The Next Four Years May Spell Environmental Disaster
The following commentary is one in a series from KCET and Link TV writers and contributors reflecting on how the incoming president will shape, change, and redefine the future of California.
Here's a prediction: The Trump administration will prove, in all likelihood, to be one of the most catastrophic periods of time for the environment in U.S. history.
That’s not just due to the fact that the Republican Party, which now controls two of the three branches of the federal government, has been hostile to environmental protection since the late 1970s. That particular fact certainly plays a role in the current bleak prospect for the planet, but Republican politicians have been trying to gut environmental regulations since the days of the Reagan administration.
What makes the looming Trump administration different, aside from the Republican Party’s significant rightward shift in the last eight years, is the incoming President himself. Much has been said about Trump’s aversion to facts, such as the frequent examples of his insisting that thoroughly documented events never occurred. That aversion to fact gives Donald Trump a uniquely hostile relationship with science. And environmental protection, whether at the federal level or elsewhere, absolutely depends on clear science to be effective.
I should say that no recent administration, be it Democrat or Republican, has had clean hands when it comes to suppressing environmental scientists. Even Bill Clinton, likely the most ardent environmentalist to occupy the White House in the last half century, dismissed the recommendations of federal scientists on matters ranging from livestock grazing to logging. George W. Bush’s administration famously fired a cartographer whose mapping of caribou habitat threatened to impede oil drilling on the Alaskan North Slope, and overrode recommendations by the National Marine Fisheries Service on water flows in the Klamath River, resulting in a horrendous die-off of Chinook salmon in that river in 2002. Barack Obama, while significantly friendlier to the environmental sciences than his predecessor, muzzled federal scientists whose findings might have proved inconvenient to energy development on public lands, and kowtowed to extractive industries while dismissing science on the status of several endangered species.
But Trump has already signaled plans to shift federal policy decidedly in the direction of ending environmental protection. His pick to run the EPA, Scott Pruitt, opined during his confirmation hearings that humans have had “some influence” on the changing climate, but expressed doubt over the extent of that influence, saying that it’s a “matter of debate and dialogue” in the scientific community. That’s not true: the only debate and dialogue among climate scientists these days is over just how horrible climate change will be: will sea levels rise 12 feet in the next 80 years, or “only” four feet? That’s a misrepresentation common among climate change denialists, and it’s troubling coming from Trump’s pick to run the federal agency charged with regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
Pruitt cut to the core of Trump’s environment problem during his hearing when he maintained he would carry out the EPA’s mission of regulating pollution so long as those regulations did not hurt economic development. But that’s the whole point of environmental regulations: to stand in the way of economic development that would hurt the planet.
Trump’s pick for Interior Secretary, Montana Representative Ryan Zinke, trotted out a similar line on climate science at his confirmation hearing. As Interior Secretary, Zinke would be responsible for managing energy extraction from 500 million acres of public lands, and more than three times as much ocean floor. So that’s troubling. Zinke did have some reassuring things to say about some of the federal environmental scientists that would come under his supervision, saying that there were “some great scientists” working at the U.S. Geological Survey. But Zinke would be responsible for supervising hundreds of federal scientists at other agencies as well, from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Reclamation to the little-known Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. A few reassuring words at a confirmation hearing may not count for much when Zinke's working for a President who has vowed to gut environmental regulations.
One of the most worrisome events during the transition was Trump’s request that the Department of Energy “provide a list of all Department of Energy employees or contractors who have attended” workshops and meetings on climate change issues. This revelation came on the heels of Congress restoring the so-called Holman Rule, which gives Congress the power to fire any individual federal employee or cut their annual pay to $1.00. It’s hard to imagine a rationale for the Holman rule’s reinstatement other than punishing federal employees that bring up pesky facts in the course of doing their jobs.
And Trump's pick for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, is the CEO of ExxonMobil, which company deliberately, for more than 40 years, covered up the science behind greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change.
We’ve had anti-environmental presidents before, and similar majorities in Congress even more often. So what makes Trump especially worrisome when it comes to environmental protection? Simply this: science underlies every aspect of environmental protection, from determining how much lead poses a threat in drinking water, to calculating the how much CO2 the atmosphere can handle without cooking us all, to how much intact habitat a species needs to survive.
We have a person setting the nation’s environmental policy who cannot admit when he is wrong.
Science, if you strip it down to its bare bones, is the practice of examining the world and learning new things about it, some of which will force you to change your ideas about how the world works. You could say that science is the process of figuring out how wrong you are.
It’s abundantly evident that Trump cannot tolerate the possibility that he might be wrong. Witness the border wall, which will be ruinously expensive, environmentally devastating, and have little to no actual effect on human migration. Trump has easy access to the best-qualified experts in the world who could tell him all about the harm the border wall will do, and the unlikelihood that it will deter people who want to enter the United States, especially considering that Mexico’s “Baby Bust” has pushed immigration to its lowest level in decades. They could tell him, in other words, that his plan is misguided. Yet Trump reiterated his intention to build a border wall at a January press conference.
We have, in short, a person setting the nation’s environmental policy who cannot admit that certain “inconvenient truths” argue against his whims. Donald Trump, it seems, has an existential antipathy to science, whether that science offers him inconvenient information about the efficacy of a border wall, the importance of curbing our greenhouse gas emissions, the solid evidence that the western U.S. has been enduring a multi-year drought, or the general scientific consensus that fish need water. If an inconvenient environmental fact threatens to stand in the way of whatever it is Donald Trump decides he wants on any given day, he may well dismiss that fact as "a hoax."
And then he’ll deny he ever said it.
Were Trump faced with a Congress committed to even rudimentary environmental protections, there’d be some level of check on his worst impulses. But this Congress threatens to outpace even Trump’s desire to roll back environmental protections, with discussions of repealing the Endangered Species Act already well under way. Which means it’s very likely that the next four years will see a catastrophic erosion of the environmental protections Americans have come to take for granted, in arenas ranging from air quality to wildlife protection.
It may be that the only hope the environment has is the majority of those Americans who favor strong environmental protection, if they speak up. They'll have to do so forcefully, and soon.
Banner photo: Billy Wilson, some rights reserved
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