Trump dismantles environmental protections under cover of coronavirus
Administration is weakening protections ahead of the
election, making changes that could take years for a Democratic president to
undo
Emily
Holden in Washington
Published
onMon 11 May 2020 07.00 BST
The Trump administration is diligently weakening US
environment protections even amid a global pandemic, continuing its rollback as
the November election approaches.
During the
Covid-19 lockdown, US federal agencies have eased fuel-efficiency standards for
new cars; frozen rules for soot air pollution; proposed to drop review
requirements for liquefied natural gas terminals; continued to lease public
property to oil and gas companies; sought to speed up permitting for offshore
fish farms; and advanced a proposal on mercury pollution from power plants that
could make it easier for the government to conclude regulations are too costly
to justify their benefits.
The
government has also relaxed reporting rules for polluters during the pandemic.
Trump’s
ambitions reach even to the moon, which he has announced he wants the US to
mine.
Gina
McCarthy, formerly Barack Obama’s environment chief, now runs the Natural
Resources Defense Council. She said the Trump administration was acting to cut
public health protections while the American public is distracted by a public
health crisis.
“People
right now are hunkered down trying to put food on the table, take care of
people who are sick, worry about educating their children at home,” McCarthy
said. “How many people are going to really be able to sit down and scrutinize
these things in any way?”
McCarthy
said the government was “literally not interested in the law or science”, and
that “is going to become strikingly clear as people look at how the
administration is handling Covid-19”.
The Trump
administration is playing both offense and defense, rescinding and rewriting
some rules and crafting others that would be time-consuming for a Democratic
president to reverse.
The
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has written what critics say will be a
weak proposal for climate pollution from airplanes, a placeholder that will
hinder stricter regulation.
Trump
officials have been attempting to create a coronavirus relief program for oil
and gas corporations, a new move in his campaign to back the industry and
stymie global climate action. The president has sown distrust of climate
science and vowed to exit the Paris climate agreement, which the US can do
after the election.
Historians
say Trump’s presidency has forced a pendulum swing back from the environmental
awakening of the 1960s and 70s, when there was bipartisan support for
conservation. Protecting the environment – and particularly the climate – is an
issue that has become embroiled in political ideology.
“What Trump’s done is create a blitzkrieg against the
environment … trying to dismantle not just Obama’s environmental achievements
but turn back the clock to a pre-Richard Nixon day,” said Douglas Brinkley, a
history professor at Rice University who is writing a book on the subject.
“It’s just
death by a thousand cuts. It’s not one issue, it’s just across the board.”
The
administration is under a tight deadline to secure changes before the election.
A US law, the Congressional Review Act, allows lawmakers to more easily rescind
regulations or rollbacks issued later in an election year.
“They’re
hitting a now or never timeline,” said Christine Tezak, the managing director
at the analysis firm ClearView Energy Partners. “There’s a lot they want to get
done before the election, just in case.”
Some trends
are working against Trump – including states advancing environmental goals, and
low-cost renewable power and natural gas helping reduce the climate footprint
of the electricity sector. Even Houston, an energy hub, has issued a climate
action plan. Yet such contributions are not expected to be enough to fulfill
America’s role in stalling the global crisis.
Environmental
advocates have challenged many of the Trump changes in court – and won. The
Natural Resources Defense Council has sued 110 times and says it has prevailed
in about 90% of lawsuits resolved.
Recently,
judges tossed out a permit for the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline and decided
the EPA cannot bar scientists who receive federal grants from serving as agency
advisers.
Jeff
Holmstead, a lawyer with the firm Bracewell who represents regulated industries
and was a deputy EPA administrator under George W Bush, argued that many of the
changes characterized as “rollbacks” are actually “sensible, reasonable
regulatory reforms” or fixes to problems.
“It’s
impossible to understand the Trump administration’s EPA unless you go back and
look at the Obama administration,” he said. “In many groups there was a sense
that there really had been a great deal of regulatory overreach. And even if
you disagree with that, the regulatory programs created problems that they
didn’t come back and fix.”
‘This is
about who we’re protecting’
Trump’s
deregulatory agenda has addressed some issues industry would rather were left
alone. The agency is changing the way it calculates the benefits of mercury
controls for power plants. Companies had already complied with the rule and
most didn’t want it changed. But the revision is meant to set a precedent for
the government to ignore some positive health outcomes of regulation.
Trump’s
weakened standards often go against science too, critics say.
Last month,
for example, the EPA decided not to tighten rules for soot pollution, refuting
rebutting guidance from experts that more stringent standards would save lives.
The EPA has also repopulated advisory boards with representatives from industry
and conservative states and is trying to change what science it can consider
when developing health protections.
If a
Democrat takes the White House, it will take years to reverse some changes.
Moving faster would require Democrats holding both chambers of Congress. Even
then, industry would fight hard.
Christopher
Cook, the environment chief for Boston, said Trump’s efforts had been
“incongruous with all the actions that major cities are taking”.
“The thing
I would ask most Americans to consider when they’re supporting stronger
regulation is that this isn’t about what we’re protecting against, this is
about who we’re protecting,” Cook said, noting that places with more pollution
are faring worse under the coronavirus pandemic.
“Covid has
been a dry run for the climate crisis. We’ve seen the populations that Covid
affects because it attacks the respiratory system. We can’t continue
with bad air in America.”
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