Trump’s Earth Day Purge

I was a very young cat, just turned 14 years old, when 20 million Americans celebrated the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Schools closed where I was raised in White Plains, N.Y. to give students like me freedom to take part in all manner of eco-sustaining activities.

I gathered a few friends to join me downtown to paint the White Plains train station and drag tires and old appliances from the dark, heavily polluted waters of the Bronx River. Our exploits were documented by New York Times reporter Joseph Lelyveld in the second-to-last paragraph of a page one story on Earth Day in the next morning’s paper.

The first Earth Day, and each of the next 53, celebrated the momentous course correction in how our industrial society regarded its responsibility to land, water, air, and public safety. America no longer idly accepted the damage and danger from rank exploitation of forests and wild lands, and the insidious tide of chemical and biological pollution.

This year, the 55^th anniversary of Earth Day is no celebration. It is scarred by President Trump’s insidious and careless campaign to nullify the environmental achievements of the last half century. The expanse and depth of the attack is much more aggressive than any previous president’s effort to unleash polluting industry from oversight. The agencies and institutions that sustained America’s program of environmental protection are being pulled into the government-wide purge of people and policies viewed as a threat to Trump’s authoritarian impulses, and what his aides call the “woke and weaponized” bureaucracy. 

Hazards in Policy
Virtually every feature of the regulatory infrastructure  that sets limits on contamination and safeguarded habitat is a target. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, committed last month to dissolve the agency’s scientific research office, reduce the agency’s staff by 65 percent, and kill 31 regulations affecting toxic air emissions and water discharges, climate change, and waste management. Zeldin is prepared to kill bans on PFAS, the “forever chemicals,” and other dangerous compounds in consumer goods.

Zeldin’s scheme is meant to end environmental monitoring and increase toxic pollution that amplifies health hazards. It is the leading edge of a much larger administration campaign, uncovered by the Times, to dig into the code of federal regulations and to either kill hundreds of consumer, workplace safety, and environmental rules, or not enforce them. The Times called it a “quest to dismantle much of the federal government: deregulation on a mass scale.”

Trump’s assault goes much farther than putting executives of polluting industry in charge of the E.P.A. and other regulatory agencies, which was the favorite pro-business tactic of previous Republican administrations. This president is bullying major universities by holding hostage billions of dollars in federal research grants, many of which are meant to improve environmental monitoring, and develop non-polluting agricultural and industrial practices.

The administration eliminated U.S.A.I.D., which brought to a close the extensive international conservation programs that protected endangered species, battled poaching and illegal fishing, and provided millions of people clean water and safe sanitation.

The work to eliminate American efforts to limit atmospheric emissions that are warming the atmosphere is especially pernicious and dangerous. Backed by entirely fictitious assertions that climate change is a “hoax,” the president is revving up old engines of policy and practice that will raise concentrations of climate-harming pollution.

He is pulling  the United States out of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, a collaborative international agreement slow global climate change. He’s working out how to evade the 2007 Supreme Court decision that enabled EPA to limit carbon dioxide emissions.

He’s cancelling grants, incentives, and levying tariffs intended to squelch production and sales of clean energy generating equipment and electric vehicles. Trump also wants to waive requirements for polluters to collect and report their emissions of CO2, and the other heat-trapping gases that cause climate change.

Acting Crazy
Other than his desire to re-open closed coal-fired power plants and revive U.S. coal production the president has not made perfectly clear his justification for the broadside on environmentalism.

Certainly, there have been instances when strict pollution prevention rules fostered economic pain at the grassroots. For example, the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act cleared sulfur dioxide and mercury from coal-fired electrical plant air emissions. The legislation ended acid rain and made fishing safer,  but it also raised operating costs that contributed to utility industry decisions to close old electrical plants, and along with them reductions in coal consumption. Thousands of utility industry workers and coal miners lost their jobs. 

Similarly restrictions in the 1990s on logging in national forests in the West helped increase the number of endangered spotted owls. But they also forced the closure of many independent sawmills and caused joblessness in small towns.

Yet one of the redeeming strengths of America’s environmental protection program is its flexibility, its capacity to adjust to changing conditions. Regulations that required cities to clean up chemically contaminated areas to pristine condition, put into effect in the 1980s,  cost $20 million to $40 million an acre and blocked redevelopment of old industrial sites that impeded modernization in American cities. The cleanup regulations were changed in the 1990s to provide the same level of safety at much lower cost, leading to a powerful revival of construction projects in U.S. cities.

In the 21^st century new provisions in law and incentives designed to slow climate change has yielded a clean energy and clean vehicles production industry that is generating new jobs. They also are helping the U.S. compete for leadership in one of the century’s most important industrial sectors.

There is no such nuance to what the president is up to with the environment. Somehow he sees a dirtier country as a primary ingredient in his inaugural formula for “a nation that is proud, prosperous, and free.”

The question is this: will Americans accept more pollution, more risk, more ecological damage? Our history and devotion to Earth Day principles are primary evidence that we won’t.

A Useful History
In 1970, driven by a powerful current of public support, Congress and the states approved protective statutes, and paid for enforcement and research programs, that produced one of the most successful public interest advances of the last half century. America’s environment got much cleaner. America’s economy got much bigger. The air cleared in Los Angeles. The Hudson River became clean enough for sturgeons and swimmers. Humpback whales returned to the North Atlantic.  Protected wilderness expanded to 112 million acres, an area larger than California. 

The life-sustaining value of environmental protection attracted deep support from voters, regardless of their political affiliation. Even big business embraced Earth Day’s virtuous principles.

 I’ve spent my entire life in service to environmentalism and its achievements. Trump’s madman bid is to return to the era of exploitation and hazard. My response, and the responses of every American I know, regardless of party affiliation, is this: We’re not going back.