Trump
praised
his administration’s “environmental leadership” despite promoting policies that have weakened environmental regulations.
Trump has allied himself with coal, oil and gas industry groups,
nominated a former energy lobbyist to run the Environmental
Protection Agency and vowed to pull out of the Paris climate accord.
He’s also pushed for the repeal of regulations that would have
cracked down on coal-burning power plants. When more than 180
countries agreed to tighten regulations on the global trade in
plastic waste, the U.S. opposed the deal. In their statement to the
U.N. Environment Assembly, U.S. officials acknowledged that dumping
millions of tons of plastic debris into the ocean “required urgent
action.” Yet they opposed what they called a “prescriptive
approach,” drawing criticism from environmentalists who accused the
administration of being beholden to plastics producers.
1) Departure from the Paris climate agreement
In
June 2017, less than five months after his inauguration, Trump
announced his plan to pull
the US out
of the Paris climate agreement. He told an audience outside the White
House: “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not
Paris”. He claimed the agreement, signed by the US and nearly 200
countries in 2015, promising to cut greenhouse gas emissions to keep
global heating below 2C, unfairly disadvantaged the US and negatively
impacted jobs and factories.
2) Shrinking national monuments and animal protections
Trump
attracted broad criticism in December 2017 when he announced plans to
slash the size of two national monuments in Utah.
Bears Ears was cut from 1.5m acres to 228,784 acres and Grand
Staircase-Escalante almost halved from approximately 2m acres to
1,006,341 acres – marking the biggest elimination of public lands
protection in America’s history. In August 2018 officials announced
plans to allow more mining
on the land and to sell some of it off – despite previously vowing
not to. The following month, the administration announced plans to
remove key provisions from the Endangered Species Act – prompting
conservationists to warn it could put vulnerable plant and animal
species in more danger.
3) Rollback of the Clean Power Plan
The
Environmental Protection Agency is in the process of finalizing plans
to dismantle
the
Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era rule intended to cut emissions from
power plants and encourage them to move towards natural gas and
renewable power. The regulations, which were announced in 2015 and
had the backing of hundreds of businesses, were billed at the time as
the “biggest step that any single president has made to curb the
carbon pollution that is fueling climate change”.
4) Cuts to clean water protections
The
Trump administration plans to remove
protections
from thousands of America’s streams and millions of acres of
wetlands, which is feared will harm wildlife and enable pollution to
enter drinking water. Under the proposal, fewer waterways would
require permits to pollute – including agricultural runoff and
industry waste. Currently, protected waterways provide drinking water
to approximately 117 million people.
5) More methane
In
September 2018, the Trump
administration
announced its plans to repeal rules that aim to restrict methane
leaks on public and tribal lands. The Obama administration tried to
cut leaks by forcing oil and gas companies to capture methane (a key
gas involved in global heating), update technology and arrange to
monitor leaked gas. But the Department of the Interior has branded
the rule “flawed” and “unnecessarily burdensome on the private
sector”
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