Courtesy of the Bastrop Advertiser
Jan. 30, 2020
By Bill McCann
While President Donald Trump’s impeachment and the crisis with Iran distracted the public, the Trump administration demonstrated again that it is more concerned about coddling polluters than protecting our planet. On Jan. 9, Trump announced his administration’s proposal to gut rules governing the nation’s landmark environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
The proposal is part of a long, growing list of Trump administration actions that threaten to undo a half century of environmental progress in the United States. Trump’s raids on the environment have included gutting rules limiting emissions of climate-changing carbon dioxide from power plants; rolling back rules on leaks of climate-changing methane from oil and gas operations; rolling back rules relating to safety of offshore drilling operations; and rolling back fuel efficiency standards for new autos. Also, last week the administration announced it was easing limits on pollutants dumped into the nation’s smaller streams and in wetlands, a dirty-water scheme to appease developers and agricultural interests.
The attack on NEPA may be the most disturbing. Fifty years ago, author-journalist George Laycock wrote a book, “The Diligent Destroyers,” about how public agencies and big corporations were laying waste to America. Meanwhile, amid growing public concern about the environment, Congress passed NEPA and President Richard Nixon signed it into law. It required the federal government to review the environmental impacts of any major federally funded or permitted project – everything from highways to oil pipelines to mining or drilling on federal lands.
The law was so significant that more than 100 other nations developed policies modeled after it. NEPA has stood as a bulwark against abuses by the federal government – and industries it is supposed to regulate. It prevented them from steamrolling projects by requiring that they first address the environmental consequences. Until now.
Now, the Trump administration wants to “modernize” NEPA. That’s Trumpspeak for undermining the law, speeding up pipeline and other projects, giving short shrift to their effects on our air and water, and ignoring their potential impacts on climate change. Not surprisingly, the administration’s proposed changes to NEPA are similar to those requested recently by a group of organizations representing a who’s who of the nation’s biggest industrial polluters.
Proposed NEPA revisions relating to climate change are particularly egregious. Under the proposal, federal agencies would no longer have to assess the cumulative impacts of new projects, in effect allowing them to ignore the potential impacts of major projects on climate change. As Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune stated, the administration’s proposal “is nothing more than an attempt to write Donald Trump’s climate denial into official government policy.”
Trump’s ignorance on the subject is maddening. Last week, Trump tried to belittle international concerns about climate change by calling activists “prophets of doom.” The evidence is all around us – rising sea levels, melting glaciers, massive killer wildfires in California and Australia, unprecedented floods, monstrous hurricanes and record heat waves.
Some of the evidence is coming from our own government. On Jan. 15, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration separately reported that the Earth’s average global surface temperatures in 2019 were the second warmest in the 140-year history of modern record keeping. Only 2016 was warmer. The past decade was the warmest on record. Every decade since the 1960s has been warmer than the one before.
Government scientists have made it clear that what’s happening is no quirk of nature. It’s caused by the buildup of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, pumped into the atmosphere mostly from human activities.
By shredding science-based regulations designed to help protect the planet, Trump’s diligent destroyers are granting short-term benefits to corporate allies at the expense of humankind’s health and welfare.
