economically or environmentally optimal solutions.

Finally, the order reveals a deep hostility toward the global climate finance architecture. It explicitly instructs agencies like the Treasury and Commerce to rescind support for clean energy preferences in U.S. international finance mechanisms. This amounts to a strategic withdrawal from the norms of global climate diplomacy, just as major economies are strengthening multilateral efforts. The order reframes fossil fuel support not as a transitional necessity, but as a patriotic obligation—an ideological move with profound implications for U.S. credibility in climate negotiations, investor certainty, and environmental justice outcomes both at home and abroad.

Proclamation: Lifting Burdensome EPA Restrictions on Coal Plants

Source: Fact Sheet

This proclamation is a companion piece to the broader deregulatory strategy that President Trump initiated with his April 8 energy orders. It suspends compliance obligations for coal-fired power plants under the stricter version of the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), introduced during the Biden administration. The White House argues that this rollback is necessary to preserve jobs, avoid premature plant shutdowns, and ensure the stability of the national grid—once again casting environmental regulation as a direct threat to energy security.

What stands out is the administration’s framing of emissions control as an “unattainable” burden rather than a public health imperative. Mercury and air toxics pose documented risks, particularly to vulnerable populations, yet the administration’s language treats compliance as economically irrational and strategically dangerous. In doing so, it erases decades of scientific and regulatory consensus about the health consequences of coal pollution. The only metrics that matter in this narrative are operational capacity, job preservation, and national defense readiness.

The proclamation also engages in revisionist environmentalism: it reasserts Trump’s first-term policies, including the repeal of the Clean Power Plan and the adoption of the weaker Affordable Clean Energy rule, as successes in balancing environmental protection with industrial viability. This selectively curated legacy ignores that even large utilities had moved beyond MATS compliance and were shifting away from coal—driven by economics, not regulation alone. By contrast, the new order risks incentivizing plants to delay modernization or defer retirement based solely on temporary political winds.

The broader implication is a rollback of institutional momentum toward emissions reduction. By suspending regulatory enforcement, the administration signals to both industry and investors that fossil infrastructure will be shielded from transition pressures. This not only undermines clean energy market dynamics but creates legal uncertainty for future administrations that may attempt to reinstate public health protections. Ultimately, the policy favors short-term coal viability at the expense of long-term environmental integrity and systemic resilience.

Regulatory Relief for Certain Stationary Sources to Promote American Energy

Source: Proclamation

This proclamation grants a two-year exemption from stricter compliance standards imposed by the Biden-era Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule, targeting coal-fired power plants. The rationale is clear: the Trump administration argues that the required emissions control technologies are not commercially viable and that forcing compliance would lead to plant shutdowns, job losses, grid instability, and a weakened national defense. The underlying argument is one of feasibility and pragmatism—but the framing is steeped in a broader anti-regulatory, fossil-first ideology.

What’s striking is the administration’s absolute framing of the MATS compliance timeline as an existential threat to energy security. There’s no space in the document for compromise or technological innovation toward cleaner coal. Instead, the strategy relies on regulatory rollback to delay transition and preserve the existing fossil fuel fleet—irrespective of the long-term environmental or health costs associated with mercury and other hazardous pollutants. This could significantly delay investment in modernization and emissions-reduction technologies, or disincentivize utilities from adopting cleaner alternatives.

The move has particular implications for climate justice and public health. MATS standards were implemented to curb pollutants that disproportionately affect low-income and marginalized communities living near coal-fired plants. The suspension of stricter standards—framed solely through a national security lens—ignores those public health stakes entirely. It also runs afoul of market trends, where utilities are increasingly planning coal phase-outs due to economic and regulatory risk.

The proclamation fits into a broader strategy of defending legacy fossil infrastructure from the twin pressures of decarbonization and market competition. Rather than supporting a just transition or hybridization strategies (e.g., co-firing, CCS integration), the Trump administration doubles down on preserving the status quo, even at the cost of long-term resilience and global climate credibility.

Executive Order: Strengthening the Reliability and Security of the United States Electric Grid

Source: Fact Sheet

This executive order presents itself as a technical and national security measure to stabilize the U.S. power grid, but it operates with a deeper political logic: embedding fossil fuel dependency within the governance of grid reliability. At its core, the order directs the Department of Energy to implement a uniform methodology for evaluating grid “reserve margins”—the backup capacity required to prevent outages—and to use that process to determine which generation sources must be retained. In effect, it creates a formal pathway to prevent the retirement or conversion of coal and gas plants under the pretext of reliability.

The urgency is tied to projections of rising electricity demand, particularly from the proliferation of AI data centers and a manufacturing resurgence. This concern is real: data centers already consume about 4% of U.S. electricity, and that share is growing. However, the Trump administration uses this demand growth as a rationale to lock in traditional baseload power, instead of accelerating investment in grid flexibility, renewables, or storage. The order does not mention clean energy integration, demand response, or distributed resources—instead, it leans on legacy infrastructure as the assumed backbone of future supply.

A particularly consequential piece of the order is its prioritization mechanism. If a plant’s shutdown is forecasted to reduce “accredited generating capacity,” the Department of Energy can now act to prevent that closure. While this might sound pragmatic, in practice it provides a powerful justification to override state-level transition plans or utility decarbonization goals. This is not a neutral technical framework—it institutionalizes bias toward fossil-heavy capacity under the language of grid security.

By linking reliability to fossil retention, the order makes a subtle but potent move in the energy policy debate: it weaponizes infrastructure planning against decarbonization. The framing suggests that technological innovation, resilience, and reliability are only achievable through traditional energy sources. In doing so, it risks locking the U.S. grid into an increasingly obsolete and polluting model—just as major economies are investing in transformation through clean tech and smart grid integration.

Executive Order: Protecting American Energy from State Overreach

Source: Full Text + Fact Sheet

This executive order signals an aggressive reassertion of federal supremacy over state environmental and energy policy. President Trump tasks the Attorney General with identifying and challenging state laws that “burden” domestic energy production—particularly those addressing climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, environmental justice, ESG investment criteria, or carbon pricing. In effect, the order targets the regulatory sovereignty of progressive states and reframes their environmental mandates as unconstitutional obstructions to national energy dominance.

The order singles out states such as California, New York, and Vermont, accusing them of “retroactive extortion” and “climate change nuisance laws” that penalize past emissions or enforce strict carbon standards. In this framing, state-led climate accountability efforts are not expressions of local governance or public interest—they are portrayed as ideologically driven threats to national unity and economic well-being. The move represents a deliberate inversion of the usual federalist argument: Trump claims to defend federalism by dismantling it, using federal authority to neutralize state policies in favor of uniform deregulatory control.

This executive order is more than symbolic—it enables the Department of Justice to actively sue states, delay or block enforcement of their climate-related laws, and recommend legislative changes to preempt local authority. It raises serious constitutional and legal questions about the balance of powers in the U.S. federal system. It also threatens to paralyze state innovation in climate policy, which has historically driven national progress when federal action stalled.

Beyond the legal mechanics, the order reveals a strategic narrative: climate regulation is depicted as elite overreach, harmful to working families and small businesses, and contrary to national interest. This rhetorical shift reframes climate policy not as a moral or scientific necessity but as a cultural wedge issue. It effectively isolates state governments as ideological outliers and frames their climate ambition as economic sabotage—a framing that resonates politically but clashes with long-established climate governance norms at home and abroad.

Sources – U.S. White House: