The Environmental Protection Agency is responsible for regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.  Under that authority, the EPA released the Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light-Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles on March 24, 2024.  Those standards are projected to reduce a cumulative 7 billion metric tons of CO2 through 2050.  Per the requirements of Executive Order 12866, the rule was subject to a full regulatory analysis, including attention to cost, choice, safety, and national security.  The net benefits to individual consumers is estimated at $6000 per vehicle and the overall benefit to society is estimated at $99 billion through 2055.  https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P1019VP5.pdf https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-04/420d23003.pdf

HFC refrigerants gained favor as replacements for CFC refrigerants because they are not ozone-depleting and their similar chemistry made possible their application as "drop-in" substitutes within existing refrigeration and cooling equipment. However, HFCs are extraordinarily potent greenhouse gases, and thus pose a comparable though different hazard to the CFCs they replaced. The Kigali amendment to the Montreal Protocol, adopted in 2016 and ratified by the US Senate in 2022, accordingly provided for the phase-out of HFC refrigerants in favor of non-ozone depleting refrigerants that are not such outstandingly worrisome greenhouse gases. As in the case of energy transition discussed above, the shift to such refrigerants entails re-engineering cooling equipment--a challenge to manufacturers tied to older CFC/HFC designs but a boon for innovative manufacturers designing and producing equipment compatible with next-generation non-HFC refrigerants, as well as for jobs associated with manufacturing such new equipment.

On Kigali ratification, see https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/09/21/statement-by-president-joe-biden-on-senate-ratification-of-the-kigali-amendment-to-the-montreal-protocol/

Since Project 2025 authors also strongly imply they have little or no appetite for any regulation of greenhouse gases, this proposal means they want the federal government to stop track greenhouse emissions at all.

The Clean Air Act expressly prohibits the EPA from considering economic costs when determining what level of ambient pollution poses a health threat and setting NAAQS.  This longstanding interpretation of the Clean Air Act was affirmed by a unanimous Supreme Court in Whitman v. American Trucking Associations in 2001.  https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R43092.pdf

While criteria and hazardous air pollutants are indeed important to regulate, the subtext here is that this office should neither regulate nor try to keep track of greenhouse gas emissions.

The EPA's initial success was the result of vigorously regulating polluters and requiring states to comply with pollution reduction plans. Former prosecutor William Ruckelshaus achieved a "culture of compliance" (to use a Project 2025 phrase) with regulated entities through the "aggressiveness" of his enforcement program. And far from ceding leadership to the states, as Project 2025 would have it, Ruckelshaus made states comply with federal laws, even when that resulted in what Ruckelshaus called a "terrible" relationsthip between the EPA and the states in the early 1970s. It was nice when states were cooperative, but states were not always cooperative, and the impetus for the EPA was precisely the need for federal authority and federal leadership over states. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/07/14/scott-pruitt-is-wrong-about-the-origins-of-the-epa/

A sweeping claim that goes entirely unsubstantiated and that clashes with ample peer-reviewed literature. Similar to many of the historical claims made by Dans in his introduction.

The legalistic emphasis here obscures just how much of this expansion was due to new science about health and environmental hazards. Many hazardous air pollutants had not been seriously studied prior to the 1970s, for instance, and in this era, growing scientific findings about carcinogenicity of pollutants like benzene laid important bases for the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/abs/10.3197/197337314X13927191904808

The early EPA adopted the very "top-down coercive" approach decried earlier in this chapter, to bring states and localities as well as industry into compliance with the new anti-pollution laws.

The organizing principle of the Biden administration's environmental agenda has been the potential for investments in clean energy technology to create jobs. Employment in clean energy jobs now exceeds fossil fuel-related employment by a factor of three. https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-report-shows-clean-energy-jobs-grew-more-twice-rate-overall-us-employment https://e2.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/E2-2023-Clean-Jobs-America-Report.pdf

The closest this author comes to actually acknowledging that there may be actual harms from climate change. But chapter remains silent on what these "reasonably attributable" harms may be.

The Gold King Mine incident was a terrible disaster, and the EPA deserves much blame for it, but it is ludicrous to argue that it resulted from a "globally focused agenda." There is absolutely no evidence for that.

Both Democrats and Republicans have generally embraced an all-of-the-above energy strategy since the mid-1970s. Contrary to these claims, production of natural gas and oil have both reached record highs during the Biden administration. US oil production is at record highs and the US leads the world in oil production. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61646 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61545

The Biden administration has adopted regulations which have expanded investments in renewable energy manufacturing and deployment, but those investments have not curbed the production of fossil fuels. https://www.cleaninvestmentmonitor.org/

Puzzling claim, since White House officials can be called to testify in Congress just as easily as EPA administrators. Perhaps the author is indirectly challenging the "all-of-government" approaches of the Biden administration both to environmental justice and to climate change, of which Regan is among the chief supporters.

This may also be a reference to the creation of the US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, a position held first by John Kerry and now by John Podesta. Project 2025 denounces both projects involving international cooperation as well as emphasis on climate change, and this position would seem to raise their ire. The new position, though, as part of the National Security Council, allows the US to have an official dedicated to the intertwined issues of security and climate change.

The "top-down, coercive approach" which the the author attributes only to the Obama and Biden adminstrations alike has actually been embraced by Republican as well as Democratic presidents before then. As the author notes below, the EPA itself was founded by Richard Nixon in 1970, and clean air, water, and other acts passed by Congress in that era, some of them nearly unanimously. That happened because of how porous and poor state-level and private pollution control had become. Here and other other critical points, this author goes silent what was widely recognized as the EPA's central mission: protecting public health and environments.<br /> https://www.apeoplesepa.org/home/origins

Section 208 of the Clean Water Act specifically delegates authority over land use policy and regional planning to the EPA.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-86/pdf/STATUTE-86-Pg816.pdf

Gunasekara served as Chief of Staff of the Environmental Protection Agency under Administrator Andrew Wheeler. She orchestrated the Trump administration's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord and its repeal of the Clean Power Plan. She earned a JD from the University of Mississippi School of Law and a BA from Mississippi College. https://docs.house.gov/meetings/GO/GO05/20230329/115609/HHRG-118-GO05-Bio-GunasekaraM-20230329.pdf

Test annotation directly on footnote

Test annotation for footnote in EPA chapter

Presumably the author here refers to EPA efforts to tackle that problem that, in world of Project 2025, is not to be named, climate change. The assertion that the EPA "strangles" domestic energy production is simply incorrect. Forbes has called recent oil and gas production to be on a "record pace" the past couple of years: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2024/04/26/us-oil-and-gas-production-are-ahead-of-last-years-record-pace/

Statistics on US oil production rates: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61545

An especially difficult passage to understand, because of its many leaps and omissions. The author blithely equates Congressional legislation on the budget to international negotiations on public health or climate change or trade. He then concludes that policymakers--and presumably here he is talking about those who also pass or administering national policies on public health or climate change, do so with too little "public scrutiny and democratic accountability." This account simply ignores those practices accumulating especially through the 20th century that have indeed made the federal decision-making more transparent and accountability to the public. For instance, the author simply skirts past--or perhaps is unaware of--the history of expanding requirements for public hearings and input as well as the Freedom of Information Act itself, passed in 1967 to ensure public availability of agency documents. Perhaps the most egregious yet perhaps telling omission here is that members of Congress as well as the president have to win periodic elections--normally the major mechanism of accountability for a representative democracy such as ours. Which raises questions about just how voting and elections do figure in to Project 2025's vision. https://www.amacad.org/publication/daedalus/milestones-evolution-administrative-state https://www.eff.org/issues/transparency/history-of-foia

Considering only the federal budget successfully diverts from the concrete ways our federal government has grown since 1789 to offer additional protections, services, incentives, and--public spaces and places--that enable Americans and their families better to flourish.

At the Environmental Protection Agency, repeated budget cuts and staff reductions during the Trump administration made it much more difficult for this agency to enforce the laws that are supposed to protect Americans from polluters. https://envirodatagov.org/embattled-landscape-series-part-2b-the-declining-capacity-of-federal-environmental-science/<br /> https://envirodatagov.org/publication/a-sheep-in-the-closet-the-erosion-of-enforcement-at-the-epa/ It's worth noting that when the Constitution was rewritten, America had no factories or big private corporations, and what pollution there was came mostly from human and animal wastes.

Another aggressive and sweeping construction of a "Left" as a "they" whose morals  are cast as unrecognizable and even somehow anti-Constitutional and authoritarian.  Yet another instance, as well, of how the spector of  authoritarianism shadows the agenda of Project 2025 itself.

Here at the very end, the author slips in an explicit pitch for market and corporate "freedom" that was long the central message of modern conservatism.

This language also seems to contradict earlier messages about "woke" corporate messages being inherently bad.

There are a number of ironies in the Heritage Foundation arguing for the decentralization of power and returning "self-governance to the American people," given that Heritage supports the idea of a strong executive especially in its Promise #1. This Promise #2 section heaps criticism not just on agency heads but also on the legislative branch. Such criticism is also selective; although conservatives have managed to attack federal agencies by scaling back the judicial precedent of "Chevron deference," that precedent originated as a defense of the Reagan-era EPA's attempts to limit the power of the Clean Air Act. https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/perspective-supreme-court-could-thwart-epas-ability-to-address-climate-change https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674260450 https://www.ncsl.org/state-legislatures-news/details/supreme-court-throws-out-chevron-decision-weakening-federal-regulators

As noted above, the US is currently at record energy production. That has complicated questions regarding climate, but the premise presented here is easily disputed. The US exports more energy than it imports.

https://www.vox.com/climate/24098983/biden-oil-production-climate-fossil-fuel-renewables

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/data-and-statistics.php

This linkage here of climate change to children's rights here is telling. Both, of course, are denigrated as ridiculous by conservatives (note that the use of scare quotes). Greta Thunberg, for example, has been on the receiving end of endless bullying and threats from mostly middle-aged, conservative white men. Certainly, her activism in climate change, as well as the millions of other young people who have protested government inaction, threaten adult superiority and dominance of politics. Psychologist Caroline Hickman connects these attacks with adult fear and insecurity.

The UN adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. Signed by the United States, it was never ratified by Congress. The document recognizes children's right to survive, have their own identity, give their own views and opinions, have freedom of expression, protection from violence, and the right to information, among other things.

Another sign of what's historically new in Project 2025's version of neoconservatism. While for forty years it concentrated on unleashing and funding corporate power (the latter largely through tax cuts on businesses and wealth), now suddenly these conservatives have turned to critizing what their movement strove so hard to enable.

Bonhoeffer was a German Protestant theologian who went to prison and was hung by the Nazis in 1945. His reference serves as one more marker of how the shadows of fascism and authoritarianism haunt this Foreword toe Project 2025. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/dietrich-bonhoeffer#:~:text=Dietrich%20Bonhoeffer%20was%20a%20German,classics%20throughout%20the%20Christian%20world.

The historical irony of framing the United Nations as dictatorial is not lost on us historian-readers. It was founded in the wake of World War II in important part to try and prevent a recurrence of the transnational alliance between fascist dictators that led to that war. Moreover, the powers it and related international bodies have accrued are quite limited and weak. To take the examples of the Conference of the Parties and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, conservative US presidents have shown just how unbinding these bodies' agreements have been, by withdrawing our country from the most forceful agreements these negotiations have achieved. GW Bush withdrew our country from the Kyoto accord in 2001, and Trump did the same with the Paris accord in 2017. https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/news-insights/lessons-learned-from-kyoto-to-paris/ https://www.climatecenter.pitt.edu/news/america-and-paris-agreement-withdrawal-recommitment-and-future-implications

Overturning Roe v. Wade has put the health of millions of pregnant women at risk, as prominent groups of health professionals have recognized. https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/population-care/access-abortion-and-women-s-health-what-research-shows https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2023/a-year-without-roe Reproductive choice is fundamental to human beings living sustainably, and necessary for both human health and the resiliency of the natural world. The U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade by its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization threatens not just the rights of women to control their own bodies, but the entire ecosystem of routine and emergency obstetric and gynecological care. In states where most abortion care is now prohibited by law and doctors may face criminal charges for providing customary treatment for miscarriages, the health and, in some cases, the lives of pregnant people are endangered https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/01/us/abortion-journey-crossing-states.html?searchResultPosition=9 Beyond the individual lives at stake, however, the demise of Roe has skewed the distribution of medical professionals among states, creating "maternity care deserts" and limiting access to reproductive health care for all. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/04/24/us/abortion-supreme-court-idaho?searchResultPosition=1#maternity-care-suffers-as-abortion-laws-drive-obstetricians-from-red-states Moreover, highly publicized denials of IVF and other fertility treatments spurred by the end of Roe deprive families of their rights to have children. Women and their families fear barriers to contraception access come next.

Here there's some agreement between Project 2025 and the Surgeon General appointed by Biden. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/opinion/social-media-health-warning.html

But for all Project 2025's expressed concerns about children's mental health and "unborn children," it turns utterly silent here on the many environmental threats to children's health, including exposures to lead and many other toxic chemicals to which their developing systems are far more susceptible than adults. https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/population/children

The chapter on the EPA here goes further, actually calling for a demotion of that agency's Office of Children's Health.

Exemplary of how much more exercised this and other Project 2025 are about gender, sex, and reproduction than about race, the critique of DEI is merely tucked in here to a much longer set of these other concerns.

A theme of American conservatism especially since its political alliance with conservative Evangelicals and Catholics starting in the 1970s. "Restore the American family" implies a stable definition of "family" that stands outside of history. Scholars have argued, instead, that the concept of "family" is constantly changing and in recent decades has become highly politicized. See, for instance, https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780809026746/allinthefamil, https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9781935408345/family-values?srsltid=AfmBOorOO6MeT5oyZNB-hky3yAl_vnpYYFkV8m2vGEd-R9p7oqyZtTkx, and https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-world-turned.

A chief goal of that earlier merger of politically engaged Evangelicals and conservative Catholics, overturning Roe v. Wade, has now been achieved. Hence, advocates of this agenda, in pushing state-level abortion bans as well as newers targets, have sought ever more active exercise of governmental authority over both sexual relations and gender identify.

The first mention of corporations in the Foreword comes on this page.

The closest this text comes to mentioning science at all--another glaring omission that itself makes a statement. Here it appears in italics, as part of the deceptively "lofty" verbal repertoire of "progressive elites."

The Department of Defense has recognized global climate change as a priority for the defense and security of the United States. https://www.defense.gov/spotlights/tackling-the-climate-crisis/

Environmental issues and climate change are inextricably linked to issues of race and class. Decades of research in many fields have demonstrated that poor, working class and communities of color face higher levels of exposure to toxics and pollution. Teaching about these subjects and connections is pivotal for a generation having to deal with the complicated layers of these problems.

By 1989, the US Supreme Court summarized the collective wisdom of that time about why Congress was not really up to making many decisions that federal laws required the government to make. It found that “in our increasingly complex society, replete with ever changing and more technical problems, Congress simply cannot do its job absent an ability to delegate power under broad general directives.” https://www.amacad.org/publication/daedalus/milestones-evolution-administrative-state

The AP Style Guide in 2020 announced that "Black" should be capitalized as a racial term. https://blog.ap.org/announcements/the-decision-to-capitalize-black That quiet disregard for current stylistic conventions reflects the curious role in race in the author's argument. On the one hand a "Great Awokening," presumably coincident with the Black Lives Matter movement and all about racial awareness and justice, is invoked as a core target. On the other hand, when this author turns more specific, racial concerns hardly seem present, merely tucked in between a litany of targets involving gender identity, sexual relations, and reproduction.

And the absence of a living wage? All but missing in this depiction of families is crisis are the unfavorable economic landscapes in which so many American families are now embedded. Pertinent historical trends there over the last several decades include growing economic inequality, the pooling of wealth and income at the top, and the erosion of a middle class, forcing economic struggles on more and more American families. https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality A now-abundant literature in economics and political science as well as history attributes a significant share of this rising inequality to conservative policies identical to many of those which Project 2025 calls for or seeks to amplify. See for instance https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/, and https://scalar.usc.edu/works/growing-apart-a-political-history-of-american-inequality/index

Footnote goes missing here. Much fact-based literature offers alternative explanations of such percentages that avoid the vague insinuations here about racialized moral shortcomings. For instance: "African American fathers are also more likely to face additional barriers in their parenting role due to poverty and the environment in which they live. More than twice as many black children (39%) grow up in families living below the poverty level than do white children (18%) (US Census Bureau 2011b). Black children are also more likely to live in a neighborhood where a greater proportion of other children are poor (Drake and Rank 2009). A lack of household resources is thereby likely compounded by a lack of community resources." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3728162/#:~:text=African%20American%20fathers%20are%20also,(US%20Census%20Bureau%202011b).

The centralized and powerful economic institution that is the modern corporation goes conspicuously missing in this conservative vision of "real" American lives. This omission says much about those faces of power in modern American life that conservatives seem to collectively hope their audience, too, will fail to see or worry about.

Much fact-based literature offers alternative explanations of such percentages that avoid the vague insinuations here about racialized moral shortcomings. For instance: "African American fathers are also more likely to face additional barriers in their parenting role due to poverty and the environment in which they live. More than twice as many black children (39%) grow up in families living below the poverty level than do white children (18%) (US Census Bureau 2011b). Black children are also more likely to live in a neighborhood where a greater proportion of other children are poor (Drake and Rank 2009). A lack of household resources is thereby likely compounded by a lack of community resources." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3728162/#:~:text=African%20American%20fathers%20are%20also,(US%20Census%20Bureau%202011b).

From his efforts to break the air traffic controllers to his assault against the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to his tax cuts mainly for the wealthy, claiming they would then just "trickle down" their riches to workers, Reagan's agenda was more anti-labor than any American president since Herbert Hoover. See for instance: https://truthout.org/articles/ronald-reagan-enemy-of-the-american-worker/

Here and subsequently, the approach of Project 2025 to the global threat of climate change is not so much to deny as to ignore it, or else write it off as a left-wing political fantasy.

Historians have long questioned the degree to which the Reagan administration was a "revolution." They have located many of the transformations commonly associated with Reagan's presidency—particularly deregulation and a shift to market-oriented policies—in the 1970s and especially the Carter years. (See for instance https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691157917/the-1970s?srsltid=AfmBOoo0NVQ8J0JmEl2PZmaB3HGgDHBZ7m1Ql_6Nk2BMiHJybLBthzm5 and https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250160072/fearcity) Attributing these complicated shifts to the designs of a single administration exaggerates the success of Reagan-era policies as well as the wisdom of centralizing power under a unitary executive branch.

Historians now generally recognize Carter as a more ambiguous figure than is acknowledged here. His presidency marked a "heyday for environmentalism." The federal environmental state consolidated in strength and scope, through more ambitious implementation of early 1970s environmental laws as well as passage of new ones. At the same time, Carter also introduced deregulation and market-friendly laws that this account ignores, intent as it seems on celebrating the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. See chapter 5: https://ugapress.org/book/9780820344089/race-and-the-greening-of-atlanta/

While the rise of the New Right has become an integral part of historians' interpretations of the seventies, Project 2025 authors portray that rise as oddly disconnected from what they portray as the era's "division and danger." https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674027589

Though CDC statistics lag by as much as two years, recent reporting of these figures shows a "sudden and hopeful drop" in drug overdoses and a "huge reversal" from COVID pandemic highs. https://www.npr.org/2024/09/18/nx-s1-5107417/overdose-fatal-fentanyl-death-opioid#:~:text=U.S.%20overdose%20deaths%20fell%20for%20the%20first%20time%20since%202020&text=A%20line%20chart%20showing%20U.S.,over%20100%20thousand%20in%202024.

Historians' more recent re-interpretations of the 70s, which have proliferated, are not reflected here. The 1970s were a "seminal decade for environmental protection" according to legal historian Richard Lazarus https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/publications/insights-on-law-and-society/volume-19/insights-vol--19---issue-1/environmental-law---politics/, an interpretation affirmed by many other historians of environmental policy and environment such as Richard N. Andrews. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300222913/managing-the-environment-managing-ourselves/ Thomas Borstelmann finds that feminism crested in the 1970s, becoming increasing woven into what he calls 'the ethics of daily life.' https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691157917/the-1970s?srsltid=AfmBOoo0NVQ8J0JmEl2PZmaB3HGgDHBZ7m1Ql_6Nk2BMiHJybLBthzm5 Steven Tuck argues that the 1970s were 'the high-water mark of the black liberation movement." https://www-jstor-org.proxy.library.stonybrook.edu/stable/40543227 Historians Bruce Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer called the 1970s "the Big Bang" because of how the foundations were laid for current public debates then. Central to this interpretation of the decade is the rise of a New Right that for Project 2025 authors, seems somehow extraneous to that era's "division and danger." https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674027589

Historians' more recent re-interpretations of the 70s, which have proliferated, are not reflected upon here. The 1970s were a "seminal decade for environmental protection" according to legal historian Richard Lazarus https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/publications/insights-on-law-and-society/volume-19/insights-vol--19---issue-1/environmental-law---politics/, an interpretation affirmed by many other historians of environmental policy and environment such as Richard N. Andrews. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300222913/managing-the-environment-managing-ourselves/ Thomas Borstelmann finds that feminism crested in the 1970s, becoming increasing woven into what he calls 'the ethics of daily life.' https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691157917/the-1970s?srsltid=AfmBOoo0NVQ8J0JmEl2PZmaB3HGgDHBZ7m1Ql_6Nk2BMiHJybLBthzm5 Steven Tuck argues that the 1970s were 'the high-water mark of the black liberation movement." https://www-jstor-org.proxy.library.stonybrook.edu/stable/40543227 Historians Bruce Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer called the 1970s "the Big Bang" because of how the foundations were laid for current public debates emerged then. Central to this interpretation of the decade is the rise of a New Right that for Project 2025 authors, seems somehow extraneous to that era's "division and danger." https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674027589

Test run of annotating

1970, the year the Nixon Administration created the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Although many factors have contributed to the plummeting cost of solar panels, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contributed to this by expanding the market for solar panels, companies installing them, and the labor base. The Solar Energy Industries Association keeps close tabs on these statistics.

H.Res 109 (1)(B) and (C) describes the "duty of the Federal Government" in the wake of environmental crises as including the creation of “millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensur[ing] prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States" and investing "in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century.”

While histories of the Obama Administration and unions are still being written, there's no shortage of labor journalism tackling the Obama years. This includes recent journalism on the Trump Administration's efforts to roll back Obama era labor reforms.

In this context it's worth noting that despite promising to deliver "Card Check" (The Employee Free Choice Act), the Obama administration failed to do so. The record is decidedly mixed: while there have been positive appointees to the National Labor Review Board, the administration still fought organized labor on Card Check and trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

This report by the Center for American Progress documents how Trump's environmental rollbacks exert disproportionate harm on communities of color. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2020/02/27/480820/communities-color-bear-brunt-trumps-anti-environmental-agenda/

Likewise, this article demonstrates how Trump's policies exacerbate environmental racism and inequality. https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/6/16/21290591/trump-black-lives-epa-air-pollution-covid-19

This has also been a focus of previous work by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. See this 2017 EDGI report on Pursuing a Toxic Agenda: Environmental Injustice in the Early Trump Administration

Addressing and alleviating environmental injustices is a large component in H.Res 109. The resolution (1)(E) describes the Federal Government as duty bound to "promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth."

Historians have only begun to explore the lasting impact of environmental racism and the long-term damage inflicted on communities by industries. Of particular focus on this, see: Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Robert Brullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000).

Some of the most pressing threats are from proposed development projects that would impact Indigenous communities and lands in Alaska. These the NPR-A, Pebble Mine, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge here and here.

This is a key specific repeated from H.Res 109, which calls for net zero emissions by 2050 as well. (1)(A).

The New York Times has compiled a list of the Trump Administration's environmental rollbacks here. Turner and Isenberg place these rollbacks in historical context in The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump.

Although Biden does not emphasize public lands in this speech, decisions about how to treat these lands are crucial to climate change policy--and constitute a key difference between the agenda promoted by the Trump administration (and most Republicans) in contrast to the views of most Democrats. On the links between public lands and the climate crisis, see, among others this article in The Guardian and this report from the NRDC.

During the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corp was a key New Deal program, which mobilized 3 million young men to participate in restoration activities throughout the United States. It is the inspiration for a "modern day civilian climate corp," although most proponents emphasize that a new corp should be far more inclusive than the original CCC. For more on the CCC, see Maher, Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement. On the New Deal policies more broadly, see Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal. For a recent op-ed on the New Deal as a model for the Green New Deal, see The Keys to Ensuring a Green New Deal Succeeds, Washington Post (2019).

Biden's general comment here is far more vague than H.Res 109 (2)(G), which specifies that the Federal Government should be responsible for "working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible, including-- (i) by supporting family farming; (ii) by investing in sustainable farming and land use practices that increase soil health; and iii) by building a more sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food”

Biden adds another specifc solution not mentioned in the House resolution.

Abandoned wells litter the American landscape. Scientific experts have had a hard time figuring out exactly how many wells have been abandoned, because record-keeping is so poor, but reports make clear that numbers are vast and that abandoned wells can pose significant environmental problems. For a brief, readable background on the history and science of abandoned oil and gas well, see this 2018 report by the American Geosciences Institute. Reports of the harm done by abandoned gas wells start on page 207 of this report.

Biden was presumably talking about this story in the New York Times on July 12, 2020:

From H.Res 109: The Federal Government should be responsible for: (2)(L) "cleaning up existing hazardous waste and abandoned sites, ensuring economic development and sustainability on those sites."

The need to focus on the electric providers is mentioned several times in H.Res 109. (2)(C) includes "“meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources”; and (2)(D) "building or upgrading to energy-efficient, distributed, and ``smart'' power grids, and ensuring affordable access to electricity”

In 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the fastest growing jobs in the country between 2018 and 2028 were in solar panel installation and wind turbine maintenance.

This is also a strategy that the Obama administration pursued in response to the 2008-10 fiscal crisis. From an economic perspective, the program wasn't as successful as anticipated, as it encouraged consumers to buy cheaper, more fuel efficient cars. That is unlikely to be a problem, considering the premium price of many electric cars.

From H.Res 109 (2)(H): The plan has a goal of "overhauling transportation systems in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible."

Biden laid out his plan for economic recovery on July 9, 2020. His plan is here.

One of the key goals of the Green New Deal includes "upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification.” Biden discusses plans for individual homes in the next section.

At the start of the Obama administration, Van Jones served as the Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. Jones soon resigned from the position amid controversy fomented by right-wing TV news personality Glenn Beck along with prominent Republican Party critics of the administration.

This is a problem -- steel production is a major source of carbon emissions. There's a lot of talk about "clean" steel and "green" steel, but it's still a [dirty industry] (https://www.ft.com/content/3bcbcb60-037f-11e9-99df-6183d3002ee1). Steel is not the only material important to scaling up clean energy technologies. Significant increases in mining and materials production will be necessary to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars, and similar technologies. These materials include commodities, such as steel and aluminum, and speciality materials, such as lithium, rare earth metals, and graphite. On this point, see the World Bank's May 2020 report on Minerals for Climate Action.

H.Res 109 repeatedly links the Green New Deal to the context of World War II and Roosevelt's New Deal. Biden here (and in other places) in this speech links to more recently history - namely, his work with President Obama.

Politifact has reviewed Trump's claims and his record on advancing infrastructure projects in detail here.

Biden bases his jobs and energy plan heavily on the Green New Deal, outlined in House Resolution 109. The resolution is available here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109

Specific references and differences from the resolution are noted in individual paragraphs below.

Trump is drawing on the support of unions like those in the building trades that have long supported fossil fuel infrastructure projects and have been publicly critical of actions on climate change and environmental protection. These unions have argued that they are protecting their members' relatively high-paying jobs and worry that talk of a "just transition" means deindustrialization and loss of some of the best jobs available for working class people in some parts of the US. For a discussion of this see https://psmag.com/environment/why-are-unions-joining-conservative-groups-to-protect-pipelines. See also http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22243/climate-workers-just-transition-philadelphia-energy-solutions-workers-labor

It is worth noting that that unions, including building trades unions have supported many environmental actions. Labor groups including some from the construction industry participated in planning and development as well as lobbying for the recently passed Climate and Community Protection Act in New York, setting the nation's most aggressive targets yet for greenhouse gas emissions. See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/16/new-york-climate-jobs-plan-union-work

As we've noticed in previous annotations, the President claims credit for the long-term effects of regulation, while attacking the processes that make regulation effective.

It is worth noticing that under the Trump administration, the waters regulated by EPA have changed significantly, most importantly with the elimination of the Clean Water Rule established by the Obama administration in 2015. With its revocation, polluters will be able to dump potentially harmful materials into a much larger set of streams and wetlands, potentially affecting the drinking water of 1/3 of Americans.

Defining NEPA as "mostly about process" reflects the CEQ's focus on the Supreme Court's decision in Robertson v. Methow Valley Citizens Council (1989). Yet both an examination of other decisions and legal scholarship suggests that the law could also entail substantive requirements. See Jason J. Czarnezki, "Revisiting the Tense Relationship between the U.S Supreme Court, Administrative Procedure, and the National Environmental Policy Act ," Stanford Environmental Law Journal 25, no. 1 (2006): 3-28

Chairman Neumayr's statement reflects the complicated legal and procedural history of NEPA enforcement since the 1970s. The CEQ's proposed update emphasizes Supreme Court decisions like Robertson v. Methow Valley Citizens Concil (1989) which defined NEPA as a solely procedural requirement. Such case law also allowed for agencies to make decisions based on other values not articulated by NEPA itself (i.e. economic benefit) so long as they adequately detailed environmental impacts. As critics pointed out at the time, this decision and other adverse Supreme Court decisions departed from the explicitly stated intentions of those Congresspeople who actually crafted NEPA. They envisioned a law that would substantially change agencies' decision-making, not merely require them to tally up environmental harms before proceeding. (See David B. Lawrenz, "Judicial Review under the National Environmental Policy Act: What Remains after Robertson v. Methow Valley Citizens Council," University of Colorado Law Review 62, no. 4 (1991): 899-932).

Some of the reforms now proposed are indeed modernizing, as Neumayr and other proponents claim. These start with adaptations to current publication and communication technology. They clarify, for instance, that agencies can publish materials in electronic formats (pg. 1692).

Especially when applied to a law that courts have defined as mostly procedural, some of the proposed reforms of process have substantial implications. Some clauses seek to define away already limited opportunities to redress environmental harms in the courts. Among these, clauses in part 1500 insist that the new rules "create no presumption that violation of NEPA is a basis for injunctive relief or for a finding of irreparable harm" (pg. 1694), and later add that "CEQ’s regulations do not create a cause of action for violation of NEPA." Clauses nearby and elsewhere chip away at additional grounds furnished by NEPA for legal remedies of environmental damage, stating, for example, that "harm from the failure to comply with NEPA can be remedied by compliance with NEPA’s procedural requirements."

The claim is incorrect. One proposed change—to eliminate consideration of indirect or cumulative effects of large infrastructure projects—will undoubtedly subvert environmental protections not only in NEPA but in other environmental laws. The CEQ seeks a redefinition of “effects” in environmental impact statements (EISs), including ““whether CEQ should affirmatively state that consideration of indirect effects is not required.”

Climate change mitigation is the clear intended target of this proposed revision, as Lisa Friedman of The New York Times has noted (“Trump Rule Would Exclude Climate Change in Infrastructure Planning,” January 3, 2020). The rules propose that “effects should not be considered significant if they are remote in time, geographically remote, or the result of a lengthy causal chain.” Under the proposal, effects should be taken into account only if they “are reasonably foreseeable and have a reasonably close causal relationship to the proposed action”.

NEPA’s requirements for an EIS provide one—sometimes the only—vehicle for assessing the direct, indirect, and cumulative effects of major infrastructure projects on climate. In analyzing Congress’s intent, the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA (127 S.Ct. 1438 (2007)) that the “harms associated with climate change are serious and well recognized” [at 14b] and that Congress fully intended to grant EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gases, which are considered air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. Regulations promulgated in the Obama era followed through on Congressional enactments and the Supreme Court ruling by requiring assessment of direct, indirect, and cumulative effects. By eliminating consideration of indirect and cumulative effects, the proposed changes to NEPA attempt to reverse Congress’s intent and the High Court’s ruling, clearly undermining safeguards to environmental protection afforded by the Clean Air Act.

The CEQ also claims that the proposed NEPA rule changes do not raise federalism concerns) that will impact the states. While the proposed rule changes would apply to federal agencies, failure of those agencies to consider indirect and cumulative effects will impose burdens on the states, leaving the human and fiscal costs of climate change mitigation to the states, precisely the issue that brought states to sue successfully in Massachusetts v. EPA.

The Trump Administration has itself likely slowed the EIS process. It has done so both by significantly shrinking relevant agencies and by abruptly shifting the body responsible for implementing NEPA, the Council on Environmental Quality, from its headquarters as reported in the Washington Post and Greenwire.

Trump-appointed officials have also hindered efforts to streamline and otherwise improve the NEPA revew process initiated by previous administrations. In 2010, in celebration of the Act’s 40th anniversary, the Obama administration refined its implementation . Among the Obama revisions were measures clarifying when findings of no significant impact are appropriate and when categorical exclusions could be used to exempt routine activities from NEPA review.

