Here’s Why the Environment Is Under Attack in Modern-Day America

Modern domestic U.S. history can be summed up like this:

Before about 1980, most Americans had good opportunities to get ahead if they worked hard, but since that time, they’ve fared very poorly.  The vast majority of the wealth created in the last few decades have gone to the rich, where the common American has struggled.  Understandably, they’re angry.

Enter Donald Trump, who stirs them into a frenzy, while blaming a host of supposed enemies: immigrants, Muslims, the Washington elite.

This entire process has been terrible for the natural environment, and there are several forces all conspiring to make this worse with each passing month:

• Starting with the most obvious, the Trump administration is aggressively rolling back pollution standards, deregulating industries, dismantling the relevant government bodies, e.g., the EPA, opening up new areas to oil and gas exploration, and selling off or leasing public lands for this purpose. As linked above, Harvard Law School does an excellent job at tracking all this.

• Trump supports the fossil fuel industry, while actively attacking renewable energy.

• Since 82% of the tax breaks went to corporations and the super rich, the people who voted for him, most of whom still support him, are actually in slightly worse shape financially than they were before he took office.  Angry people, sadly but understandably, have very little concern for what this planet’s going to look like in a few decades.

• Angry people are also “truth-challenged,” to coin a phrase, i.e., susceptible to lies, which is an important factor, given that they live on a steady diet of false and misleading statements from their leader, a pathological liar.

• There is an inverse relationship between Trump support and education.  This means that many (not all) of Trump’s supporters find themselves unable to grasp the basic science on which many environmental issues turn.

• The corporations, now far more powerful than ever in history, have essentially usurped the legislative branch of the federal government.  Now we have lobbyists literally writing laws.  Corporations are run by people who carry a fiduciary responsibility to maximum shareholder value, and this, obviously, is bad news for our skies and waterways, since environmental concerns can only reduce profits.

Not that it matters to this particular discussion, but the level of respect the rest of the world has for Trump is even lower, by far, than it is here.  Shown in this link are nine charts from the Pew Research Center that lay out this appalling fact.

One can only hope that Trump’s words and actions at this point are becoming so insane that his support base will wane, and there’s some recent evidence to support that theory.

Wish us luck.