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 […]
Trump Administration
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 […]
TRUMP’S TRIPS AND TAXPAYER TOLERANCE: A COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS
A friend of mine raised the questions in an email: “How much does it cost to fly that huge jet to Florida every weekend? This guy spends too much of your money and my money and for what? How does a citizen demand an accounting for this bullshit travel cost?” So I decided to look […]
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 […]
TRUMP STOOPS (LOW) TO CONQUER
How low can he go? That’s the question I have to ask after watching Donald Trump exploit in the audience a young woman suffering from a rare disease, families whose loved ones were slain by two illegal immigrants, and the widow of a Navy SEAL who died on a U.S. ground mission into Yemen. I […]