The Obama rewrite of NEPA rules also began to require anticipation of climate change in the planning process, though by 2016 this provision was still applied unevenly. The Trump White House proposal does away with most considerations of climate change, by maintaining that “effects should not be considered significant if they are remote in time, geographically remote, or the product of a lengthy causal chain.”

The great virtues of NEPA remain widely appreciated by many in recent times: ensuring that not just builders or government officials but affected communities and environments should receive some say in project planning. These continuing strengths of NEPA have been repeatedly documented in reports by non-profit organizations and government agencies. This report by the Center for the American Progress highlights the value of NEPA in the context of a Charlotte, NC-area transportation project. It argues that the current environmental review process "improves governance, increases transparency, and makes infrastructure projects better by reducing environmental and community impacts through public participation and mitigations." This 2010 Department of Energy report highlights the quiet success of NEPA. Reviewing thirteen "quiet success" stories, it argues that in each case, NEPA was responsible for "public involvement and careful consideration of alternatives [that] has produced better outcomes.” The Natural Resources Defense Council also highlights NEPA successes in this report. It "gives citizens their only opportunity to voice concerns about a project's impact on their community." And because it "ensure[s] that the project's impacts -- environmental and otherwise -- are considered and disclosed to the public," also "because informed public engagement often produces ideas, information, and even solutions that the government might otherwise overlook, NEPA leads to better decisions -- and better outcomes -- for everyone."

Upon signing NEPA into law on January 1, 1970, the Republican President Richard Nixon invoked threats to Americans' "quality of life" barely noted at the titularly commemorative event held at the White House this past week. "I have become convinced," he declared, "that the 1970’s absolutely must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment. It is literally now or never."

When Nixon then spoke of his staff devoting "many hours" to "pressing problems" including "airport location [and] highway construction," he was referring mainly to the damages they were imposing on neighborhoods and natural lands. As he also noted, "once the damage is done, it is much harder to turn it around." A main purpose of NEPA was to ensure that from the start, potentially destructive impacts on both communities and ecosystems would figure into decision-making about federal projects and funding. The Richard Nixon Foundation has posted a summary of his remarks.

As several news outlets have pointed out, this is true. The "somebody" is long-time Trump adviser (and former Trump golf-course consultant) Edward Russo. Likely through his connection to Trump, in March 2019, Russo received a valuable EPA research agreement for the Israeli company, Water-Gen, which collects drinking water from air. Russo is now CEO of Water-Gen's American branch.

His book, Donald Trump, Environmental Hero, mainly touts Trump's development of a private golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, as an environmentally friendly act. With "no domestic animals, no uncontrolled chemical applications, and no impediments to equestrian trails," he claims it "the most environmentally sensitive golf course in the world--especially, when compared to the type of farming that was occurring on the land prior to Donald's purchase" [sic]. Among Trump's other environmental heroics, his Bedminster golf course became "a 210-acre habitat for grassland birds on his own dime," he brought in six goats to tend to its weeds, and he built other golf courses from Aberdeen to Florida, converting one "environmental mess" after another into "stabilized bird paradise[s]." And when the Deep Water Horizon oil spill threatened Russo's beloved Florida Keys, Trump wrote a $10,000 check to Russo's Florida Keys Coalition as it attempted respond to the crisis. Without any consideration of federal environmental laws, agencies or policy, much less any resort to science, Russo gushingly concludes that "if everyone followed the example of Donald and worked to ensure that their actions resulted in an environmental net gain, and people were held accountable for their actions, our environment would get better every day."

By documenting and contextualizing the environmental policies, rhetoric, and politics of the Trump administration, the historians of EHAC seek to do our part in hold Donald Trump and his appointees accountable. Happy NEPA Anniversary!

President Trump has dismissed concerns about climate change as a "hoax" many times, including at a 2015 campaign rally. Although his rhetoric has been slippery - as is evident in his response to the reporter's question - his administration's proposed policies are all consistent with Trump's longstanding dismissal of climate change as an urgent issue and his prioritizing of fossil fuel-driven economic growth. Indeed, the proposed changes to NEPA would shear off larger and longer-term consequences on climate from all required reviews of environmental impact.

Describing climate change as a hoax has long aligned Trump with the most anti-environmental factions of the Republican party. In 2003, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) describe the threat of catastrophic global warming as the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." In 2013, Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) claimed that "global warming is a total fraud." Such views reflect decades of rightward movement in the Republican Party, which increasingly dismisses scientific expertise and equates environmental policy with an insidious international political agenda to undermine economic growth and subvert American interests to global interests. On these points, see Turner and Isenberg, The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump, 1-2.

Records maintained by the U.S. Department of Transportation contradict this statement. In 2018, the average time to completion was 3.9 years for a highway project. For more information, see the U.S. Department of Transportation website.

Additional delays may also result from litigation, which is distinct from the review process. The proposed reforms may well exacerbate the resort to lawsuits, by stakeholders who feel their interests have been excluded from the streamlining of reviews. Hence, we may see even more delays in the environmental review process.

The goals of NEPA have evolved since 1970. One of the most important changes in how NEPA has been implemented was the result of Executive Order 12898, issued by President Clinton in 1994. It requires that the federal government give attention to environmental justice in assessing the consequences of proposed actions and undertaking outreach to ensure that all affected communities are engaged in the public review process. This expansion of outreach is obscured in Trump’s speech behind cliched complaints about slow bureaucracy. https://www.archives.gov/files/federal-register/executive-orders/pdf/12898.pdf

However, while Clinton’s Executive Order has been been significant, it has not translated into the effective actions for which many environmental justice groups had hoped. In Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty (2007), a report for the United Church of Christ, which has been essential in the environmental justice movement in the US, the authors lamented that the EPA had failed to fully implement EO 12898 and called for Congress to more fully codify it (pgs. 156-157). Reflections on EO 12898 after 20 years published by the NRDC were similarly mixed (See https://www.nrdc.org/experts/albert-huang/20th-anniversary-president-clintons-executive-order-12898-environmental-justice).

These "hardworking Americans" often live in communities that have been made to shoulder many of our society's environmental burdens at the same time, from peeling lead paint to tiny asthma-inducing particulates to hazardous wastes dumps. But the excision of "cumulative" considerations from the new NEPA rules appears to place these communities, and cause of environmental justice itself, on the Council of Environmental Quality's chopping block.

Mary Neumayr is a veteran federal civil servant who served as senior energy counsel for Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Before being nominated to lead the CEQ in July 2018, she spearheaded the Trump administration's rewrite of Obama-era policies that required the consideration of climate change in environmental reviews. For more information, see this article at ThinkProgress.

Historically, the United States was also "envy of the world" for its leadership on environmental regulatory issues. Domestic environmental regulations served as templates for the international community's approach to environmental protection. As James Turner and Andrew Isenberg explain in The Republican Reversal, "The United States had a long history of international environmental leadership. In 1911, it joined with other nations to create the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention to regulate the hunting of fur seals; in 1916, the United States agreed to the Migratory Bird Treaty with Canada; in 1946, U.S. diplomats played an important role in the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling; and in the early 1970s, the United States led the negotiations that resulted in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species…Through the late 1980s, both Democrats and Republicans could take pride in the record of the United States in international environmental leadership."

Especially notable on the Republican side was the Reagan administration's leadership in addressing the threat of a stratospheric ozone depletion in the late 1980s, an effort that stemmed from the strengthening of the Clean Air Act. Turner and Isenberg, The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump (Harvard 2018), 148.

Careful analysis makes clear that economic growth under the Trump administration is actually a continuation of the economic expansion that began under Obama. The previous administration deserves more credit for shepherding our recovery from the 2008-9 financial crisis and Great Recession. See data from The Washington Post.

Historic data on gross domestic product at the state level complicates simplistic causal arguments that environmental regulations slow economic growth. California and Massachusetts are two states that have histories of prioritizing environmental protection and efforts to address climate change. Between 2005 and 2019, their state economies grew at an average rate 4.15% per year. In contrast, the U.S. economy grew at 3.7% per year during the same time period. States antagonistic to environmental protection, such as West Virginia and Wyoming lagged behind, with an average growth rate of 3.0% per year. Data drawn from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

We are compelled to take issue here with the implicit definition of a "we" as only including white European colonizers. Most of us are American historians who teach our students about Native American as well as British and others European colonizers uses of the land. Native Americans did indeed occupy North America before the British showed up, and they too altered the landscape, notably through fire as well as agriculture.

Under Trump, air pollution is once more on the rise. In October 2019, researchers at Carnegie Mellon reported that small particulate matter levels had surged across the United States during 2017 and 2018. They estimated nearly 10,000 additional deaths had resulted, mostly from associated lung diseases.

And as Politico noted back in July, there has been a"15 percent increase in the number of high air pollution days in the first two years of the Trump administration as compared with the last four years of the Obama administration. That’s a setback from a long-term decline under the previous four presidents..." Other outlets from Mother Jones to Scientific American have offered additional points countering Trump's claims.

Among the many priorities set out in NEPA that the president fails to mention is a wider-ranging principle of creating "enjoyable harmony." If taken seriously, this concept could arguably furnish a more expansive imperative for environmental action than the health, safety, and economic frameworks Trump does emphasize. It seems obvious that the Administration's position is to minimize, even more so than previous administrations and court decisions, the original expansiveness of NEPA's intent. See James R. Skillen, Federal Ecosystem Management: Its Rise, Fall, and Afterlife (Kansas, 2015), 69-72, which emphasizes the substantive elements of NEPA that have been forgotten/minimized compared with the procedural components.

The EPA under Trump has surpassed the goal of his executive order to cut two regulations for each new regulation. Regulations lifted include bans on pesticides found to cause brain damage in children, and restrictions on the amount of mining debris that coal companies can dispose of in streams. Indeed, many if not most of the new regulations being proposed by this agency seek to curb or rollback existing rules. A running list is maintained by Harvard Law School and another by the NYTimes.

As with the two earlier examples, the controversies that dogged and slowed efforts to expand the Seattle-Tacoma airport hinge less upon NEPA itself than the project's potentially far-reaching impacts themselves, and the many parties deeply affected by these. A "streamlined" NEPA will not stop many of the lawsuits of the aggrieved that slowed this project, and may even multiply these.

As part of the Trump administration's "streamlining," it is also seeking to eliminate consideration of "cumulative" environmental impacts. Thereby, those poorer and minority communities on whose surroundings many environmental harms have already been piled on are likely to bear an even greater burden. Already, in spite of the lengthy NEPA process over the Seattle airport's expansion, nearby residents who continue to bear its brunt have wound up feeling their concerns about heightened noise and air pollution have been sidelined. As one resident put it at a hearing in 2018, "the communities that are taking the impacts are poor. Our area is going to lose because we don’t have the voice, power and money other neighborhoods have."

In a related story, those living in Burien, Washington, under a flight path the airport has moved to expand, have twice sued FAA for not adequately taking into account the environmental impacts of the new flyway. In the last such suit, a federal court decided in November, 2019 that the FAA had failed to defend its argument that the revised flight path deserved a "categorical exclusion" from NEPA's requirements. The 2-1 federal decision ruled that exempting the flight path through categorical exclusion constituted an "arbitrary and capricious" exercise of federal power.

The 25 years it took to begin construction of the Basnight Bridge owed very little to NEPA itself. As the Southern Environmental Law Center noted in comments on NEPA revision last fall, delays in the project were "due entirely to an incomplete proposal, politics, and funding."

