By Andrew Christie, Chapter Director
In his State of the Union address, President Trump took a moment to tout one of his proudest accomplishments:
"We have cut more regulations in a shorter period of time than any other administration."
In the dreary, deadly litany of Trump’s onslaught on the environment, neatly summed up by the New York Times over the holidays, one particular rollback of environmental rules stands out: The Executive Order that “directed agencies to stop using an Obama-era calculation of the ‘social cost of carbon’ that rulemakers used to estimate the long-term economic benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.”
This rang a bell. It chimed louder when I went back and located the mirror image of that accounting method in this passage from another Executive Order that Trump issued in 2017:
“The Secretary of Commerce shall, unless expressly required otherwise, refrain from designating or expanding any National Marine Sanctuary…unless the sanctuary designation or expansion proposal includes a timely, full accounting from the Department of the Interior of any energy or mineral resource potential within the designated area…and the potential impact the proposed designation or expansion will have on the development of those resources.”
(So a timely, full accounting is in order when it might be used to show that big dough could be made from drilling for oil or strip-mining the sea floor in a biologically important area. Such an accounting is not to be made, however, on the cost side of the ledger. And when it comes to calcuating the benefits of a healthy environment, this is simply not to be spoken.)
As it turns out, this was – brace yourself – a strategically dumb move by Trump, as Science magazine pointed out in the helpfully titled “Trump’s attack on social cost of carbon could end up hurting his fossil fuel push.”
It seems you need to make that abolished calculation if you want a permit for your fossil fuel project. In a recent ruling blocking the expansion of a Montana coal mine, the judge “pointed to the government’s failure to use the existing calculations for the social costs of carbon, arguing that government officials ‘could, and should, have tied its greenhouse gas emissions calculation to the effects of those emissions.’ The decision, Judge Molloy wrote, was arbitrary and capricious because officials quantified the benefits of expanded mining ‘while failing to account for the costs, even though a tool was available to do so.’”
Nor is this is a Trump thing. It’s a Republican thing. The same Science article notes “an influential federal appeals court ruling late in 2007, which found that the administration of George W. Bush improperly ignored costs from global warming in setting gas-mileage standards for sport utility vehicles and small trucks.”
And then there’s Jesus: “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost…?” (Luke 14:28).
It’s not the tweets, the lies, the vast ignorance, or even the manifest corruption of this administration that presents the deepest problem. It’s the policies, a superstructure of internal contradictions that is being built to cater to big polluters and defy scientific and environmental reality. As the Times noted, groups like mine have successfully thwarted eleven of Trump’s attempts to roll back environmental regulations and reinstated them, and 31 more have yet to go through. But the ones that have been slapped into place now will mean “80,000 extra deaths per decade and cause respiratory problems for more than one million people, according a separate analysis by researchers from Harvard.” And those figures significantly underestimate “the global public health impact” of the rollbacks.
This is the rickety, fatal edifice of giddy deregulation -- chunks of it falling off and crashing into neighborhoods below -- that must be pulled down and replaced with a rebuilt regulatory structure designed to keep us safe and protect the environment as the first order of business once we have a House and Senate -- or a House, Senate and White House -- that are able to do so.