Comments due March 10, 2016
Let’s play a game.
It’s April 30, 2017: Day 100 of President Donald Trump’s first hundred days. The champagne floweth, the Wall is under construction, and now we’re more or less federally mandated to refer to 1600 Pennsylvania as the Gold House. The president’s bombastic governance is buoyed by a comfortable Republican congressional majority. After the Senate blockaded Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016, it confirmed a jubilant Ted Cruz, who has only cemented far-right ideology in the justice system. The GOP has had a busy hundred days. This is patriot country.
How’s the environment doing?
Most people don’t really talk about the environment anymore. The last time a journalist tried to ask Press Secretary Sean Hannity a question about climate change, she was booted from the briefing room. We can talk about land, though. With a real estate developer for president, we spend a lot of time talking about land.
Under the fast-tracked Business Opportunities for Appalachia Act (BOFA), mountaintop removal mining has decimated something on the order of 25 percent of the peaks in Central Appalachia. During late January’s fire sale of the American West, the private sector scooped up all but a fraction of the land previously owned by the federal government. Upwards of 15 percent of the leases are reportedly held by the blind trust that currently controls the Trump Organization’s assets.
Miles of the Pacific Northwest coastline are unrecognizable — it turns out we needed a couple more good swathes of land to host burgeoning U.S. crude exports to Asia — but hey, the Gold House lawn looks great. And besides, Seattle’s got it easy compared to Oakland, which is now just one large coal export terminal.
How’d we end up here? Well, what you have to understand is that a lot happened at once. President Trump moves without hesitation.
If we’re going to start with something, though, it probably began with the Paris climate change agreement the world was so happy to adopt in 2015. One of the first things that occurred after inauguration day was the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. This didn’t bode well for international climate action writ large. Without the U.S. on board, China and India pulled out, citing uncertain economic times ahead, leaving the European Union to try and salvage a neutered deal. Sure, the U.S. was broadly condemned, but with OPEC’s mid-2016 restrictions on oil supply and an uptick in the price of Gulf crude, cheap American oil sounded pretty good to China, which was happy to help finance those shiny new Pacific Northwest oil export terminals. They went up pretty quick, and that was enough to keep the president happy.
It’s important to keep this president happy.
After the president pulled out of the Paris Agreement, Congress swiftly, predictably, rolled back the Clean Power Plan for curbing carbon pollution from power plants and the Obama administration’s updated methane rules for cutting leakage from landfills and the oil and gas sector. Trump, flanked by coal executives amid much fanfare, signed the legislation. (This was before the dismantling of the EPA, but we’ll get that later. We’ve only made it to early February.) Either way, with a new originalist on the bench, SCOTUS was bound to strike down the power plant regulations anyway.
Early March is around when things really started to get interesting.
Reinvigorated by a friendly business climate and overt federal support, Shell has begun preparations to head north. Very north. A global scramble for Arctic oil, currently in full tilt, is only avoiding escalation because of the president’s cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin (and the worldwide acknowledgement that the States’ indiscriminate bombing of Syrian, Iranian, and Iraqi oil supply chains has actually left Arctic oil with one of the lowest risk profiles).
Speaking of Russia, Vice President Sarah Palin recently returned from her first state visit to Moscow, where she, Fred Singer (her chief of staff), and U.S. Trade Representative Carl Icahn (everyone thought he’d been pegged for Treasury!) punched out the first unofficial draft of a new public-private partnership incentive program aimed almost exclusively at international oil pipeline construction. Keystone XL, now back on track, was small potatoes compared to the Big and Tall versions on the horizon. Between the vice president’s program and President Trump’s invocation of eminent domain in more or less whatever direction his eyeballs are swiveled, pipelines are effectively the new highways. (Don’t worry about the highways, though. Secretary of Transportation Chris Christie has made sure to prioritize highway funding over bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly transport.)
Sure, there’s the whole climate change thing, and of course, academics and non-profit types remain today at near-nuclear war with the government on all things coal, oil, and gas; but the new U.S. moratorium on climate science research makes it difficult to put forth any new arguments.