A new bridge was first proposed in the early 1990s as a replacement to a Bonner Bridge built in 1963 prior to NEPA between islands in North Carolina's shifting Outer Banks. The new structure was needed, argued the highway department, precisely because this earlier construction had been undertaken with such a poor understanding of its environment. Among other issues, the inlet it crossed kept migrating rapidly to the south. Among the challenges then faced in coming up with a more resilient and sustainable design, as recounted by highway technical officials in 2015, the new bridge was slated to cross landscapes in the Pea Island Wildlife Refuge and Cape Hatteras National Seashore, threatening rare birds and other species. They also confronted "a constantly changing coastal environment that is vulnerable to frequent and extreme storm events," even as they sought to plan "something that's going to last 50 years."

While there was a sixteen-year delay between the draft and final environmental impact statements for the project, approved by the Federal Highway Administration in 2010, the Southern Environmental Law Center has documented here all the poor foresight and political squabbles behind it.

The new NEPA rules now seek to exclude most considerations of climate change from the planning and decision-making in such projects. The history of the Bonner and Basnight bridge projects in a place like the Outer Banks, notoriously unstable and now anticipating even more severe storms, raises serious questions about just how resilient or reliable the resulting infrastructure will be.

The president’s comment that the environmental review process has become a "regulatory nightmare" is at face value unremarkable. That has been a refrain of a number of previous presidents, and the Council on Environmental Quality has several times issued new guidelines to try to limit its length and make its focus more concise, as a decision document rather than merely a catalog of conditions. In some cases agencies have tried to use comprehensive documentation of existing conditions as a substitute for serious decision-relevant analysis of the comparative environmental merits of perhaps better alternatives. In other cases some parties have sought to prolong and complicate the process to stop projects they felt were environmentally damaging; but in some of these cases they were responding to agencies’ unwillingness to consider alternatives that were potentially environmentally superior.

What is more important than these statements themselves are the actions that come with them. The Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) mandated by NEPA was intended to be an essential element for any federal action significantly affecting the environment. Reforms that make it serve this purpose more effectively are desirable. Unfortunately, many past proposed “reforms,” including expanding categorical exclusions, only work by removing more and more actions, or more and more of the environment, from NEPA's scope, corroding the law's purpose and effectiveness. Similarly the “reforms” now proposed would simply exclude foreseeable conditions such as climate change from environmental analyses of proposed infrastructure projects. That move, alongside the rhetoric here solely focused on the benefits of building projects, with no mention of any environmental costs, augur a wholesale abrogation of NEPA's original aims. Especially for long-lived public investments in infrastructure,almost certainly be affected by changes already foreseeable, this new NEPA regimen also promises shorter-lived roads, bridges, tunnels, etc., and a growing waste of taxpayer funds.

NEPA’s environmental analysis requirements should continue for all federal actions significantly affecting the environment. They should include all significant impacts anticipated, all significant environmental trends affecting them, and all meaningful alternatives available either to the initiating agency or to other federal agencies reviewing the document. And the opportunity to review the analysis and to suggest better alternatives should remain open both to all other agencies with relevant jurisdiction or special expertise and to the public. The resulting analysis should produce a concise and environmentally sound basis for making a reasonable, rather than an arbitrary or capricious, choice among the alternatives considered.

See Richard N.L. Andrews, Managing the Environment, Managing Ourselves: A History of American Environmental Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 184-90.

Trump greatly exaggerates here the actual, ample statistics on how long environmental reviews take under the National Environmental Policy Act, also the degree to which reviews themselves are responsible for project delays. In most cases, they simply are not. In 99.6% of cases, full environmental impact statements are actually deemed unnecessary. See Table 3-1 of this CEQ report.

According to this same study, when EISs are drafted, 58.9% are completed in less than 3 years. Fewer than 5% required more than a decade to complete. Data is available in Table 2-5 of this CEQ report.

Such projects always entail costs and benefits. Until NEPA was passed, however, both government and private developers neglected their projects' environmental balance sheets. Thereby, communities in the path of dams or freeways, also endangered species and ecosystems, bore an inordinate share of the costs, often little noted until it was too late. NEPA has played a transformative role in ensuring that this fuller array of costs and benefits are carefully assessed. It has opened considerably greater opportunities for the public to comment on such projects before they are approved, rather than after the fact.

Through these contributions, NEPA ushered in an historic turning point in how decisions about public infrastructure projects were made, documented by many historians. The era in which small but powerful and well-connected elites could decide where freeways were to run or dams were to be built came to a close in the United States. Since then, NEPA has played a major role in sustaining the public's say in public infrastructure projects. Some examples include public involvement in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, management of national forest roadless areas, and the Keystone XL pipeline.

Several books by historians that offer analysis of NEPA’s significance to public involvement in federal policy include: James Skillen, The Nation’s Largest Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West (2009); James Morton Turner, The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (2012); Cody Ferguson, This is Our Land: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Late-Twentieth Century (2015).

The National Environmental Policy Act is a cornerstone of what political scientists Christopher Klyza and David Sousa have described as the "green state" - the laws and regulations put into place in the 1970s to protect the environment and public health. When President Nixon signed it into law on January 1, 1970, he hailed it as a model of bipartisanship. It passed unanimously in the Senate (Even Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), later famous for his opposition to environmental protection, voted in favor) and with only 15 nay votes in the House. Ballotpedia.

At the time of the NEPA’s signing, no one anticipated how consequential it would be. Nor did they note the far-reaching significance of its most important provision: Section 102, added late, by Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, to give the law some “teeth.” This section requires the government to produce an environmental impact statement (EIS), assessing the environmental consequences of a proposed action and potential alternatives. While the aspirational principles at the beginning of the statute could be interpreted flexibly or weakly by courts, the EIS requirement could not. As well as providing information, the mandate for an EIS process made NEPA the vehicle for a greater democratization of federal decisions, by opening a new avenue through which voices of the public could be heard. Draft EIS's are submitted for public comment and agencies are required to respond to public and expert criticism. Thereby, NEPA has been widely recognized by historians and other scholars as having significantly enhanced the democracy of environmental governance. For just one example, see Wendy Nelson Espeland, "Bureaucratizing Democracy, Democratizing Bureaucracy," Law and Social Inquiry Vol. 25, No. 4 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 1077-1109

This portion of the Sterling Highway, which runs from Juneau through the Kenai River Valley, traverses federal reserves including the Chugach National Forest and the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. NEPA itself is not really responsible for the disagreements over routing that have caused the delays.

More influential: in a region where much of the land is public, federal law sets many rules for its development, especially if reserved for wildlife and recreation. A federal law from 1966 prohibits a road corridor "unless [there is] no feasible and prudent alternative." Designated wilderness areas--touched on by one of the route proposals--set an even higher standard, requiring presidential review (by George W. Bush) and Congressional approval.

This highway is so dangerous for related reasons. Motorists are apt to collide with its abundant herds of elk and moose, whose protection Fish and Wildlife officials have sought.

According to the National Association of Home-builders, CEO's in the construction industry earned a median income of $166,710 last year, over four times then national median take-home pay of $38,640. Members of the building trades unions generally have jobs that pay less than half (front-line supervisors) to less than a third (carpenters) of what their bosses earn.

Of course, most all of this improvement came before the Trump administration. And by the EPA's own data, the number of days with "unhealthy" ozone levels in 35 of the largest metro areas has trended upward since 2016. Of the criteria pollutants, while the national mean for sulfur dioxide has indeed fallen over the Trump years (to 2018), those for ozone and nitrogen oxide have at best remained stable, and those for carbon monoxide and small (2.5 mm) particulates have actually risen.

Records maintained by the U.S. Department of Transportation contradict this statement. In 2018, the average time to completion was 3.9 years for a highway project. This is substantially lower than in 2011, when the average time to completion was 6.5 years. The reduction is a result of regulatory reforms undertaken during the Obama administration. For more information, see the U.S. Department of Transportation website.

Though from its beginnings, the Trump Administration has shown less interest in protecting wildlife or soliciting public input than in opening federal lands for private economic use. Immediately upon arrival, for instance, it rolled back rules designed to improve the environmental review process in the Bureau of Land Management. This change reversed an Obama Administration rule meant to bring stakeholders together and gain public input sooner prior to developing a plan, rather than waiting until it was proposed. The reversal is likely to lengthen planning processes, as explained in this article by historian Adam Sowards.

While the effects of NEPA are wide ranging, many activities have been exempted as "categorical exclusions," a tactic that the Forest Service under Trump-appointed Bernhardt has aggressively sought to expand. Examples listed by the Department of the Interior include surveys, seasonal field camps, prescribed burns less than 2,000 acres in size, routine fish stocking, etc. Department of the Interior.

For more information on the history of categorical exclusions, see Kevin H. Moriarty, “Circumventing the National Environmental Policy Act: Agency Abuse of the Categorical Exclusion Note,” New York University Law Review 79, no. 6 (2004): 2312–40

On more recent efforts to expand the scope of categorical exclusions by the Trump administration, for activities from logging to building infrastructure, see this 2019 article from High Country News.

While these are key terms in the NEPA, the president has omitted a wider-ranging principle of the act, a policy of creating "enjoyable harmony," which is more expansive than the health, safety, and economic framework emphasized here. It seems obvious that the Administration's position is to minimize what was an expansive intent. See James R. Skillen, Federal Ecosystem Management: Its Rise, Fall, and Afterlife (Kansas, 2015), 69-72, which emphasizes the substantive elements of NEPA that have been forgotten/minimized compared with the procedural components.

The president’s comment that “the environmental review process designed to improve decision making has become increasingly complex and difficult to navigate” is at face value unremarkable: it has been a refrain of a number of previous presidents, and the Council on Environmental Quality has several times issued new guidelines to try to limit its length and make its focus more concise, as a decision document rather than merely a catalogue of conditions. In some cases agencies have tried to use comprehensive documentation of existing conditions as a substitute for serious decision-relevant analysis of the comparative environmental merits of perhaps better alternatives. In other cases some parties have sought to prolong and complicate the process to stop projects they felt were environmentally damaging; but in some of these cases they were responding to agencies’ unwillingness to consider alternatives that were potentially environmentally superior.

What is more important than this statement is the nature of the proposed “reforms” that he has introduced. The EIS was intended to be an essential element of the decision documents for any federal action significantly affecting the environment. Reforms that make it serve this purpose more effectively are desirable. Unfortunately, however, too many of the proposed “reforms” in the past have included such measures as expanding categorical exclusions and other measures that remove more and more actions from environmental analysis requirements, which defeats rather than improves the law’s effectiveness. And the proposed “reforms” in the present case include an attempt to remove foreseeable conditions such as climate change from consideration in environmental analyses of proposed infrastructure projects: an illogical exclusion, especially for long-lived public investments in infrastructure which will almost certainly be affected by changes already foreseeable, leading to a waste of taxpayer funds.

NEPA’s environmental analysis requirements should continue for all federal actions significantly affecting the environment. They should include all significant impacts anticipated, all significant environmental trends affecting them, and all meaningful alternatives available either to the initiating agency or to other federal agencies reviewing the document. And the opportunity to review the analysis and to suggest better alternatives should remain open both to all other agencies with relevant jurisdiction or special expertise and to the public. The resulting analysis should produce a concise and environmentally sound basis for making a reasonable, rather than an arbitrary or capricious, choice among the alternatives considered.

