Delegates hold pro-coal signs at the Republican National Convention in
Cleveland, Ohio, July 19, 2016. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Trump v. the Earth
By Amy Davidson, The New Yorker
02 April 17
He said that his order puts "an end to the war on coal." In reality, it's a
war on basic knowledge of the harm that coal can do.
In late 2006, President George W. Bush's Environmental Protection Agency
argued before the Supreme Court that it did not want to regulate greenhouse
gases, and that no one could make it do so. It certainly had no wish to
accede to the desires of Massachusetts, which, with eleven other states, had
sued the E.P.A. for failing to establish guidelines on emissions of carbon
dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons. The states pointed
to the agency's charter, under the Clean Air Act, which instructs it to
regulate chemicals released into the air "which may reasonably be
anticipated to endanger public health or welfare." They asked why the
E.P.A., which had refused even to consider whether greenhouse gases fell
into that category, thought that it could ignore the law.
The Court, in a landmark 5-4 decision, written by Justice John Paul Stevens
and issued ten years ago this week, agreed with the states. As a result of
that ruling, the E.P.A. began the formal process of looking at the science
documenting the risks posed by greenhouse gases, and recognized that those
emissions had contributed to a public-safety crisis affecting not just the
nation but the planet. The E.P.A.'s resulting "endangerment finding," as it
is known, was issued in 2009, in time for Barack Obama's Presidency. It
became the immediate object of conservative scorn and of furious efforts in
Congress and the courts to invalidate it, but it held up, and formed the
basis for new standards on auto emissions and for Obama's Clean Power Plan,
issued in 2015. More than that, the finding was an assertion of the
principle that politicians cannot entirely ignore either science or the rule
of law.
We now have, in Donald J. Trump, a President who shows disdain for both.
Trump's lack of interest in climate change as anything other than fodder for
conspiracy theories involving Chinese hoaxers reached its fullest expression
last week, in a "Presidential Executive Order on Promoting Energy
Independence and Economic Growth." The order asks every agency of the
federal government to review its rules and to purge them of measures that
inconvenience the fossil-fuel and nuclear-power industries. In particular,
it directs the E.P.A. to rewrite the Clean Power Plan, which had called for,
among other things, the replacement of old and dirty coal-burning plants.
The plan would, it was projected, result in eight hundred and seventy
million fewer tons of carbon pollution released into the atmosphere, as many
as thirty-six hundred fewer premature deaths in the United States between
now and 2030, and ninety thousand fewer asthma attacks in children.
President Trump said that his order puts "an end to the war on coal." In
reality, it is a declaration of war on the basic knowledge of the harm that
burning coal, and other fossil fuels, can do. Indeed, it tells the
government to ignore information. The Obama Administration assembled a
working group to determine the "social cost" of each ton of greenhouse-gas
emissions. Trump's executive order disbands that group and tosses out its
findings. Scott Pruitt, the new E.P.A. administrator-who, as attorney
general of Oklahoma, had joined a lawsuit attempting to undo the
endangerment finding-announced that the agency was no longer interested in
even collecting data on the quantities of methane that oil and gas companies
release.
The order also revokes several of President Obama's executive orders and
memorandums. One of them, "Preparing the United States for the Impact of
Climate Change," sought to remove regulations that deterred private industry
from responding to climate change in innovative ways; another asked the
military to assess the threats posed by climate-induced upheaval
abroad-wars, famines, flows of refugees. Trump further called for a
scrubbing of any reports or rules that might have developed in response to
those documents, and thus any insights that might have been gleaned from
them. He chooses to cast such worries aside at the Winter White House,
Mar-a-Lago, even as that property sinks into the rising sea, a process that
has begun and, by many scientific estimations, will result in its grounds
becoming one with the Atlantic during Barron Trump's lifetime.
For all the talk of American greatness, Trump's actions regarding climate
change represent a historic abdication of leadership. The Clean Power Plan
was important not only for its domestic effects but because it was a down
payment on America's commitments under the Paris climate accords. If fully
implemented, the plan would have got the United States about halfway to the
goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by a quarter, from their 2005
levels, by 2025. Without the plan, the goal will almost certainly not be
reached, despite the pledges of several states and even some large energy
concerns to adopt greener technology. Meanwhile, China, in a reversal, is
proclaiming itself to be the champion of Paris, if only as a way of
enhancing its own world-leader credentials.
Trump says that he is still deciding whether to formally withdraw from
Paris, but it is now clear that if he doesn't it will only be because he
can't be bothered with the paperwork. The United States government's
meaningful participation in the fight against climate change appears, at
least for the next few years, to be at an end. The Friday before issuing the
order, in what looked like an attempt to cheer up Republicans about their
health-care defeat, Trump granted a permit for the completion of the
Keystone XL Pipeline, which the Army Corps of Engineers had earlier blocked.
Much of this will end up in the courts, as yet another set of Trumpian
actions that make the expected confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme
Court so consequential (and the abandonment of Merrick Garland so tragic).
Gorsuch's mother was a notably anti-environmentalist head of the E.P.A.,
under Ronald Reagan, and Gorsuch would take the seat formerly occupied by
one of his judicial idols, Antonin Scalia, who was in the minority in
Massachusetts v. E.P.A. (In his dissent, Scalia grumpily wondered why the
agency couldn't just say that climate-change science was unsettled, and
leave it at that.) The Trump Administration has already proposed defunding
the E.P.A. by thirty-one per cent and cutting its staff by twenty per cent,
raising questions about how it can fulfill its most basic responsibilities.
Soon enough, the Supreme Court may be asked, again, what it means for the
E.P.A. to be derelict in its duties, and for America to have a President
whose main mode of action is reckless endangerment.
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