Who can question that Donald Trump is the most radically anti-environment president in American history? His extreme tilt toward business, contempt for science, and a lack of any personal connection with the outdoors has led us into a dark place. Even Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were environmentalists compared to Trump. Trump attacked any regulation put in place by President Obama, seemingly out of personal spite. His simple ideas lead to very serious consequences for all of humanity. We face a full-on environmental emergency.
Donald Trump used his administration to open as much land as possible to oil drilling. He green-lighted oil and gas drilling along America’s coasts and throughout our public lands. But at a recent rally for his fans in North Carolina, he said he would now block oil drilling off the coast there and off Florida. He had opened those coasts to drilling last year. Polls in both states show him in real trouble.
Will Americans be fooled but his eleventh-hour concern for the environment? His record is clear. Trump hired oil industry executives to run the Environmental Protection Agency and our national heritage lands. Trump’s environmental policies have been outrageous, just as his policies in almost all areas have been on the right end of the ideological extreme.
With large fires raging in drought stricken western states, Trump condescends to tens of thousands of fire professionals and serious policy makers and tells them to “rake the forest”. Workers rake Trump’s east coast golf courses, so of course hundreds of millions of acres of wildland can be raked also. (His staff believes that logging will calm fires though their real goal is commercializing public lands.) Scientists know logging makes fires more severe. Clearly, western states will get no help from Trump on the core causes of these disasters.
Trump spread oil drilling across our public lands, putting oil wells and oil spills in once protected places. Once oil drillers move into a place, they ruin the land for any other purpose. The administration cut federal oil royalties so taxpayers get almost nothing in return. Trump repealed rules requiring oil companies to stop natural gas leaks. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and leaks accelerate our climate emergency.
Donald Trump has been the most radical anti-environmental president in the history of the United States. Trump justifies trashing the outdoors and increasing pollution as “deregulation” to “stimulate the economy.” I believe these efforts are ideological – an effort to reject the culture of science, knowledge, and conservation which Trump’s followers find subversive and Trump believes are a personal affront.
Rejecting science and the idea that government should serve the people. Trump has accelerated global warming. He has done everything he can without Congress to increase air pollution. He tried to remove pollution controls from coal fired power plants and cars, taking America back to the 1950s and mirroring the policies of China. He punished California and other states for controlling auto pollution and he used the pandemic as an excuse to tell chemical plants, refineries, and coal fired power plants that they can turn off their pollution control equipment. These plants are usually in communities of color. The Trump team even worked to increase emissions of toxic hydrofluorocarbons and mercury from coal plants. Mercury causes brain damage in children.
Scientists know that certain pesticides are killing off bees needed to make our crops produce food. Trump’s team refuses to ban the pesticides despite knowing our food crops will fail as bees die off. Ideology over science.
Trump’s people have done all they can to weaken wildlife protections, attacking the Endangered Species Act, destroying wildlife habitat, and promoting mining and industrial development in key wildlife refuges.
These are only some of Trump’s attacks on public health and our environment. Environmental protection used to be bipartisan, now it’s part of the culture wars. If he is reelected these efforts will speed up. The American people must consider this extremism when we cast our votes.
Public Lands
The Trump administration has also attacked the public lands in the same way they have damaged pollution regulations. Trump started his term threatening to dismantle all of the national monuments that President Obama had established in his two terms. (This was in keeping with Trump’s efforts to erase as much of President Obama’s legacy as possible.) In the end, Trump only dismantled legal protections for two national monuments in southern Utah.
Trump cut Bears Ears National Monument by 85%. This area is rich in archeology and spectacular landforms. Three Native groups had co-management responsibility with the BLM and Forest Service but Trump eliminated their influence and snubbed their objections. Later we learned that uranium mining companies lobbied the Trump team to gain access to the national monuments. Trump rushed to open the area to uranium, oil and gas and he encouraged the off-road vehicle crowd to come on in and trash the landscape.
Multiple environmental groups sued Trump about Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument which Trump also slashed. The suits focused on the Antiquities Act which gives a president the power to establish a national monument without the consent on congress. The conservation groups argue that the Antiquities Act does not give a president the power to remove land or national monuments without Congress. The courts are taking a long time to resolve these suits.
The public backlash against national monument reductions seems to have scared Trump’s people away from reducing acreage at other monuments like the Siskiyous and Organ Mountains. In a second term Trump could try again.
Trump’s two Interior Secretaries both came from the oil industry. David Bernhardt, his current Interior Secretary, decided to close the Washington DC BLM office and move it to Grand Junction, Colorado. Most Washington BLM employees quit rather than move to a small city 5 hours from the closest major airport. This was exactly what the Trump people had in mind. They opened a new BLM office in Grand Junction in the same building with a large oil company.
Thus, the BLM no longer has staff to interact with Congress and other agencies in Washington. Hundreds of experts quit the agency.
Then Trump/Bernhardt hired one of the most radical, anti-conservation, anti-public lands people in the nation to lead the BLM. They appointed William Pendley to lead the BLM, and though this position must be confirmed by the Senate, the Trump folks didn’t call him “director” so he could serve indefinitely without Senate confirmation. He leased as much land to the oil industry as possible and tried to sell federal lands without success. In September 2020 a federal judge ruled his occupation of the directorship is illegal. Most of his decisions may be vacated.
Meanwhile the national parks never had a national director under Trump. David Bernhardt expressed his contempt for the hugely popular National Park Service by keeping most of the top directorship posts vacant and by proposing deep cuts in the NPS budget. Trump proposed a 13% budget cut every year he was in office. Congress refused to go along with any of this and increased the NPS budget.
Meanwhile over at the US Forest Service at the Department of Agriculture, Trump told the agency to get busy with commercial logging. Since the years of Ronald Reagan, logging has declined as the agency realized it was losing money and damaging areas popular with the public. It is not clear how much commercial logging actually increased under Trump but the push was on with Soviet-style timber targets .
Recently Trump scuttled the Roadless Area Rule which had protected millions of acres of virgin rain forest on the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska. Congress halted logging there in the 1990s. Now the saws could start to whine in the woods again and ships full of American logs could to to China and Japan.
Then Tump and Senator Murkowski rushed to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Drilling would industrialize a vast area of wilderness critical to hundreds of millions of birds and mammals. Oil would spill into the rivers and into the ocean. Toxic chemicals would spew into the air and water. Ships carrying oil would kill endangered marine mammals. Poverty would spread among native communities now dependent on the natural world for a large part of their livelihood.
And we could go on and on with Trump’s crimes against the public lands.
Voting matters.