The goals of NEPA have evolved since 1970. One of the most important changes in how NEPA has been implemented was the result of Executive Order 12898, issued by President Clinton in 1994. It requires that the federal government give attention to environmental justice in assessing the consequences of proposed actions and undertaking outreach to ensure that all affected communities are engaged in the public review process. This expansion of outreach is obscured in Trump’s statement behind cliched complaints about slow bureaucracy.

However, while Clinton’s Executive Order has been been significant, it has not translated into the action that many environmental justice groups had hoped for. In Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty (2007), a report for the United Church of Christ, which has been essential in the environmental justice movement in the US, the authors lamented that the EPA had failed to fully implement EO 12898 and called for Congress to more fully codify it (pgs. 156-157). Reflections on EO 12898 after 20 years published by the NRDC were similarly mixed. See comments by Albert Huang, an NRDC attorney. One wonders whether the concerns of these "hardworking Americans" will be those addressed in the Council on Environmental Quality's review.

No part of this statement suggests that that any of the administration's proposed changes will improve environmental protection.

The Trump Administration has itself likely slowed the EIS process, both by significantly shrinking relevant agencies, and by abruptly shifting the body responsible for implementing NEPA, the Council on Environmental Quality, from its headquarters as reported in the Washington Post and Greenwire.

The Trump administration has also hindered efforts to streamline implementation of NEPA initiated by previous administrations. In 2010, in celebration of the Act’s 40th anniversary, the Obama administration refined its implementation, including clarifying when findings of no significant impact are appropriate and when categorical exclusions could be used to exempt routine activities from NEPA review.

The Trump Administration immediately rolled back rules designed to improve the environmental review process in the Bureau of Land Management. This change reversed an Obama Administration rule meant to bring stakeholders together and gain public input sooner prior to developing a plan, rather than waiting until it was proposed. The reversal is likely to lengthen planning processes, as explained in this article by historian Adam Sowards.

The EPA has surpassed Trump's original promise of cutting two regulations for each new regulation. Regulations lifted include bans on pesticides found to cause brain damage in children, and restrictions on the amount of mining debris that coal companies can dispose of in streams. A running list is maintained by Harvard Law School and another by the NYTimes.

Such projects always entail costs and benefits. NEPA has played a key role in assuring that those costs and benefits are assessed carefully and that the public has the opportunity to comment on such projects before they are approved, rather than after the fact.

This has been important historically. As historians have documented, NEPA has played a key role in giving the public a say in public infrastructure projects. Some examples include public involvement in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, management of national forest roadless areas, and the Keystone XL pipeline.

Several books by historians that offer analysis of NEPA’s significance to public involvement in federal policy include: James Skillen, The Nation’s Largest Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West (2009); James Morton Turner, The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (2012); Cody Ferguson, This is Our Land: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Late-Twentieth Century (2015).

The value of NEPA has also been documented in other reports by non-profit organizations and government agencies. This report by the Center for the American Progress highlights the value of NEPA in the context of a Charlotte, NC-area transportation project. This 2010 Department of Energy report highlights the quiet success of NEPA. The Natural Resources Defense Council also highlights NEPA success stories in this report.

While the effects of NEPA are wide ranging, many activities have been exempted as "categorical exclusions." Examples listed by the Department of the Interior include surveys, seasonal field camps, prescribed burns less than 2,000 acres in size, routine fish stocking, etc. Department of the Interior.

For more information on the history of categorical exclusions, see Kevin H. Moriarty, “Circumventing the National Environmental Policy Act: Agency Abuse of the Categorical Exclusion Note,” New York University Law Review 79, no. 6 (2004): 2312–40

On more recent efforts to expand the scope of categorical exclusions by the Trump administration, see this 2019 article from High Country News.

The National Environmental Policy Act is a cornerstone of what political scientists Christopher Klyza and David Sousa have described as the "green state" - the laws and regulations put into place in the 1970s to protect the environment and public health. When President Nixon signed it into law on January 1, 1970, he hailed it as a model of bipartisanship. It passed unanimously in the Senate (Even Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), later famous for his opposition to environmental protection, voted in favor) and with only 15 nay votes in the House. Ballotpedia.

At the time of the NEPA’s signing, no one anticipated how consequential it would be, or noted the significance of its most important provision: Section 102, added late, by Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, to give the law some “teeth.” This section requires the government to produce an environmental impact statement (EIS), assessing the environmental consequences of a proposed action and potential alternatives. While the aspirational principles at the beginning of the statute could be interpreted flexibly or weakly by courts, the EIS could not. As well as providing information, EIS process opened a new avenue to listen to the public. Draft EIS's are submitted for public comment and agencies are required to respond to public and expert criticism. This has increased democratic participation in environmental governance.

A main point of NEPA was to ensure not just builders or government officials but all other affected communities and environments should receive some say in project planning. The value of NEPA has been repeatedly documented in other reports by non-profit organizations and government agencies. This report by the Center for the American Progress highlights the value of NEPA in the context of a Charlotte, NC-area transportation project. It argues that the current environmental review process "improves governance, increases transparency, and makes infrastructure projects better by reducing environmental and community impacts through public participation and mitigations." This 2010 Department of Energy report highlights the quiet success of NEPA. Reviewing thirteen "quiet success" stories, it argues that in each case, NEPA was responsible for "public involvement and careful consideration of alternatives [that] has produced better outcomes.” The Natural Resources Defense Council also highlights NEPA successes in this report. It "gives citizens their only opportunity to voice concerns about a project's impact on their community." And because it "ensure[s] that the project's impacts -- environmental and otherwise -- are considered and disclosed to the public," also "because informed public engagement often produces ideas, information, and even solutions that the government might otherwise overlook, NEPA leads to better decisions -- and better outcomes -- for everyone."

Among the many priorities set out in NEPA that the president fails to mention is a wider-ranging principle of creating "enjoyable harmony," more expansive than the health, safety, and economic frameworks he does emphasize. It seems obvious that the Administration's position is to minimize what was an expansive intent. See James R. Skillen, Federal Ecosystem Management: Its Rise, Fall, and Afterlife (Kansas, 2015), 69-72, which emphasizes the substantive elements of NEPA that have been forgotten/minimized compared with the procedural components.

Though from its beginnings, the Trump Administration has shown less interest in protecting wildlife or soliciting public input than in opening federal lands for private economic use. Immediately upon arrival, for instance, it rolled back rules designed to improve the environmental review process in the Bureau of Land Management. This change reversed an Obama Administration rule meant to bring stakeholders together and gain public input sooner prior to developing a plan, rather than waiting until it was proposed. The reversal is likely to lengthen planning processes, as explained in this article by historian Adam Sowards.

The EPA has surpassed Trump's original promise of cutting two regulations for each new regulation. Regulations lifted include bans on pesticides found to cause brain damage in children, and restrictions on the amount of mining debris that coal companies can dispose of in streams. A running list is maintained by Harvard Law School and another by the NYTimes.

The Trump Administration has itself likely slowed the EIS process, both by significantly shrinking relevant agencies, and by abruptly shifting the body responsible for implementing NEPA, the Council on Environmental Quality, from its headquarters as reported in the Washington Post and Greenwire.

The Trump administration has also hindered efforts to streamline implementation of NEPA initiated by previous administrations. In 2010, in celebration of the Act’s 40th anniversary, the Obama administration refined its implementation, including clarifying when findings of no significant impact are appropriate and when categorical exclusions could be used to exempt routine activities from NEPA review.

The president’s comment that the environmental review process has become a "regulatory nightmare" is at face value unremarkable. That has been a refrain of a number of previous presidents, and the Council on Environmental Quality has several times issued new guidelines to try to limit its length and make its focus more concise, as a decision document rather than merely a catalog of conditions. In some cases agencies have tried to use comprehensive documentation of existing conditions as a substitute for serious decision-relevant analysis of the comparative environmental merits of perhaps better alternatives. In other cases some parties have sought to prolong and complicate the process to stop projects they felt were environmentally damaging; but in some of these cases they were responding to agencies’ unwillingness to consider alternatives that were potentially environmentally superior.

What is more important than these statements themselves are the actions that come with them. The Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) mandated by NEPA was intended to be an essential element for any federal action significantly affecting the environment. Reforms that make it serve this purpose more effectively are desirable. Unfortunately, many past proposed “reforms,” including expanding categorical exclusions, only work by removing more and more actions, or more and more of the environment, from NEPA's scope, corroding the law's purpose and effectiveness. Similarly the “reforms” now proposed would simply exclude foreseeable conditions such as climate change from environmental analyses of proposed infrastructure projects. That move, alongside the rhetoric here solely focused on the benefits of building projects, with no mention of any environmental costs, augur a wholesale abrogation of NEPA's original aims. Especially for long-lived public investments in infrastructure,almost certainly be affected by changes already foreseeable, this new NEPA regimen also promises shorter-lived roads, bridges, tunnels, etc., and a growing waste of taxpayer funds.

NEPA’s environmental analysis requirements should continue for all federal actions significantly affecting the environment. They should include all significant impacts anticipated, all significant environmental trends affecting them, and all meaningful alternatives available either to the initiating agency or to other federal agencies reviewing the document. And the opportunity to review the analysis and to suggest better alternatives should remain open both to all other agencies with relevant jurisdiction or special expertise and to the public. The resulting analysis should produce a concise and environmentally sound basis for making a reasonable, rather than an arbitrary or capricious, choice among the alternatives considered.

Such projects always entail costs and benefits. Until NEPA was passed, however, both government and private developers neglected their projects' environmental balance sheet, and communities in the path of dams or freeways, or endangered species, bore inordinate costs. NEPA has played a key role in assuring that those costs and benefits are assessed carefully and that the public has the opportunity to comment on such projects before they are approved, rather than after the fact.

This has been important historically. As historians have documented, NEPA has played a key role in giving the public a say in public infrastructure projects. Some examples include public involvement in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, management of national forest roadless areas, and the Keystone XL pipeline.

Several books by historians that offer analysis of NEPA’s significance to public involvement in federal policy include: James Skillen, The Nation’s Largest Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West (2009); James Morton Turner, The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (2012); Cody Ferguson, This is Our Land: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Late-Twentieth Century (2015).

While the effects of NEPA are wide ranging, many activities have been exempted as "categorical exclusions," a tactic that the Forest Service under Trump-appointed Bernhardt has aggressively sought to expand. Examples listed by the Department of the Interior include surveys, seasonal field camps, prescribed burns less than 2,000 acres in size, routine fish stocking, etc. Department of the Interior.

For more information on the history of categorical exclusions, see Kevin H. Moriarty, “Circumventing the National Environmental Policy Act: Agency Abuse of the Categorical Exclusion Note,” New York University Law Review 79, no. 6 (2004): 2312–40

On more recent efforts to expand the scope of categorical exclusions by the Trump administration, for activities from logging to building infrastructure, see this 2019 article from High Country News.

The National Environmental Policy Act is a cornerstone of what political scientists Christopher Klyza and David Sousa have described as the "green state" - the laws and regulations put into place in the 1970s to protect the environment and public health. When President Nixon signed it into law on January 1, 1970, he hailed it as a model of bipartisanship. It passed unanimously in the Senate (Even Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK), later famous for his opposition to environmental protection, voted in favor) and with only 15 nay votes in the House. Ballotpedia.

