By Melvin A. Goodman,
There are no limits to the pernicious ugliness of Donald Trump’s war on the environment and its inhabitants. We have examples of personal ugliness toward the late Senator John McCain and his family as well as the treatment of the Gold Star family during the 2016 presidential campaign. There is policy ugliness in the racist Muslim travel ban, which the Supreme Court upheld, and the cruel separation of families at the U.S.-Mexican border, with children held in isolation from their parents. The use of federal forces against peaceful protestors in Washington, D.C. in June and in Portland in July are fascist in their intent.
Trump’s lack of responsibility for the dangers and deaths of the pandemic should ensure his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, but there are no certainties in American politics. Trump’s ignorance and indifference toward the novel coronavirus, which is causing tens of thousands of additional deaths, is ironic, given his attacks on Barack Obama for the Ebola outbreak in 2014. Trump proclaimed that “President Obama has a personal responsibility to visit & embrace all people in the US who contract Ebola.”
The most loathsome aspect of Trump’s pathological behavior is related to the pandemic. COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). And yet, Trump continues his attack on bedrock environmental regulations established over the past fifty years. During the 2015-2016 presidential campaign, Trump promised to dismantle most of the key climate and environmental policies that were in place. He has been enormously successful, according to the New York Times, with more than sixty environmental rules and regulations officially reversed, revoked or otherwise rolled back. An additional 34 rollbacks are in progress even during the pandemic.
REVOKING AND ROLLING BACK ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS
The reversals of Obama’s legacy have worsened the environment at a time when the respiratory impact of COVID-19 is unabated. Transportation and the production of electricity are the greatest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, accounting for more than half of the total. But Federal agencies will no longer have to take climate change into account when assessing the environmental impacts of highways, pipelines and other major infrastructure projects, according a Trump administration plan to weaken the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act.
- Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has severely weakened the Obama-era fuel economy and greenhouse gas standards for passenger cars and light trucks. The EPA revoked California’s power to set stricter tailpipe emissions standards than the federal government, and withdrew the legal justification for limiting mercury emissions from coal power plants.
- The Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which set strict limits on carbon emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants, was replaced by a ruling to allow states to set their own rules.
- Trump weakened an Obama-era rule to reduce air pollution in national parks and wilderness areas and weakened oversight of some State plans for reducing air pollution in national parks;
- Revoked an Obama Executive Order that set a goal of cutting the Federal government’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent over ten years; and
- Relaxed air pollution regulations for plants that burn waste coal for electricity.
Trump’s Climate Retreat
Trump’s climate denial has made the United States an environmental “pariah state” in a global community committed to addressing the problem of climate change. Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Accord made the United States the only nation in the world to reject the climate accord. The two original outliers—Syria and Nicaragua—have joined; Nicaragua stayed out initially because the agreement didn’t go far enough. Trump has undermined the rich legacy of the Obama administration in the environmental field, which included getting the world’s other major polluters—particularly China and India—to agree to reduce their emissions.
Trump’s Allies
Trump’s obscene actions during a pandemic will translate into an additional loss of life. There is no sign of congressional oversight and accountability for these excessive actions. The Senate is firmly in the hands of Trumpian loyalists, who are blocking legislation that would address the economic and social costs of the pandemic. The House of Representatives is in the capable hands of Nancy Pelosi, but the legislation that comes out of the House sits on the desk of Senator Mitch McConnell. Who knew that “one man; one vote” meant that McConnell is The Man? So “one man; no vote.” McConnell will be tested once again because the House has passed a major environmental bill to dedicate $36 billion in funding for the EPA and the Department of the Interior. The bill would block Trump’s efforts to gut the National Environmental Protection Act.
Meanwhile, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany argued last week that “science should not stand in the way” of the full reopening of schools, meaning “kids being able to attend each and every day at their school.”
Accordingly, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, reversed direction and played down the health risks of returning to school. As the pandemic began, Trump tried to cut the CDC budget, arguing that the charge COVID-19 would be worse than the flu was the Democrats’ “new hoax” designed to unseat him. After accepting the validity of the pandemic, Trump then touted ineffective drugs as a miracle cure and suggested injecting bleach into the body to cure the sick. His ignorance and contempt for science is endless.
For the Record
As of July 30, 2020, nearly four and a half million people in the United States have been infected with COVID-19, and more than 150,000 have died. China with three times the population of the United States reports 86,000 infections and 4,600 deaths. At the end of last week, the 27 nations of the European Union with a population of 510 million—1.5 times as big as that of the United States— were averaging 80 deaths a day from COVID-19; the United States averaging nearly 1,000 deaths.