Making America dirty
Politicians often use their final days in office to advance unpopular ideas and schemes, and so it is with President Donald Trump.
No, we’re not talking about Mr. Trump's outrageous and unprecedented undermining of our democracy as part of an attempt to overturn a fair election, although that is odious, dangerous and deserving of scorn. We’re talking instead of Mr. Trump’s move to roll back scores of environmental rules and regulations in the waning days of his presidency. Maybe Mr. Trump should hawk some more campaign merchandise: red caps emblazoned, “Make America Dirty Again,” anybody?
The environmental rollbacks threaten, among other changes, to weaken protections for migratory birds, undo rules intended to protect human health from air pollution and expand drilling in federally protected lands, including in the Arctic. And this week the administration rejected a plan to set tougher standards on soot, which can make COVID -19 even more lethal.
Most of the changes are designed to benefit the politically influential oil and gas industries; they will do little if anything to benefit everyday Amer
icans concerned about a warming planet or clean air and water.
It’s a continuation of what we’ve seen during the last four years from the Trump administration, which has used its time in power to implement an unprecedented assault on decades of progress to clean America’s air and water. The consequences for the environment and the climate will be lasting.
But environmental advocates say the administration has accelerated the push as part of a scorched-earth effort to change long-standing rules before President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January. The effort is a pro-industry agenda taken to an extreme, and the reason it’s being implemented after the election is obvious: It is deeply unpopular with most voters.
That includes the administration’s attempt to open drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a longstanding notion that is opposed by a solid majority of Americans. Last week, the administration scheduled a sale of oil leases in the refuge for early January.
Overall, the rollbacks increase the challenge ahead for Mr. Biden, who has promised an array of policies aimed at protecting the environment and reining in carbon emissions. Some of the last-minute changes being implemented by the Trump administration will be easy for the new president to reverse. Others, though, would require lengthy processes before they ’re undone.
There may be some potential to stop at least some of these moves if environmental groups mount legal challenges that might run out the clock on Mr. Trump’s time in office. That would allow a new administration — one that has vowed to take the environment and climate change seriously, and is unlikely to kowtow to the oil and gas industries — to scrap these attempts to undo so much progress.
There is , though, a silver lining, however perverse, in the Trump administration’s last-minute deregulation push. It is a tacit admission of Mr. Trump’s election defeat — and an affirmation that a president with a dreadful and disastrous environmental record will soon be out of power. Thank goodness for that: The Earth and all its creatures will be safer.