At the time of the NEPA’s signing, no one anticipated how consequential it would be, or noted the significance of its most important provision: Section 102, added late, by Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, to give the law some “teeth.” This section requires the government to produce an environmental impact statement (EIS), assessing the environmental consequences of a proposed action and potential alternatives. While the aspirational principles at the beginning of the statute could be interpreted flexibly or weakly by courts, the EIS could not. As well as providing information, EIS process opened a new avenue to listen to the public. Draft EIS's are submitted for public comment and agencies are required to respond to public and expert criticism. This has increased democratic participation in environmental governance.

Spending on Brownfields has actually reached record lows under Trump. The $57.4 million spent on site cleanups in FY2018 was the lowest since this program converted from a pilot initiative in 2003, under President G.W. Bush. Trump EPA budgets have also consistently called for massive cuts in Brownfields spending, for FY2020, for instance, by one-third for categorical grants.

This scholarly analysis of the brownfields program as implemented under Obama found a positive impact from it on environmental justice for local communities: Lee, Sangyun, and Paul Mohai. "The Socioeconomic Dimensions of Brownfield Cleanup in the Detroit Region." Population and Environment 34, no. 3 (2013): 420-29. But the Trump EPA's [abandonment of job training in brownfields implementation] (https://cfpub.epa.gov/bf_factsheets/) suggests its impacts may well be less favorable to local residents.

For a description and critique of this program in its early stages, see Solitare, Laura, and Michael Greenberg. "Is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Brownfields Assessment Pilot Program Environmentally Just?" Environmental Health Perspectives 110 (2002): 249-57.

Trump here refers to the new agreement negotiated by his administration to supercede NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement (sealed in 1994): the USMCA. Agreed upon with Mexican and Canadian negotiators in October of 2018, this treaty mostly copies the environmental provisions of NAFTA, with some marginal improvements, but most environmental advocates have not been impressed. They have pushed Congress, which must authorize the new trade deal, to insist on more and stronger measures.

While NAFTA itself did not include environmental provisions except as a side agreement, USMCA does write them into the body of the agreement itself in chapter 24. Environmental groups have welcomed the survival of earlier innovations in the new agreement such as the Commission on Environment Cooperation (CEC), and the enumeration of areas like marine litter and debris, presumably for future CEC actions. However, the new agreement entirely ignores climate change. It also may make it more difficult for citizen parties to protest their own government’s rollbacks of environmental regulations as violations of the trade agreement, since USMCA is now specific that these are only actionable when having impacts on trade.

Moreover, the new agreement includes no budgetary or other re-invigoration of those bodies charged with overseeing the agreement. Nor does it provide environmental remedies in vulnerable zones, such as the US-Mexico border. It is also worth noting that the Trump budget proposals have repeatedly sought to reduce EPA spending on border programs (excepting the wall) to zero.

Linked here are critical scholarly evaluations of the new agreement's public health and environmental provisions. The latter concludes: "Despite the increased number of environmental provisions in USMCA, it is poorly innovative, especially when compared to NAFTA. Indeed, NAFTA remains the most innovative PTA ever negotiated, because it created 46 new environmental provisions, including, for instance, on endangered species and on regulatory sovereignty in the enforcement of environmental measures..."

In this theme, Trump and supporters turn to a long tradition of projecting massive future costs based on thin evidence, and using these inflated costs to call environmental plans impractical. This tradition dates back at least to the Clean Air Act, and is not limited to the Trump administration.

In this theme, Trump uses environmental concerns to justify protectionism and tariffs and accuses other countries of being the real polluters, taking advantage of American softness.

In this theme, Trump and supporters cast environmental threats in anti-migrant terms--for example describing plastic waste on American shores as foreign invasion even as they characterize real people at the borders as garbage.

In this theme, Trump and supporters suggest that future innovation can prevent environmental problems, while ignoring or intentionally hindering existing tech or tested social or regulatory solutions. Meanwhile the promised innovation is often itself underfunded.

In this theme, the president and other administration officials suggest that environmental regulations are responsible for job loss and imagined economic shrinkage. This long running anti-environmental argument conceals other sources of job loss, while hiding sources of job gain associated with environmentalism. E.g. in the 1980s lumber companies blamed environmentalists for a decline in northwestern lumber jobs, that was largely attributable to over cutting, mechanization of the lumber industry, and an overall movement to the timber plantations of the South.

The Water Infrastructure Act of 2018 actually re-authorized on a more continuing basis a Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act first passed in 2014 during the Obama Administration. Mostly set up during the Obama EPA, this program has sought to encourage municipalities and states to repair, update, or expand their water, sewer, and other water-related systems through federal loans.

The approach marked a departure from much federal funding of water systems through the twentieth century, which furnished outright grants, as late as the 1980s at a ratio of one or more federal dollars for every one dollar contributed by a municipal government. By contrast, the renewed infrastructure act of 2018 now only provides federal loans, at a ratio of one federal dollar for every five promised by local, state, or private investors. This program was one of the few in Trump's EPA to receive more funds in FY2018 than in FY2017, at $63 million. But that was because of Congress rather than the Trump Administration itself, which proposed a budget for WIFIA in FY2018 of only $20 million.

The new act also contained drinking water provisions that were more generous, from reauthorizing a state revolving fund for drinking water for the first time since 2003, and amending the Safe Drinking Water Act to make it easier to use these funds to repair aging infrastructures, including leaded water pipes. Here as well, federal assistance comes as loans rather than grants, with a ratio of one federal dollar for every three provided by local or state governments or private enterprise.

In this theme, Trump and supporters seesaw between arguing natural and human causes for environmental problems. Thus for example, red tide is described as a natural phenomenon, and a consequence of fertilizer in the same sentence. Regular praise for emissions lowering while arguing against the need for emissions lowering is a similar see-saw.

In this theme, Trump and other administration officials claim smooth consistency and efficacy for processes that have been corrupt, haphazard, and incompetent.

In this theme, Trump and supporters claim credit for environmental improvements driven by long-standing regulation, even as they attack that same regulation as useless.

The Hazard Standards for Lead in Paint, Dust and Soil, aimed at protecting infants and children from deteriorating lead paint that leaves dust on floors and windowsills, was set in 2001 when the blood lead “level of concern” was 10 µg/dL. Today, what is now called the blood lead “reference level” is 5 µg/dL, and there is a proposal to revise it downward to 3.5 µg/dL. The dust-lead hazard standards have long been criticized for being outdated and insufficiently protective of children’s health. As Factcheck notes, this measure was the result not of a Trump Administration, but by a court order of December 2017, “in light of the obvious need.” Trump officials had fought against faster action in the courtroom, but lost.

However, the revisions that EPA has put in place under the Trump Administration are still inadequate. The risk assessment level (to determine which residences and schools pose a hazard to children) was strengthened from 40 to 10 µg/ft2 for floors and 250 to 100 µg/ft2 for windowsills. However, EPA declined to change the clearance standards, which are used to determine if a building is safe after the completion of renovations or repairs. Those standards remain at 40 µg/ft2 and 250 µg/ft for floors and windows. As Tom Neltner of the Environmental Defense Fund explained in a blog post:

"It does not make sense to have a clearance level that is less protective than the associated hazard standard, but EPA has expressly created that situation. The consequences of this decision would allow the bizarre situation where a risk assessment could find a dust-lead hazard on the floor such as 30 µg/ft2 (above the proposed standard but below the current level), but allow an abatement contractor to come in, do nothing, and pass clearance because the levels would fall below the current limit of 40 µg/ft2."

As the Council on Environmental Health of the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends, to protect children’s health from one of the most common forms of childhood lead exposure, the clearance standard should have been significantly lowered. At a lead-dust floor concentration of 40 µg/ft2 (the current clearance standard) a child has an estimated 50 per cent chance of having BLL ≥ 5 µg/dL.

While continuing to call for big reductions in EPA's budget for cleaning up hazardous waste sites (the Trump administration’s FY2020 budget proposal was down over twenty percent from FY2018 spending), the agency has indeed sped up its "deletions" from the federal list of Superfund sites. But as Factchecker notes, every year between 1995 and 2001, the EPA removed more than in 2018. Moreover, "of the 18 fully deleted sites in fiscal year 2018, all completed physical cleanup before 2016 and only two were made ready for reuse after 2016. "

From Portland, Oregon, to East Chicago to Houston to Minneapolis, local residents living next to many of these sites are worried about EPA's newfound readiness to declare toxic sites "clean," in part by downsizing its cleanup plans. While EPA touts its cleanup of GE-generated PCBs in the Hudson River as a "success story," New York State officials have recently sued the agency to require a more complete cleanup.

On the exclusionary and gentrifying effects that Superfund cleanups can have, in this case that of the Gowanus Canal, see: Turan, Zeynep. "Finding the 'Local Green Voice'? Waterfront Development, Environmental Justice, and Participatory Planning in Gowanus, NY." Urbani Izziv 29 (2018): 79-94

In July 2019, President Trump made a widely publicized speech on the environment. Although the administration has consistently worked to weaken the laws and regulations that protect the nation’s public health and environment, Trump’s speech misrepresented both the administration’s activities and the history of environmental protection. In this analysis, the Environmental History Action Network - a group of environmental historians and scholars - provides the needed corrections and missing context to help understand President Trump’s record on the environment.

While the United States has a long tradition of wilderness and wildlife conservation efforts, the Trump administration's most important public lands initiatives have served to challenge those policies and weaken that tradition.

In December 2017, Trump announced plans to shrink in size and weaken protections for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Bears Ears National Monument. That same month, Trump signed a tax law that included language opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's coastal plain for oil and gas exploration. In August 2019, the Trump administration weakened the regulations governing the implementation of the Endangered Species Act, making it easier to remove species from the list, giving greater emphasis to economic costs, and disregarding climate change in assessing the vulnerability of wildlife. Although the administration emphasizes its success in opening up public access to federal lands, the outdoor recreation industry has been vocal about its opposition to the Trump administration's public lands policies, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

For a timeline of Trump's attacks on the public lands, see this timeline from the Wilderness Society. Turner and Isenberg's The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump situate these policy shifts in historical context in chapter 2.

In the early twentieth century, the Republican Party, with Theodore Roosevelt in the lead, played an important role in creating the nation's first national parks, forests, monuments, and wildlife refuges. The most obvious legacy of those efforts today is an extensive system of protected public lands, which includes well-known sites such as Yosemite National Park, Glacier National Park, and Yellowstone National Park, among many others. Protecting these public lands, however, dovetailed with the growing power of the federal government and its imperial reach over the American West. Protecting these places often infringed on the rights of Native Americans and locals, who had long inhabited these sites or relied upon them for hunting and other subsistence activities.

Environmental historians have detailed the more complex origins and legacies of the American conservation movement. Starting points in this literature include: Mark Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (2000); Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (2001); Dorceta E. Taylor, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection (2016).

