by Tom Ribe
For decades, taking care of our air, water and outdoors was a bipartisan concern. Our most important bedrock environmental laws were passed by a bipartisan Congress and signed by a Republican president in the early 1970s. Since then, keeping the air and water clean and protecting wildlife has become a partisan point of conflict. The environment is now a proxy in the culture wars.
The media ignores environmental issues for the most part. Recently, climate change has muscled itself into the headlines and political debates. But most Americans know very little about how their life support system is doing and what politicians are doing to help or hurt our food supply, our water and air, the oceans, and the big wild-lands we all hope thrives in places like Alaska.
Though the George W. Bush administration had a poor record on protecting the environment, the Donald Trump administration has gone off the deep end. They have radical environmental policies, on the far-right extreme of the ideological spectrum. And they hope you don’t know that.
Oil Everywhere
Donald Trump used his administration to open as much land as possible to oil drilling. He green-lighted oil and gas drilling along most of America’s coasts and throughout our public lands, places where past presidents would not go. But at a recent rally for his fans in North Carolina, he said he would now block oil drilling off North Carolina and Florida. Polls in both states show him in real trouble.
Will Americans be fooled but his eleventh-hour concern for the environment? His record is clear. Trump hired oil and coal industry executives to run the Environmental Protection Agency and our national public lands. Not surprisingly, they repealed pollution regulations, channeled public money to their industries, and opened land and water to oil and gas drilling everywhere they could. They ignore public objections and thwart public comments required under law.
With large fires raging in drought stricken western states, Trump condescends to tens of thousands of fire professionals, scientists, land managers and serious policy makers and tells them to “rake the forest”. Workers rake Trump’s east-coast golf courses, so of course in his mind hundreds of millions of acres of forests wilderness can be raked also. What is raking?
Trump and Mike Pence say forests should be “managed.” The lands have been managed for decades by tens of thousands of professionals, but they know nothing about the topic. By “managed” Trump means commercial logging. His staff believes that logging will calm fires though their real goal is commercializing public lands to make money. But scientists know logging makes fires more severe, ruins water supplies and kills wildlife.
Clearly, western states will get no help from Trump on the actual causes of these disasters. A warming and drying climate is the force behind the escalation of fires into million-acre monsters.
Trump spread oil drilling across our public lands, putting oil wells, roads, pipelines and oil spills in once protected places we all own together. Once oil drillers move into a place, they ruin the land for any other purpose. The administration cut federal oil royalties, so taxpayers get almost nothing in return for ruined lands in a time of oil glut. Trump repealed rules requiring oil companies to stop natural gas leaks which are a major problem. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas and leaks accelerate our climate emergency.
Donald Trump has been the most radical anti-environmental president in the history of the United States. Trump justifies trashing the outdoors and increasing pollution as “deregulation” to “stimulate the economy.” I believe these efforts are ideological — an effort to reject the culture of science, knowledge, and conservation which Trump’s followers find subversive and Trump believes are a personal affront.
Rejecting science and the idea that government should serve the people, Trump has accelerated global warming. He has done everything he can without Congress to increase air pollution. He tried to remove pollution controls from coal fired power plants and cars, taking America back to the 1950s and mirroring the policies of China. He punished California and other states for controlling auto pollution and he used the pandemic as an excuse to tell chemical plants, refineries, and coal fired power plants that they can turn off their pollution control equipment. These plants are usually in communities of color where people are sickened by air pollution.
The Trump team even worked to increase emissions of toxic hydrofluorocarbons and mercury from coal plants. Mercury causes brain damage in children. Coal plants are sited near Indian reservations and where the poor live.
Scientists know that certain new pesticides are killing bees needed to make our crops produce food. Trump’s team refuses to ban the pesticides despite knowing our food crops will fail as bees die off. Will we starve so the chemical industry can make profits? Ideology over science.
Trump’s people have done all they can to weaken wildlife protections, attacking the Endangered Species Act, destroying wildlife habitat, and promoting mining and industrial development in key wildlife refuges.
These are only some of Trump’s attacks on public health and our environment. If he is reelected these efforts will speed up. The American people must consider this extremism when we cast our votes.
Public Lands
The Trump people have also attacked the public lands in the same way they have damaged pollution regulations. Trump started his term threatening to dismantle all of the national monuments that President Obama had established in his two terms. (This was in keeping with Trump’s efforts to erase as much of President Obama’s legacy as possible.) In the end, Trump only dismantled legal protections for two national monuments in southern Utah. National monuments are places the public owns where protections keep the land wild and clean.
