As representatives from nearly 200 countries wrapped up talks at the United Nations’ COP30 climate summit this week, not only was the United States absent, but the Trump administration also unveiled a series of sweeping proposals to roll back environmental protections and encourage fossil fuel extraction.
The United Nations Climate Change Conference ended Friday in the Brazilian city of Belém, where delegates met to develop a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels, boost climate action and limit global warming.
For the first time in the history of the summit, the United States, a major emitter of greenhouse gases, did not send a delegation. Instead, the Trump administration this week announced a plan to open new oil drilling off the coasts of California and Florida for the first time in decades and proposed rule changes to weaken the Endangered Species Act and limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to protect wetlands and streams.
“These rules reinforce the administration’s refusal to confront the climate crisis seriously and, in fact, take us in the opposite direction,” said Jessie Ritter, associate vice president of waters and coasts at the National Wildlife Federation, a conservation group.
The White House told NBC News on Friday that this week’s “historic” announcements are intended to “promote President Trump’s agenda of American energy dominance.”
“President Trump is reversing government overreach, restoring energy security, and protecting American jobs by rolling back excessive and burdensome regulations and creating new opportunities to ‘DRILL, BABY, DRILL,’” White House spokesman Taylor Rogers said in a statement. “President Trump serves the American people, not the radical climate activists who have fallen victim to the biggest scam of the century.”
Ritter said the new proposals signal to the world how far the United States has moved away from any meaningful climate action.
“I doubt this will surprise people who have been watching internationally,” he said. “But it is unfortunate, given the example the United States sets and what our leadership, or lack thereof, encourages other countries to do.”
The Trump administration’s announcement Thursday that it intends to open roughly 1.27 billion acres of U.S. coastal waters to oil drilling sparked bipartisan pushback.
Although the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association for the oil and gas industry, hailed the program as a “historic step toward unlocking our nation’s vast marine resources,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) pushed to maintain the current moratorium on drilling, which Trump extended during his first term.
“I’ve been speaking with @SecretaryBurgum and made clear my expectations that this moratorium must remain in place, and that in any plan, Florida’s coasts must remain off the oil drilling table to protect Florida’s tourism, environment, and military training opportunities,” Scott wrote Thursday on X, referring to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
Across the country, California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote in
“We will not stand by while our economy and our coastal communities are at risk,” he said.
The drilling directive came just three days after the Trump administration proposed major limits to the Clean Water Act of 1972 that would roll back pollution and runoff protections for most of the country’s small streams and wetlands. The rule would narrow the definition of which bodies qualify as “waters of the United States” under the law.
If finalized, the changes would mean the smallest amount of freshwater resources would be under federal protection since the law was enacted, according to Jon Devine, who heads the water policy team at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group.
“By the EPA’s own estimate, only about 19% of the nation’s wetlands would be protected from destruction and unregulated development if this were to come to fruition,” Devin said.
Wetlands act as flood buffers by absorbing and storing water during extreme rainfall and other high runoff events. As the world warms, coastal and inland flooding is expected to become more frequent and severe.
“Many of the places we already have in the U.S. that are increasingly prone to flooding due to climate change will be even more at risk,” Devine said.
Wetlands and streams also feed other bodies of water that serve as critical drinking water supplies across the country, so critics fear the policy could make drinking water unsafe in some communities.
The third major environmental rollback announced this week was a set of four rules that would erode protections under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. The proposed changes aim to make it easier to remove species classified as threatened or endangered and harder to add new protected species and their habitats to the list. The rules, if approved, would also allow the government to consider “economic impacts” in decisions to list or delist species.
Taken together, Ritter said, these three proposals are consistent with the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda.
“These decisions prioritize short-term profits, often for a few industries and special interests, at the expense of things that have been broadly bipartisan and important issues for people for decades,” Ritter said.
Not all impacts of the changes may be immediately apparent, he added, but the scale of the long-term consequences could be immense.
“It’s really not a stretch that this is going to affect all Americans in some way,” he said. “Everything is connected, and it’s arrogance to think that we can have these massive negative effects on our streams and wetlands, our animals, our coastal waters, with no impacts to humans.”
