The Leadership in the United States is Upside Down When it Comes to Addressing Carbon Emissions

June 2, 2018 – Donald Trump and Scott Pruitt are the Tweedledum and dee of the United States, two of the dumbest people to ever lead the American government. They are willfully ignorant about climate change and just plain stupid when it comes to enacting policy. The latest from these two dumbbells comes in the form of Pruitt’s attempted rollbacks on emission standards on vehicles, and Trump’s orders to stop the closure of coal and nuclear power plants.

Besides the fact that both policy decisions ignore the chief contributor to climate change, greenhouse gas emissions produced from human sources, they also run counter to the objectives agreed to at the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. Of course, Trump, can ignore Paris because he has already announced that the United States will not honour the intentions of the previous American administration as a signatory. And Pruitt, represents an entirely different case, a man on a mission to keep his friends and backers from the Heartland Institute, mining coal, and pumping oil and gas for an eternity.

Pruitt is a man with a mission. He is rolling back federal regulations governing pesticide use, lead paint, renewable fuels, water quality, and methane emissions from oil and gas wellheads. He doesn’t give a damn about protecting the ozone layer if it means impeding his backers from putting emissions into the atmosphere that deplete it. One wonders what Trump meant when he campaigned on the promise ‘believe me” to deliver to Americans the cleanest air and water on the planet.

But Pruitt, who filed a 38-page document recently indicating his plans to rollback tailpipe emission standards on vehicles, provided within it no technical, scientific or legal justification for the reversal of the prior administration’s regulations. Instead of science and technological facts Pruitt used quotes from automakers who described how they would have to build more hybrids and electric vehicles (something they all are doing) to meet 2025 regulated fuel standards, described as an onerous undertaking. For those still sane within the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the document Pruitt submitted was described as “unprecedented” and a former senior EPA policy analyst remarked the agency “has just never done anything like this.” With no data and no numbers, it’s pretty clear that both the words “environmental” and “protection” need to be removed from the agency’s name.

Even more interesting is that Pruitt is doing exactly what he did when he was Attorney General in Oklahoma, where he attacked the EPA about its climate change and environmental policies using a letter largely written by friends of his in the oil industry. This was just one of 14 lawsuits this current EPA head launched against the very body he directs today.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that others are following in Pruitt’s footsteps in suing the EPA but this time in an effort to stop him. A coalition of 17 states and the District of Columbia are arguing that without evidence the agency’s revised standards represented an arbitrary and capricious act. It further stated that the emission standards created by the Obama administration were more than feasible with the benefits to the environment outweighing the cost to vehicle makers to achieve them.

With transportation vying for top greenhouse gas polluter along with coal-fired power plants, the emission standard objectives represented if not the most important single policy for cutting atmospheric carbon, certainly one of the top two. So Pruitt, who clearly lives in an upside-down world, is cooking the books at the EPA and thus helping to cook the planet.

Now, as for the dumbbell who is his boss, and his shill, Rick Perry, at the Department of Energy, the two seem to have a hard-on for coal arguing that national security and the defense of the nation preempt all other concerns re the environment. In a draft memo issued by the Trump administration, it argues that “regulatory and economic factors” are causing “fuel-secure plants” to be “retired prematurely.” It further states that the nation is in danger of losing sufficient capacity to meet its needs in the forced transition to renewable and natural-gas-based power generation. And therefore, “to promote the national defense and maximize domestic energy supplies, federal action is necessary to stop the further premature retirements of fuel-secure generation capacity.” 

So Trump is using national security as the justification for almost every new and divisive policy he enacts, whether he is attacking trading partners and allies with tariffs, or immigrants and those who want to become Americans, or now energy producers. The President is compelling utilities and grid operators for the next two years to buy power from government-specified coal-fired and nuclear power plants.

In the Financial Times yesterday, Ed Crooks has penned an article in which he quotes Todd Snitchler of the American Petroleum Institute, an organization representing natural gas producers, stating that what the President is proposing is “unprecedented and misguided.” And the operator of the largest power grid in the United States running from New Jersey through Illinois to Tennessee, PJM Interconnection, issued a statement stating there was “no immediate threat to system reliability” that could the use of the national security argument to justify government interference in the marketplace.

So there you have it, Tweedledum, Tweedledee, and their lackeys taking the American people and, unfortunately, the rest of the planet down a rabbit hole to a dystopian future.