Then there was mid-March’s spike in oil train explosions. You couldn’t really blame the GOP for that one, but environmentalists did anyway. The probability of an oil train explosion remained constant, but with more fracked oil came more trains. (As well as subsidies for private sector fire departments. It has become abundantly clear that we’ll need a lot more fire departments to deal with a rather unprecedented uptick in railway explosions.)
Of course, nobody, Republicans included, was really sure what would happen when Trump dismantled the Environmental Protection Agency. It kinda just happened in one of his fits of rage, and we’re frankly still sorting that one out. It turns out that the first thing that happens when you shutter an agency is that its 15,000 employees get angry. The next thing that happens is that the private sector steps in for the purpose of “economically efficient environmental protection.” EnviProtect Systems, which now holds a near monopoly on pipeline-spill cleanup and gas-leak plugging, was rumored just this month to be pondering a bottled-water business play. Fracking contamination has been a boon for private-sector water.
This is, of course, to say nothing of the elimination of the Department of Energy and the drastically curtailed purview of the Bureau of Land Management, but there’s probably not time to dive into the intricacies of Interior Secretary Rand Paul’s days. Suffice it to say that the man works long hours.
And the climate is still changing, but don’t tell Sean Hannity I said that.
10 comments:
I'm not really into politics, so I'm not really sure about all of Trump's policies. But from what I know, he hasn't talked a whole lot about the environment, nor what he will do to it, with it, how to fix environmental-related problems, etc. Honestly, I'm not even 100% sure he knows what's going on with everything in the environment. Who even knows if he would continue America's participation in environmental talks? A lot of people are concerned with oil in the Middle East, Trump most likely included, and it is actually the #1 spot on their 'big environmental issues' list. I personally feel like the President of the United States should care more about just 1 or 2 environmental issues. I mean, as the President you can't be conserned with all of the issues all of the time, but dealing with at least a handful within your term(s).
-Elizabeth Piper Phillips
It seems that no matter which policy Trump plans to enact it will negatively affect the US environment equally as much if not more than the economy itself. The land-delelopment driven mindset will greatly destroy and deplete our non-renewable as well as our renewable resources. Being led by a government that is not environmentally conscience and does not react to the negative impacts that world trade or development has on our planet we will be in havoc. The Paris Agreement has promised major carbon emission reductions, a truly promising start to regenerating the health of the environment and reducing the harm that is being emitted globally. By backing out we would be setting the example that other countries with greater emissions can do whatever they please without putting up the costs to reduce pollution rates and clean the air in their respective countries with affects the world as a whole. If Trump was president we would be willingly killing our planet, we would destroy the economy and international relations and everything that has taken much tedious work and time to resolve and begin to replace and replenish. With all of this hard work we need to fight to keep the world environment on the right path. The Paris Agreement was just the beginning to a new reform, we need to build on that not back out of it.
The sad and terrifying aspect of this article is that this could be a very real future for the United States if Trump is elected President. Although just based on what Trump has done and said in the past, if he is elected President the status of the country and the world could be a lot worse than what this article says. This article proves how important it is to elect the right officials to office and what electing the wrong officials would do for this country. I think it would be interesting to see an article talking about the presidency 100 days after the election of another candidate with more liberal views, like Bernie Sanders. I think the outcome of Bernie's election would be a lot more positive than the effects of Trump's election would be.
-Marrina Gallant
Donald Trump has a very concerning view on the Environment and Environmental Policy. He does not just deny that climate change is occurring; he calls it a hoax, and says those who warn of global warming only want to raise taxes. He is less outspoken on other environmental issues, though he sued unsuccessfully in 2013 to block plans for wind turbines in Scotland that would power 65,000 homes, arguing, in part, that they would mar the view from a golf course he was proposing to build. Trump has even stated in the past that he would not hesitate to cut the Environmental Protection Agency.
