My friend Hugh Kaufman, who’s worked for the EPA since its inception in 1970, sent a chilling email yesterday: “When does oil drilling off the Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, & Nantucket shores begin? ‘In an unprecedented move, the Trump administration has ordered the local commission that advises the Cape Cod National Seashore to suspend its […]
Environmental Politics
FIGHT-BACK: GOING LOCAL
It turns out that the Trump EPA’s purge of climate data from its website includes a 50-page “A Student’s Guide to Global Climate Change,” which once displayed educational videos and taught how to calculate your personal climate footprint. Well, it’s not been removed entirely, but buried deep enough that even a Google search won’t help in […]
THE END OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE?
I read two articles on a plane yesterday. Both had the same message about the same place. One, a cover story in Discover Magazine, was headlined: “What You Need to Know about our Melting Planet.” The other, featured in Rolling Stone, was a special report: “Doomsday Glacier: How Fast Will the Oceans Rise?” The […]
A NEW FOOL-EFFICIENCY STANDARD FOR CONSUMERS AND THE CLIMATE
So there he was this week in Detroit, addressing about 1,000 people inside the American Center for Mobility. A banner behind him read, “Buy American – Hire American.” Trump announced that “the assault on the American auto industry is over!” He was going to set up “a task force in every federal agency to identify […]
THE TRUMP PLAN TO DESTROY THE CHESAPEAKE BAY
During the 1980s, I became an environmental activist in fighting to protect the Atlantic striped bass. A combination of fishing pressure and pollution in their primary spawning grounds of the Chesapeake Bay had seen the fish’s population plummet to near-oblivion. Finally, after Congress intervened while Maryland declared a five-year fishing moratorium and other states along […]
TRUMP PLAGIARIZES EXXON – TIME TO BOYCOTT HIS TWEETS?
On Monday, ExxonMobil – the oil-and-gas behemoth that flatulated Rex Tillerson from CEO to running the State Department – released their latest big news. They were going to invest a cool $20 billion to “expand manufacturing in the U.S. Gulf region,” alleging this would create more than 45,000 “high-paying jobs.” Lest we forget, scientific studies […]
WALLED OFF: HOW TRUMP’S PLAN WILL IMPACT ENDANGERED SPECIES
It’s crazy enough on many levels, the executive order Trump has signed ordering construction of that “great, great wall” – all 1,900 concrete miles of it and as high as 55 feet along our border with Mexico. The cost projected by MIT researchers is $40 billion, which Trump has suggested could be raised by putting […]
THE “GOLFER-IN-CHIEF”DRIVES SMACK INTO A WATER HAZARD
Donald Trump’s been tweeting away for some time now. Maybe you don’t recall his “Twitter rant,” as the GlobalGolfPost dubbed it, during the U.S. Open tournament back in June 2014. The Pinehurst 2 course in North Carolina had undergone a renovation, stripped of any rough and leaving nothing along the fairways but sandy areas and […]
ONE LAST CHANCE TO STOP SCOTT PRUITT FROM RUNNING THE EPA
This week is D-Day for whether the Senate will confirm Trump’s choice of Scott Pruitt to run the EPA. So far, one Republican has broken ranks to say she would vote no. Susan Collins of Maine issued a statement yesterday that she has “significant concerns that Mr. Pruitt has actively opposed and sued the EPA […]
WHY TRUMP CAN’T JUST PULL OUT OF THE PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT
During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump talked big about pulling the U.S. out of the landmark global agreement to combat climate change, forged in Paris at the end of 2015 and since ratified or accepted by 121 countries. Since being elected, Trump has said he’d actually study the matter. And even Rex Tillerson, the former […]