Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
A hazy sunset behind the U.S. Capitol is caused by smoke blown across the country from the intense wildfires on the West Coast, September 15, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
In mid-September, Washington, D.C.’s sun glowed bright orange in a hazy sky. While some may have called it picturesque, others knew right away this was a small demonstration of the damage and destruction from the West Coast’s raging wildfires. Democratic Rep. Harley Rouda of California, one of the wildfire hot spots, knew to check the air quality on the apps on his phone to confirm what he was observing.
“Everybody was like, ‘Oh, look at the beautiful sunset.’ And I said, ‘You know why’s it’s like that? This is the pollution coming across the United States from the wildfires in the West,’” Rouda explained in an interview with the Prospect. Since becoming chairman on the House Oversight Environment Subcommittee, he’s held hearings on everything from climate change to FEMA preparedness to EPA oversight, with the goal of helping to educate his colleagues across the aisle, as well as the public, on the urgency of addressing climate change.
Since President Trump has taken office, the realities of the climate crisis have become more tangible. The Trump administration has made rolling back Obama-era environmental protections a priority at the Environmental Protection Agency, which is helping accelerate climate change and putting Americans’ health at risk. By weakening clean air and water standards, rolling back regulations, and allowing more drilling on both federal lands and waters, Trump’s EPA is just making it easier for polluters to pollute, says Ann Carlson, professor of environmental law at the University of California, Los Angeles.
According to The New York Times, President Trump has rolled back 100 environmental policy regulations with the help of former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, now an energy lobbyist, and the current agency head Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist. Sixty-eight regulations have been changed, with another 32 in progress.
If Trump wins re-election, he will have four more years to execute this deregulation agenda, and likely accomplish much more than crushing Obama’s climate legacy.
“He [Trump] not only wants to undo what Obama did, but publicly go completely in the opposite direction. Just stick the thumb in Obama’s eye,” says David Cassuto, professor of environmental law at Pace University. “If the idea is less regulation is better, then there are plenty more regulations to deregulate.”
While other countries are working to develop more green technologies or abandon fossil fuel energy all together, the United States is steadily moving in the opposite direction. Under the Trump administration, the incentives to invest in and cling to fossil fuels have only grown.
“Four years has already been terrible. Eight years is a disaster,” Carlson says. “We have a very short window to try to mitigate the worse damages of climate change … so four more years of doing nothing, of allowing [and] encouraging fossil fuel consumptions, fossil fuel demand, is just a fiasco.”
The last four years of environmental policy show a steady increase in the Trump administration’s pace at attacking regulations. A House Oversight Committee investigation released in January showed “widespread ethics issues,” where political appointees ignored their duty to fill out ethics pledges and disclose conflicts of interest. Some of Trump’s picks simply ignored the pledges, and others got to work while holding off on their submissions, according to a letter sent from the House Oversight Committee to the EPA.
While President Trump’s anti-Obama objectives were clear, his administrators were not always able to craft the changes that they would have liked without leaving themselves open to litigation.
The courts have slowed down a portion of the regulatory changes in the last four years, from halting progress on the Dakota Access Pipeline in the Midwest and forcing the EPA to fix loopholes that allow coal power plants to release air pollution in Pennsylvania, to pausing changes to what’s considered acceptable methane emissions. However, the Supreme Court has yet to hear a major case on these efforts. A second term, along with Trump’s third high-court nomination and his hundreds of lower-court federal judge picks, could sway the courts in deregulation’s favor.
Part of Trump’s agenda is based on rethinking the cost of pollution and ignoring the science on the long-term health risks of being exposed to fumes and toxins that infect people’s air and drinking water.
“The administration is trying to suppress science through rules like this rule that prohibits agencies from relying on scientific studies that reveal underlying medical data of people exposed to air pollutants,” Carlson says. “They are trying to monkey with analyses that support environmental regulation because they are cost-effective.”
A second term, along with Trump’s third high-court nomination and his hundreds of lower-court federal judge picks, could sway the courts in deregulation’s favor.
In one instance regarding what level of mercury emissions is acceptable, the Trump administration re-evaluated the health benefit of capping emissions at about $6 million per year. But the Obama EPA evaluated the health benefit to be $80 million annually. Mercury emissions can be naturally occurring, but mercury is also one of the most hazardous pollutants emitted by coal-fired power plants. By ignoring studies that show more information about medical data and long-term health effects, Team Trump is able to shrink its responsibility to the general public and support an industry most other developed nations are trying to abandon.
The House Oversight hearings try to explain that the cost of responding to climate change now will in fact be less expensive in the long run than trying to ignore the science, Rouda says. In addition to the long-term effects of rising global temperatures and the mass migration that will follow when people move away from wildfires and hurricane-caused flooding, the most vulnerable people in the U.S. are already feeling the impacts of deregulation.
Communities of color and disadvantaged communities are on the front lines for these immediate effects, Cassuto says. People of color are more likely to live in areas that are in violation of the already-low EPA standards for pollution, and they are less likely to have access to quality health care.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, also a member of the Environment Subcommittee, hosted what she called a “toxic tour” in her district, to show how people’s health and everyday lives are affected by decisions made in Washington. For people in Tlaib’s district and many other places in the U.S. that are in the vicinity of coal plants and refineries, as well as industrial agriculture sites, the health impacts are observable, but under this administration, they are also ignored.
“The environmental situation in the United States unfortunately materially impacts communities of color and impoverished communities more than the rest of America,” Rouda says, also citing the field trip to Detroit.
In addition to harmful deregulation in the U.S., President Trump is also disrupting international climate crisis response efforts. Last November, he infamously pulled out of the Paris Agreement, the leading international treaty with the sole purpose of addressing climate change and limiting global temperature rise to about 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels. While almost no country is meeting its climate goals, the U.S. is the only nation to not make any effort at all.
“This is the kind of leadership vacuum which the Trump administration celebrates,” Cassuto says. He added that a second-term Trump could withdraw from a host of international treaties that protect the environment, from the Migratory Bird Act to protections for the world’s oceans.
In addition to harmful deregulation in the U.S., President Trump is also disrupting international climate crisis response efforts.
It’s impossible to anticipate how Trump will govern for the next four weeks—let alone the next four years. But his track record of flouting science and disrespecting experts is well established. And this ethos is already affecting the rank and file at the EPA. In addition to resignations from more than 1,500 employees, those who remain at the agency are battling with their bosses to even accept the scientific realities of the coronavirus.
The EPA, which is the largest council within the American Federation of Government Employees union, voted no confidence in Administrator Wheeler’s ability to safely handle the coronavirus pandemic. Employees from both the D.C. headquarters as well as local offices across the country explained at a Zoom town hall how they were being pushed to move back into their offices without proper safety precautions, and in disregard of local statistics on coronavirus testing and spread.
“It’s tough to say what another four years would look like, when every single day brings a new surprise,” Rouda says. “But I assume it will be a continuation of what the last four have been. And if that is indeed the case, for America and Americans, we’re going to have an unhealthier, dirtier environment than we would have under a Joe Biden presidency. That’s a fact.”