Trump cut Bears Ears National Monument by 85%. This area is rich in archeology and spectacular landforms. Three Native groups had co-management responsibility with the BLM and Forest Service, but Trump eliminated their influence and ignored their objections. Later we learned that uranium mining companies lobbied Trump to gain access to the national monuments. Trump rushed to open the area to uranium and oil and gas and he encouraged the off-road vehicle crowd to come on in and trash the landscape with motorcycles and off road buggies.
Multiple environmental groups sued Trump about Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument which Trump also slashed. The suits focused on the Antiquities Act which gives a president the power to establish a national monument without the consent on congress. The conservation groups argue that the Antiquities Act does not give a president the power to remove land from national monuments without Congress. The courts are taking a long time to resolve these suits.
The public backlash against national monument reductions seems to have scared Trump’s people away from reducing acreage at other monuments like the Siskiyous and Organ Mountains which they said they wanted to eviscerate. In a second term Trump could try again.
Trump’s two Interior Secretaries both came from the oil and coal industries. David Bernhardt, his current Interior Secretary, decided to close the Washington DC Bureau of Land Management office and move it to Grand Junction, Colorado. Most Washington BLM employees quit rather than move to a small city 4 hours from the closest airport. This was exactly what the Trump people wanted. They opened the new BLM national office in Grand Junction in the same building with a large oil company.
Thus, the BLM no longer has staff to interact with Congress and other agencies in Washington. Hundreds of experts quit the agency. In a second term, more damage would be done. BLM policy comes from political appointees in the Interior Department. The agency has reversed management plans made under the Obama administration that would have protected sensitive places like Chaco Canyon National Historic Park and Arches National Park. They have also generally ignored public comments on their policy changes.
Then Trump/Bernhardt hired one of the most radical, anti-conservation, anti-public lands people in the nation to lead the BLM. They appointed William Pendley to lead the BLM, and though this position must be confirmed by the Senate according to law, the Trump folks didn’t call him “director” so he could serve indefinitely without Senate confirmation. He leased as much land to the oil industry as possible. In September 2020 a federal judge ruled his occupation of the directorship is illegal. Most of his decisions may be vacated. But Pendley has refused to vacate his office, saying he serves at the direction of Trump and the court’s opinions are irrelevant.
Pendley’s appointment is consistent with a pattern in the Trump years where a person who strongly opposes the mission of a federal agency is put in charge of that agency. We see this at the Department of Education where Betsy DeVos, a radical proponent of private and religious schooling runs education policy regarding public schools.
Numerous Trump appointees never came to the Senate for confirmation as required by law. These people probably could not be confirmed in a Republican Senate because of their views and their resumes. These appointments violate the Federal Vacancy Reform Act. Lawsuits to force their removal churn through the courts while taxpayers pay to defend Trump’s failure to follow the law on this matter.
Meanwhile the national parks never had a national director under Trump. David Bernhardt expressed his contempt for the hugely popular National Park Service by keeping most of the top directorship posts vacant and by proposing deep cuts in the NPS budget. Trump proposed a 13% budget cut for our national parks every year he was in office. Congress refused to go along with any of this and increased the NPS budget slightly. Even so, the NPS budget is barely enough for the agency to function.
Meanwhile over at the US Forest Service at the Department of Agriculture which manages more than 400 million acres of our land, Trump told the agency to get busy with commercial logging. Since the years of Ronald Reagan, logging has greatly declined as the agency realized logging was losing money and damaging watersheds and wildlife areas and often angering the public. It is not clear how much commercial logging actually increased under Trump but the push was on with Soviet-style timber targets .
Recently Trump scuttled the regulations which had protected millions of acres of virgin rain forest on the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska. Congress halted logging there in the 1990s. Now the saws could start to whine in the woods again and ships full of American logs could go to China and Japan. Millions of people who visit Alaska on cruise ships (pre and post pandemic) will see clearcuts rather than beautiful forests as they ply the waters towards Juneau.
Then Tump and Senator Murkowski rushed to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Drilling would industrialize a vast area of wilderness critical to hundreds of millions of birds and mammals. Oil would spill into the rivers and into the ocean. Toxic chemicals would spew into the air and water. Ships carrying oil would kill endangered marine mammals. Poverty would spread among native communities now dependent on the natural world for a large part of their livelihood as the boom and bust oil industry provided uneven income and environmental ruin for their residents.
And we could go on with Trump’s crimes against the public lands. This is the tip of the iceberg.
Voting matters.
(all photos copyright Tom Ribe)