- Vinay Kaushik
I looked up Trumps polices on climate change and he says its a hoax, that the world goes through changes without human interference. Some of what he is saying is kind of based on fact, there has been changes in the climate of the earth that human had no part of (look at the ice ages). But, I read in the times a week ago that the coastal tides are the highest since the creation of Rome. I feel that these changes are occurring so rapidly now that the factor of production have a hand in the raising temperatures. The economic scale is just to large for the environment as we know it to continue as it is. I believe that Trump has appealed to the greed of the American people. A lot of Americans have gained economic wealth through methods that have destroyed the environment like energy providers, real estate developers, or agricultural giants. It is hard to tell somebody not to produce and loose economical for the environmental sake. They will not be around long enough to see the environmental changes, good or bad, and they will give up their wealth in the process. The only solution I see that will make everybody happy is the invention of no emission engine which according to the laws of thermal dynamics is impossible.
It's interesting, because there's a large segment of China that is aware of the effects Climate Change has on IT, at least theoretically (I haven't read the actual models as of yet), so I at first figured that it would be more loathe to back out of the Paris agreements than this suggests. However, looking into it they're motivated enough by industrial expansion (which frankly makes sense for them to be worried about on some level, they're a large amount poorer than us) that they might do it anyway.
Perhaps the "environment vs jobs" fight is replicated all over the world. Though the impact is bigger further away from us.
Trump is purely a business man who has made money over the years. Electing him as the president will equip him with political as well as monetary power. This is dangerous in a democracy because power is centralized in the hands of just one man and it has the potential to disrupt the balance. Trumps policies will clearly be profit oriented and not be environmentally responsible.
Being a businessman and supporting the economic growth automatically means that you are not environmental friendly. However, there are some exceptions when entrepreneurs could show how they really care on environmental issues, for example, Bill Gates who recently invested money in the bright future for nature. Regarding Trumps ideas on issues, it can be clearly noted that the candidate does not care about nature at all. Furthermore, he treats it like a resource of wealth, while the current situation could show the whole world that nature is something that nations should protect. The candidate does not except the climate change either, “Climate change is a hoax.” I made some research over Trump’s opinions, and found out a plenty of interesting information on the web .Last spring and summer, workers at Trump National Golf Club in Loudoun County chopped down more than 400 trees along the Potomac River so their golfers could have a better view of the water. In Loudoun County, officials said they objected to the removal of the American elms, green ashes and black locusts when Trump’s people approached them with their plan last spring, according to Danny Davis, the county administrator’s chief of staff. But there was nothing they could do to prevent it. In a telephone interview, Trump defended the removal of the trees, saying it was legal and that his organization spent “tens of thousands of dollars” cleaning up the trash and debris along the shoreline after he bought the 800-acre course in 2009. This just proves that Trump is not a good candidate for presidency, but a businessman. America does not need that.
No matter who is the next President of the United States, we must first understand that climate change is a real and threatening issue. Now; lets talk about Trump. He is a businessman, and that's just the thing. He sees the economic benefits of natural resources (ie;land) and not the environmental benefits of such things. A business man as president, who is open to compromise (because in order to mesh environmentalism and economics, there must be compromise),could be a potentially good thing. Donald Trump, however, has shown again and again that he is unable to do just that, compromise. As one of the wealthiest real estate mongrels in the world, Trump has already left a negative environmental footprint as a result of economic expansion. I wonder why so many people are surprised that a selfish, Real Estate Tycoon; once elected, would act as a selfish Real Estate Tycoon. Trump is unable to think about the environmental impacts of his actions, and if he is, he's too old to care about future generations. Which brings me back to my original point; a selfish president that cares only about the environment will appeal to environmentalists, and a selfish president that cares only about economic growth will appeal to economists. In this case, Trump just so happens to be the candidate who selfishly cares about economics; and because the environment is a more pressing issue at the moment than the state of the economy, a Donald Trump presidency would be a disaster.
The environment under Trump could potentially be very affected. Trump knows one thing, and that is money. In today's world, not enough people care about environmental issues. People are so caught up in the "now", they aren't worried how are environment will be in 10 to 20 years. Trump's impulsive actions and besides for real estate, unknown investments and hand shakes made could be catastrophic to our environment. I believe it truly lies in the fact that people are not nearly educated enough of environmental issues for it to matter. Everyone cares about money and daily expenses and needs rather than if people are fracking in another state. I wouldn't personally know about fracking if I didn't hear about it and read about it. If more people knew about issues such as fracking, the possibility of attacking arctic oil, or building international pipelines, people would change their perceptions on them.
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