What’s Happening Now?
The top news in Washington these days is all about the impeachment of President Trump. Democrats seem to have settled on Trump’s ‘abuse of power’ as the principal reason for their impending impeachment vote. Although there are any number of reasons they could site as justification for his removal, Democrats claim they need to simplify his numerous mis-steps into something simple that the electorate can understand. “Besides,” some of the pundits argue, “we need to avoid arguments about whether this or that rises to the level of impeachment and is truly criminal or not.” These arguments and the Republican effort to disrupt the impeachment proceedings has the effect of sucking all the air from the news rooms around the nation.
One of the most egregious things happening ‘behind the scenes’ in national politics is the failure of the Trump Administration to follow the rules of law that have been established to protect our environment. The bulwark of much of our law for environmental protection lies in the requirements of the Clean Air Act. The Act was first passed in 1970 to set requirements intended to help prevent air pollution. The Act was amended by President Bush in 1989 to update requirements as our technology changed. This 1990 amendment to the Act was overwhelmingly passed by a bi-partisan majority in both houses of Congress. Since that time, the Act has been effective in helping clean our air by requiring that polluters initiate a variety of controls to minimize and control the poisons that were previously released in our atmosphere without compunction.
The Trump administration has implemented a strategy of pretending that neither science nor climate change exist. Mr. Trump therefore cancelled America’s engagement in the world-wide agreement concerning air pollution known as the Paris Accords. Not surprisingly, Mr. Trump was intimately aware that the Paris Accords were contrary to effective political fund-raising contributed by the fossil fuel industry. As a consequence, Trump has ordered his bureaucracy to walk away from its statutory obligation to curb greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change. For the past two years, the administration has pursued a strategy of avoiding implementation and enforcement of air pollution regulations that affect climate change. It is no surprise that relaxing regulations or ignoring them totally is of great value to many of our nation’s wealthiest individuals and the companies they own or manage. These are those who show their gratitude by providing money for politicians and their political parties. Of course, this particular quid pro quo is largely kept hidden and is therefore unknown by most hard-working Americans who have little time for investigating foolishness such as this.
These actions by the government have real-life effects on average people. A detailed study concludes that “By not addressing methane leakage from both new and existing oil and gas operations, the toxic soup released during oil and gas operations -- including methane, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and hazardous pollutants such as benzene -- will generate dangerous, localized pollution that will annually cause 1,900 premature deaths, 1.1 million asthma attacks, and 3,600 emergency room visits by 2030.”
Fortunately, we have *State government agencies that are aware of these failures and have taken action. State attorneys general have stepped in, challenged the legality of these delay tactics, and obtained court victories over a recalcitrant administration. Backed into a corner, the Trump administration has finally come forward with proposed rules of its own. Rather than reducing greenhouse gas emissions as required by the Clean Air Act, however; its proposals would roll back the reductions embedded in current rules and sanction a return to pre-existing greenhouse gas emissions levels. In some cases, climate damaging greenhouse gas emissions would actually increase further under the administration’s proposed rules.
The causality between health and pollution is undisputed. To ignore the means of preventing harm to innocent Americans seems to me to be criminal and worthy of impeachment. Surely, we can do better.
In the last 200 years, we’ve burned enough fossil fuel to raise the concentration of CO2 from its historic level of 275 parts per million to 400 ppm. Each year we burn more and more fuel for energy; experts believe we are on track to reach 700 ppm unless major changes are made. We earthlings are now pushing about 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. “The extra heat we trap on the surface of the planet from this expenditure of carbon is equivalent to the heat from 400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs every day.”
More heat means drought. Drought means fires. The fire season in the American West is 78 days longer than it was in 1970. Since year 2000, more than a dozen US states have reported the largest wildfires in their recorded history. In Alberta Canada, a fire burned over 1,500,000 acres causing 88,000 people to flee. The large fires cannot be suppressed by any means known to man.
When there are fires there are also floods. The rule of thumb is that dry places get drier and wet places get wetter leading to flooding. Flooding has risks beyond the loss of homes and household goods and the inconvenience of leaving one’s home until the flood waters subside; a survey has shown that 2,500 toxic sites in America lie in flood-prone locales.
None of this is news to Exxon, Shell and other global oil companies in the last generation. The unusual property of CO2 in allowing visible light to be transmitted but preventing the passage of infrared energy had been known for a long while. One of those who warned of this effect was the famous physicist Edward Teller, who announced this effect in 1959 and its impact on our atmosphere. The oil industry has long understood the effect of carbon in the atmosphere. In 1977, one of Exxon’s senior research executives warned his company of the rapidly developing problem in warming the earth. His secret warning soon became public knowledge as another researcher also made public the data that was beginning to come in.
In 1988, a man named James Hansen gave testimony to the United States Senate about the impending doom being caused by carbon pollution. By this time, the executives at Exxon and other oil companies had put together their strategy of misinformation and hired many of the same public relations experts who had defended the tobacco companies. The big lie to the public began even while oil company executives raised the height of their offshore drilling platforms because of rising oceans. They just didn’t tell us. It was also a simple matter for the oil executives to arrange for Vice President Dick Cheney from the oil company Halliburton to convince others in his political party to ignore the problem and do nothing about the rapidly escalating issue.
And now here we are today with a dire problem that is being made worse by a lawless President who pursues the same old policies of earlier Administrations. The question now is, what are we going to do about it? I say impeachment is the only reasonable answer.
*For a full report on the work of the State Attorneys General see: https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/State%20Attorneys%20General%20—%20Empowering%20the%20Clean%20Energy%20Future
