Undoing the Damage from Trump’s Environmental Rollbacks
Big City Pollution
A growing number of Americans are expressing their displeasure at their president, given Trump’s insensitivity to spate murders of black people at the hands of police, his gross mishandling of the pandemic, and his allowing Russia to maintain bounties on the heads of American soldiers. At this point, it appears that he’ll be leaving office in January if not before.
Having said that, The New Republic believes it will be a long struggle to restore the regulations the Republican-controlled EPA has erased. They write:
The Trump administration’s response to a pandemic that has killed more than 120,000 Americans and forced much of the country into a devastating economic slowdown has been a massive failure, leading to new levels of anger and disappointment at the president. But none of that has stopped Donald Trump and his aides from rolling back as many environmental protections as they possibly can.
Since March, the Environmental Protection Agency has weakened mercury air pollution standards, permanently lowered regulations for vehicle tailpipe emissions, and finalized a reinterpretation of the Clean Water Act that opens the door to expedited pipeline development.
At the White House, Trump has been just as busy. In June he signed an executive order that allows companies to bypass key environmental reviews on infrastructure projects like mines and issued a proclamation to allow commercial fishing in a protected monument off Maine’s coast that was created specifically to limit such activity. The administration has called the moves necessary environmental adjustments during the pandemic and important measures to prop up the U.S. economy, including the suddenly struggling oil and gas industry. But it’s obvious that the White House has no intention of slowing down rollbacks—and in some cases finalizing hard-to-reverse rules—until the last moments of the administration.
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All this is true, but the way I see it, if Trump leaves by January (preferably in handcuffs), the environmental damage he will have done to this planet will be far more limited than most people understand. The greatest portion of that damage will have been the four years of U.S. development and deployment of cleantech that our civilization lost.
Most of the environmental rollbacks haven’t gone into place, as they are held up in the courts, and those that have been implemented can be immediately rescinded.
The thing to fear at this point is that somehow Trump remains in office, and has another four years to ruin essentially every element of humankind and the planet on which it resides.
