Unraveling Trump's Toxic Agenda

[babylonsister]

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/donald-trump-environmenal-agenda-738964/

October 19, 2018 11:38AM ET
Unraveling Trump’s Toxic Agenda
The administration is on an insane fossil-fuel bender — hastening catastrophic climate change and gambling with our health
By Phoebe Neidl & Andrea Marks


Nobody had high hopes for Trump’s environmental policy. He had, after all, said climate change was a hoax and sent out more than 100 skeptic tweets even before running for president. But the speed, recklessness and spite with which his administration has sought to upend environmental protections has been breathtaking. Climate change aside, even the common-sense need to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink is being challenged as the administration has unleashed a slew of regulatory rollbacks. And his science-denying, fossil-fuel-fetishising policies couldn’t come at a worse time — the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just published its most dire report yet, advising that if we don’t get to zero carbon emissions by 2050, we’ll blow past a 1.5 C temperature rise, the threshold for disaster.

Below, a list of Trump’s most reckless policies yet.

Gutting Fuel Standards

Donald Trump is promising every American a less-efficient car, so they can spend more money at the gas pump, breathe in more air pollution and cook the globe quicker with carbon emissions. “This is one of the single most damaging rollbacks attacking climate and clean-air safeguards in American history,” says Vickie Patton, general counsel at the Environmental Defense Fund. Standards set in 2012 by Barack Obama would have doubled gas mileage by 2025, but Trump is freezing those improvements (a decision even automakers like Ford and Honda have spoken out against). Plus, he’s trying to strip California of its legal right to set its own standards, which have historically functioned as a national benchmark. The administration’s own analysis of the rollback predicts the planet will warm a catastrophic 4 degrees Celsius by 2100, but argues not much can be done to stop it, so why bother trying. Controlling transportation emissions — the largest man-made source of carbon dioxide in the U.S. — would be a good start. According to the research firm Rhodium Group, this rollback could mean an annual carbon increase greater than the combined emissions of 82 percent of the countries on Earth.


Illustration by Victor Juhasz for Rolling Stone

Trump’s Gift to Coal Plants

The 76 regulations and counting that Trump is rolling back read like a wish list for the coal industry. Chief among them is the dismantling of Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the first set of federal limits ever placed on pollution from coal- and gas-fired power plants. Its goal was to reduce the energy grid’s carbon emissions 32 percent below 2005 levels, and it was the linchpin to meeting our commitment to the Paris Agreement, the pact signed by every other country in the world to control global temperature rise. Obama’s plan was also projected to prevent as many as 90,000 child asthma attacks a year, while Trump’s could release 12 times as much carbon, and may cause 1,400 premature deaths a year due to pollution.


Coal plants have been closing at a rapid clip since natural gas and renewables have taken over more and more of the energy market – and Trump is doing everything he can to stop it. The Energy Department’s plan to subsidize coal power plants was defeated last year, but a leaked White House memo shows the administration is considering an even more drastic measure: requiring power-grid operators to use coal and nuclear power plants. It’s a big-government interference into a competitive market — the last thing a “pro-business” Republican president should be proposing. The plan would essentially make consumers spend more money on dirtier power. “It’s insanity,” says Pat Gallagher, legal director of the Sierra Club. “The Trump administration is not just rolling back Obama rules, they’re basically trying to crush marketplace opposition in favor of their cronies.”

Unleashing Greenhouse Gases

They don’t get as much attention as carbon dioxide, but both methane and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) dwarf CO2’s heat-trapping ability. And methane leaks from oil and gas operators have become the second-largest source of industrial greenhouse-gas emissions in the U.S. But Trump is trying to kill regulations that forced operators to reduce the leaks, a rollback that could mean 380,000 more tons of pollution, the equivalent of 2.6 million cars. The EPA is also trying to roll back regulations on HFCs (emitted from air conditioners, refrigerators and aerosols). The “superpollutant” is so powerful, however, that without a worldwide phase-down it could cause a half-degree Celsius of warming by 2100 — enough to single-handedly torpedo the Paris Agreement. And then there’s the corruption: Former EPA head Scott Pruitt, who was forced to step down in July amid 13 investigations into his scandalous tenure, was lobbied about HFCs by J. Steven Hart, whose wife Pruitt rented a Capitol Hill condo from at a third of the market rate.

more...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/donald-trump-environmenal-agenda-738964/

[dalton99a]

1. A demonic monster from the depths of hell

[mr_lebowski]

2. He's the absolute scum of the EARTH ... a f***ing sh*tstain on the jock of humanity ... (nt)

[Hermit-The-Prog]

4. with a horde of demons helping him kill us all

[Initech]

3. You elect republicans, you're gonna get pollution.

Doesn't take a political science major to figure that one out!