All eyes are on Joe Biden and his supporters at the Democratic National Convention this week and next week the Republicans meet to crown Donald Trump. The Democrats are mentioning climate change or global heating often in their speeches and the republicans likely will not let these words pass through their lips. Donald Trump’s climate change denialism has become the official policy of the republican party despite the fact that it has no basis in scientific reality. Trump is busy with environmental deregulation.
The Trump administration believes that climate change is a hoax perpetrated to attack our economy by leftists. This is a pretty extreme view that requires ignoring large bodies of scientific evidence from a wide range of academic and international institutions. The debate about whether the climate is changing is long settled but the Trump folks cling to a fringe view that various climate upheavals are either not real or they are part of a natural fluctuation in the weather.
On top of these beliefs, the Trump folks have an anti-regulation agenda and they have taken aim at all federal environmental laws. Partly their campaign is based on the belief that regulation hinders the economy and that environmental laws are entirely unnecessary as companies will voluntarily control pollution. A second motivation for deregulating lies in the above climate beliefs and Donald Trump’s obsessive need to erase the presidency of Barak Obama.
Since even the republican Senate won’t go along with repealing or even weakening various environmental protection laws, the Trump folks have done all they can in the regulatory arena or by using executive orders to weaken laws. Their efforts have been met with hundreds of lawsuits by public interest groups and most of these lawsuits have succeeded, stopping the Trump efforts dead. Undeterred, they soldier on.
Trump’s main focus has been the laws that target the oil industry or laws that reduce the demand for oil. There is no question that Donald Trump and many republicans (and some democrats) get large amounts of campaign cash from the oil industry and many politicians believe that our economy needs to be centered on oil and cannot evolve beyond oil dependence.
In any case we might take stock of a few of the laws that the Trump gang has attacked in the last three years. Keep this list in mind as the media and politicians largely ignore this issue or talks in generalities about climate change.
Since March 1, the time when the pandemic went national, the Trump administration has rolled back car and truck emission standards, allowing car and truck makers to reduce the efficiency of new vehicles so they will burn more fuel and pollute the air more. This is a huge setback for the American people. Urban people especially will breath more toxins and greenhouse gas emissions will rise, worsening global heating.
For the first time in 40 years, vehicles of all kinds are now the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US. The coal industry is dying, and more vehicles are on the road. Thirty to forty percent of our greenhouse gas output comes from vehicles.
The good news is that California, the largest car market, has agreements with car makers not to reduce their pollution standards. Trump has tried to block these agreements with a tantrum of lawsuits.
Meanwhile the Trump crew has attacked the mercury pollution standards put in place by past presidents. Mercury comes from burning coal and is a neurotoxin. The Obama administration had tightened mercury pollution standards because low income people near coal plants were being poisoned. This rollback will cause brain damage in children and shorten the lives of adults living near coal plants.
Past administrations had regulated the disposal of refrigerators and other appliances that contain toxic chemicals that attack the ozone layer. Trump relaxed these standards to allow industry to vent toxins into our air. This saves money for industry, but it harms the public.
Next Trump’s gang relaxed rules for building coal fired power plants and oil refineries so that corporations can build new plants without certain air quality permits. This is called “streamlining” in conservative-speak. It is highly risky for companies to build plants without air quality permits because they will face new air quality regulations in the future and lawsuits in the near term.
The good news is that the coal industry is dying rapidly, and new coal fired power plants will not be built in the US anytime soon. The oil industry is shrinking as well.
Meanwhile, as Trump increases the amount of air pollution in the US and speeds the warming of the planet, the covid-19 crisis continues. City dwellers who breath the pollution have irritated lungs that probably are more susceptible to the coronavirus. Thus, the attack on clean air laws may not be timed well in terms of public health. But the Trump people know their time is probably short. If they lose the election in November, we can expect a radical increase in moves against environmental law before they pack up and head back to the golf courses.
Ironically the Trump folks said the pandemic required them to stop enforcing clean air and water laws through the Environmental Protection Agency. They have stopped reviewing deadly pesticides that are killing off pollinating insects thus endangering our food supply. The Trump folks only focus on “helping” industry. They have no focus on pubic heath or the welfare of the voters or the health of our natural world.
And this list doesn’t even take into account their push to destroy vast areas of Alaska wilderness with oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the huge copper mine near Bristol Bay which will kill off a major portion of our salmon supply. Nor does it take into account the huge areas of public land leased to the oil industry which will render it useless for any other purpose.
But since the media mostly agrees that these issues are not interesting to the public, few outlets cover them. And the public mostly has no idea how the environment has been trashed by the Trump people. More and more people are concerned about the environment and hopefully they will become informed. The Center for Western Priorities found in polling that concern about public lands is a major issue for voters in the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest.
Joe Biden will have his work cut out for him, reversing the vandalism of the Trump people.
