Being an environmentalist in the Trump era doesn’t allow for boredom. Nor joy, if looking only at what the administration is generating.
We are in a climate crisis, watching global temperatures and sea levels rise, polar ice and tundra disappear, storms and droughts magnify. All scientific evidence points to rapidly worsening climate conditions caused by human production of greenhouse gases from the drilling and burning of fossil fuels.
Yet the small steps taken by the Obama administration to cut those emissions are under full frontal attack. Senator Ed Markey called Trump’s environmental executive order issued last week (“Trump ends ‘war on coal’,” March 29) a “war on the environment.”
Bingo.
Trump ordered Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department to try to suspend the Clean Power Plan, a major Obama EPA rule aiming to cut emissions from existing United States power plants 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Most of that savings will occur through the retiring of older, more polluting, coal-fired facilities. The fate of the Clean Power Plan is still pending in D.C. District Court and Trump now wants it “reviewed” by EPA head Scott Pruitt, a fossil-fuel industry champion. Review inevitably will mean its gutting, though that will take a while.
While the administration works to maintain pollution from existing plants, the order will also attempt to weaken standards for future ones and will lift the Obama moratorium on coal leasing on federal lands.
Trump is a salesman and his policy has been sold on the backs of mining communities suffering economic decline and hungry for the well-paying jobs that existed decades ago. However, as with so many of his pitches-cum-policy, this one is, not surprisingly, not based in facts. Coal has lost 20,000 jobs in the last 10 years but renewable energy produced 35,000 jobs in 2015 alone. Further, most of that coal job loss was due to mechanization in mining (tearing off mountain tops) and coal’s inability to compete with cheap natural gas. Deregulating coal pollution will not change this reality.
Much of the rest of the order attempts to cleanse the concept of climate change and the inherent social impact of carbon emissions from all of government’s plans and programs. Obama had made strides in injecting climate assessments into much government policy.
Instead, now under Trump, energy production (sold as “energy independence,” even though there is a coal and natural gas glut) is promoted at all cost. One of those costs is the continued wasteful spewing of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide in the short term, from natural gas wells. Obama’s EPA had taken steps to regulate methane leakage.
The executive order comes as a package with massive cuts in the Environmental Protection Agency staff and its future budget and the intended halting of more stringent limits for vehicle emissions.
Should the Trump executive orders prevail, it would eliminate the possibility of the U.S. reaching its goals under the Paris Climate Agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
But the damage may come before then. Should developing countries like India see a lack of commitment from the U.S. to the treaty, they may very well respond in kind, shelving their own investment in renewables and conservation.
The executive order will be fought in court, of course, but the administration is doing its best to weight that fight in its favor. Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch is a steadfast foe of the Chevron standard. That principle states that courts should defer to federal regulatory agencies when the regulators are carrying out laws that are ambiguous.
Assessing Gorsuch’s writings and decisions, many environmental experts believe that he would side with corporate interests against federal regulations issued to enforce such bedrock legislation as the Clean Air and Clean Water acts. It would endanger past precedent of defining carbon dioxide as a pollutant that can and must be regulated by the EPA.
This Trump “war on the environment” could mean doom and gloom, but recent months have shown us both the ineptitude of the administration’s rule and the power of angry people robbed of their rights and their future. We are seeing a politicizing of multitudes who have never used their voices before and a solidarity among those affected by different issues now willing to take to the streets in support of each other.
The massive April 29 People’s Climate March with its scores of sister marches around the globe demands not only the cutting of greenhouse gases, but institution of economic and racial justice. It takes a stand for immigrants and refugees and for workers deserving a living wage.
Right here in the Valley, there is intertwined support for an anti-militarism march on April 17 in Northampton, a pro-science march in Amherst on April 22 and the western Massachusetts manifestation of the PCM for Jobs, Justice and Climate. (For those able to make the trek to Washington, $65 bus tickets are available at https://climateactionnowma.org/.)
Small groups of friends are drinking coffee at kitchen tables all over the Valley while calling their senators to filibuster Gorsuch’s confirmation and block Trump’s environment- and human-wrecking policies. Others are mobilizing to fight the pending destructive incursion of the Tennessee Gas pipeline into the Otis State Forest.
It is a movement with a steep learning curve born out of desire to defend the planet and future generations from the Trump assault. Which side are you on?
Marty Nathan, MD, is a mother and grandmother who lives in Northampton and works at Baystate Brightwood Health Center in Springfield’s North End. She is a steering committee member of Climate Action NOW.