Trump the environmentalist? That sounds like a dirty joke.
Who says President Trump doesn’t have a sense of humor?
Last week, Trump gave a speech that was a howler even by his standards. The president who surrounds himself with coal miners tried to portray himself as a champion of the environment. You can’t get much funnier than that.
Start with the setting. With Trump in the Rose Garden was former coal industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, who runs the Environmental Protection Agency. Also there was David Bernhardt, the former oil and mining lobbyist who runs the Interior Department.
“From day one,” Trump said, “my administration has made it a top priority to ensure that America has among the very cleanest air and cleanest water on the planet. We want the cleanest air, we want crystal clean water, and that’s what we’re doing and what we’re working on so hard.”
Actually, from day one Trump’s top priority has been to reverse Obama-era regulations designed to make the air and water cleaner. He also wants to roll back standards on car and truck efficiency. Pollution fines are down 85 percent from Obama’s presidency.
Former officials from Republican and Democratic administrations believe that Trump — in less than three years — has the worst record on environmental protection since Congress and Richard Nixon created the EPA half a century ago.
Christine Todd Whitman, EPA administrator under George W. Bush and former New Jersey governor, said of Trump’s speech, “He’s living in his own reality.”
But the man who saved his career through so-called reality TV has heard that the environment matters to potential swing voters. So he staged a performance and tried to make enough Americans forget reality.
Trump is correct that, compared to decades ago, America’s water is cleaner and our air is clearer. Credit for that improvement, though, goes to past presidents. Under Trump, the nation is regressing.
The Associated Press reported that there has been a 15 percent increase in high-air pollution days nationwide since Trump took office. Greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming hit a 25-year low as Obama left office. Under Trump, emissions are rising.
Speaking of global warming, Trump did not even mention the greatest threat to the environment — climate change. No surprise there. Trump’s policy on global warming is ignorance, calling it a “hoax” and withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement.
Such denial especially should matter to voters in Florida, one of the states most vulnerable to rising seas. Business groups understand that the state’s economy is at risk and that resiliency will be very expensive. The risk and the cost will be greater with no White House leadership.
There is none now. Recently, the Trump administration began changing the timeframe for studies that examine the consequences of climate change. The new references will stop at the year 2040, after which the most serious problems to Florida will begin to present themselves if greenhouse emissions keep growing.
Trump’s policies endanger Florida in other ways. He wants to open the Atlantic coast to oil and gas drilling for the first time and to allow seismic testing in the Atlantic. He wanted to bring drilling much closer to the Gulf coast. He wants to relax drilling safety rules, a move that would increase the chances of another BP spill.
Outside the White House, reality — environmental and political — is settling in. Last week, U.S. Rep. Brian Mast announced the formation of the Conservation Council. Mast is the Republican congressman who represents Martin County, which has suffered so much in recent years from discharges of pollutants in Lake Okeechobee water.
Also in the group is U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Republican who represents the Panhandle. He is practically Trump’s avatar in the U.S. House, but he opposes expanded offshore drilling. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill affected the Panhandle more than any other part of Florida.
Trump suspended Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which would have allowed states to decide how to meet new limits on greenhouse gas emissions. It was a marketbased program that Florida likely would have met without major changes because so much electricity in this state now comes from natural gas, which burns cleaner than coal.
A New York University study estimates that Trump’s policies will lead to dirtier air and thousands of additional deaths each year. Just a few days ago, the EPA announced that it will allow use of a pesticide that the agency itself has called “very highly toxic” to honeybees, whose populations have been crashing.
Trump lied when he said that the United States has the cleanest water and air on the planet. Only once did Trump tell the truth on the environment: “We’re working hard, maybe harder than all previous administrations, maybe almost all of them.” Yes, to make the air and water dirtier and more dangerous.