Trump's emphasis on local forest management as the root cause of wildfires gets at a broader problem in the way that we talk about wildfire in the West. Historically, federal fire policy has emphasized total fire suppression, which has increased fuel load and contributed to poor management. That said, the main thrust of Trump's point here seems to be arguing against any talk of anthropogenic climate as a causal factor. There is a rich literature in environmental history on fire. An excellent starting point is Stephen Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire. The best practices for "active management" have been debated historically and continue to be so in the forestry literature. See: B. N. Baird, “Comment on ‘Post-Wildfire Logging Hinders Regeneration and Increases Fire Risk,’” Science 313, no. 5787 (August 4, 2006): 615–615, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1127481; D. C. Donato et al., “Post-Wildfire Logging Hinders Regeneration and Increases Fire Risk,” Science 311, no. 5759 (January 20, 2006): 352–352, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1122855; D. C. Donato et al., “Response to Comments on ‘Post-Wildfire Logging Hinders Regeneration and Increases Fire Risk,’” Science 313, no. 5787 (August 4, 2006): 615–615, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1126583; Andrew S. Mathews, “Power/Knowledge, Power/Ignorance: Forest Fires and the State in Mexico,” Human Ecology 33, no. 6 (December 2005): 795–820, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-005-8211-x; Simon Pooley, “Fire, Smoke, and Expertise in South Africa’s Grasslands,” Environmental History 23, no. 1 (January 1, 2018).

Despite Trump's emphasis on the historic nature of his executive order, it actually marks a return to the past. One of the centerpieces of George W. Bush's environmental policy initiatives was the Healthy Forests Initiative, which aimed to expedited forest thinning, fuel reduction, and other strategies to reduce the threat of wildlife in the West. In fact, Bush announced that initiative in Jackson County, Oregon in August 2002 - the same county where Colleen Roberts, Trump's guest, serves as County Commissioner.

Climate justice advocates have been amongst the strongest supporters of the Green New Deal. Indeed, one of their greatest concerns is how the extraction of fossil fuels and the consequences of climate change both disproportionately impact minority communities. On the climate justice movements' origins and key tenets, see Tokar, "Movements for Climate Justice in the US and Worldwide," Routledge Handbook of Climate Change Movements (2014), chapter 9 and Schlosberg and Collins, "From environmental to climate justice: climate change and the discourse of environmental justice," WIREs Climate Change 2014, 5:359–374.

Some scholars question whether economic growth and environmental protection are compatible. Since the 2008 recession, "degrowth" critics has raised questions about what they describe as the "growth-addicted, deregulated, neo-liberal economic policies that have dominated national governments and international financial institutions since the 1980s." They advocate an alternative approach predicated on "equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human wellbeing and enhances ecological conditions." In their view, capitalist accumulation is fundamentally incompatible with the long-term ecological health of the planet. For a brief introduction to degrowth, see this article. For a longer history of environmental thought, focused on the tension between growth and limits, see Paul Sabin's book, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth's Future.

In making this statement, Trump is playing a very familiar rhetorical card. Nearly every president since George H. W. Bush, Democrat and Republican alike, has described their commitment to marrying a strong economy with a healthy environment. For instance, in 1989, President George H. W. Bush outlined his philosophy on environmental protection. Speaking to the public, he explained: "Our approach…is driven by a new kind of environmentalism, a set of principles that apply to all of the environmental challenges that we face. We believe that pollution is not the inevitable byproduct of progress. So, the first principle is that sound ecology and a strong economy can coexist." In 2013, President Obama made a similar point when introducing his climate agenda. Speaking at Georgetown University, he said: "The old rules may say we can’t protect our environment and promote economic growth at the same time, but in America, we’ve always used new technologies -- we’ve used science; we’ve used research and development and discovery to make the old rules obsolete."

Although environmental policy issues are deeply partisan today, there is a long tradition of bipartisan support for environmental reform in the United States. In the early 1960s and 1970s, when the nation's key environmental policies were passed into law by Congress, the leadership and strong support of legislators on both sides of the aisle was important. Laws such as the Wilderness Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act passed by overwhelming margins that included nearly all Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate. Yet, that bipartisan support began to erode in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration attempted to rollback key environmental laws on grounds that they were costly and inefficient. Today, issues such as climate change, energy policy, and endangered species protections remain partisan. But there have several important moments of bipartisan cooperation on environmental policy in recent years, including the passage of the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act for the 21st Century Act in 2016 and the Natural Resources Management Act passed in 2018. On the shift toward partisan debates over environmental issues, see Turner and Isenberg, The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump.

This is an example of environmental xenophobia, reversing the President's usual equation of immigrant people with garbage by treating plastic waste as a sort of invasion.

In fact, while relatively few studies have been done on different national contributors to oceanic plastic (and none that I can find have studied the origins of plastics on U.S. shores) those studies show that the U.S. is a significant contributor.

Such studies do not generally take into account the Americans' role as early plastics adopters or the generally accepted role of US-based multinationals like Coke, Pepsi, and Procter and Gamble in creating plastics waste. Focusing on current consumption levels, rather than global profits and historical burdens is also characteristic of climate change denial.

It is also worth noticing that a. Americans are among the heaviest per capita consumers of plastic in the world; b. While, in 2010, the U.S. was characterized as mismanaging almost no plastic waste much of that waste was being managed by being sent to China which has some of the worst management practices globally. Since 2018, however, China, like a growing list of countries, no longer accepts most American plastic waste.

This is an example of figleaf innovation-- a vague reference to a distant technological fix in order to distract attention from existing regulatory or social solutions.

This is likely a reference to The Ocean Cleanup, an organization founded with great fanfare in 2013, that promised an automated solution to the great Pacific Garbage Patch and received $30 million in funding. Criticized from the beginning by marine scientists and technical experts it has had significant technical problems.

In fact NOAA records the removal of 2400 metric tons of marine debris (including other forms of debris like derelict vessels) in 2018 mostly through partnerships with community organizations and nonprofits like the Sitka Sound Science Center.

The Trump admistration’s proposed budget for FY2020 cuts NOAA funding by 18% and directly attacks many of these programs. If the budget is enacted, NOAA plans to deemphasize partnerships like those described in the President's speech.

It is true that coastal waters support a significant number of jobs. In June of 2019, the Trump Administration's EPA reversed a decision blocking the Pebble Bay Mine in Alaska dating back to the Obama administration. The hardrock mine critically threatens 14,000 full and part time jobs in the downstream salmon fishery. Project promoters promise "750 to 1000 direct jobs for Alaskans" and up to 2,000 overall jobs. This is part of a broader pattern of supporting corporate mining profits and extractive industries over more widely distributed profits and environmental and public health.

Overall the Trump administration's record on coastal waters is not good, including attempting to open coastal waters to fossil fuel extraction, easing restrictions on developers and, by continuing to support fossil fuel burning, intensifying ocean acidification.

The United States does rank first -- along with nine other countries -- in drinking water. But it does not have the “cleanest air on record,” whether that means the cleanest air in the history of the U.S. (air pollution has recently worsened) or the cleanest air in the world (the U.S. ranks 88th among countries in exposure to particulate matter).

There is little evidence the Trump administration is aiming to reduce air pollution in at-risk communities. In general, the administration has sought to undercut both environmental justice in the EPA and air pollution science and control at the EPA. The administration proposed defunding the Office of Environmental Justice and disbanded the scientific board that advised the agency on air pollution.

Moreover, the agency’s focus on repealing the Clean Power Plan (CPP) and replacing it with a much weaker regulation flies in the face of the contention that the agency is concerned with at-risk communities. The CPP would have given much relief to at-risk communities who are disproportionately located near coal-fired power plants and the particulate matter they spew. The lead researcher on a recent EPA study of environmental inequality concluded that minority communities (and poor white communities in West Virginia) would be more exposed to particulate matter if the Trump administration’s Affordable Clean Energy Rules replaced the CPP.

In the past fifty years, the United States has made huge strides in cleaning up its air and water. It has done so by creating strong federal laws, based on good science, and a strong federal agency, the EPA, that has had the capacity and will to enforce those laws.

While the U.S. does have relatively clean air and water, the pollution levels of countries are not static for at least one important reason: Because pollution is driven by effective enforcement of strong environmental regulations, air and water can get cleaner and dirtier with the strengthening or weakening of regulations (and their enforcement).

China, for example, a country that is infamous for air pollution problems, is getting cleaner because it has beefed up the capacity of their environmental protection agencies and gotten much tougher on enforcement. A large cross-national study of air pollution found that “the rigor and structure of environmental regulations have particular impact [on cleaning up the environment], as does emphasis on enforcement.”

Under the Trump administration there have been concerted attempts to roll back regulatory health protections, and there has been a dramatic drop in enforcement. From what we know of our own history and the history of other countries, we can expect that weak enforcement will result in more pollution. The EPA’s own estimates of benefits from enforcement in 2018 show that the agency is backtracking on its role in curtailing pollution. Indeed, the American Lung Association found that air pollution in American cities increased in 2019 compared to 2015-2017. As the Association notes, all the progress on clean air the nation has made is “not certain to continue, as some in Congress seek to remove or weaken that law [the Clean Air Act], and as the administration seeks to repeal or reverse the safeguards in place to enforce the law."

Punishing businesses and other entities that violate pollution laws and endanger the health of other Americans is an effective way of creating a better environment. The record is clear on this: In and after the 1970s, Congress passed strong, regulatory laws, based in good science, aimed at protecting the environment and human health. Since then, we have seen dramatic improvements to the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land we live on. As important as the laws was the creation of an independent agency tasked with enforcing those regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Monitoring for pollution violations and forcing violators to comply with the law or be punished with fines is about much more than getting individual violators to stop polluting. When the EPA and state agencies effectively enforce the law against individual violators, other firms take notice and are more likely to comply, resulting in less pollution. Over time, environmental regulations spur firms to innovate and implement cleaner technology, making the whole industry cleaner over the long run.

Environmental regulations have catalyzed technological innovation and their economic benefits have far outweighed their costs. In 1997, EPA estimated that, from 1970 to 1990, the benefits of the Clean Air Act exceed the costs by 42 to 1, and in a follow-up study in 2011, EPA estimated that from 1990 to 2020, the benefits exceeded the costs by 30 to 1. As the EPA's website states, "Since 1970" -- when the U.S. instituted a Clean Air Act that, for the first time, had the teeth to punish polluters -- "cleaner air and a growing economy have gone hand in hand."

Far from rejecting an approach that punishes polluters for violating the law, the United States has been a leader in creating strong, effectively enforced environmental regulations. That approach has been successful. Under the Trump administration, however, enforcement has withered and the EPA has become increasingly ineffective at curtailing pollution. Most measures of enforcement at the agency in 2018 fell drastically, in some cases lower than they have been in several decades. The agency’s estimated reductions in pollutants and hazardous waste in 2017 and 2018 were the lowest on record.

Trump has indeed signed bipartisan legislation to address Harmful Algal Blooms (of which red tide is one example). For a brief discussion of the legislation, see the University of Mississippi School of Law’s post. The primary consequences of the legislation are increased funding for identification, assessment, and public notification for Harmful Algal Bloom and hypoxia events.

The actions that Trump is celebrating here are part of much longer-term efforts in Florida, mostly stemming from the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) authorized by Congress in 2000, that included plans to regulate water levels and restore habitat in and around Lake Okeechobee). The Herbert Hoover Dike, one of the large barriers around Lake Okeechobee is a non-CERP project, but also one with a much longer history of planning and construction. In addition, citing the US Army Corps of Engineers’ projects for flood control and drainage as environmental achievements will seem dubious to many environmentalists and conservationists who have historically opposed the conversion of relatively wild spaces like the Everglades to salable real estate. Trump’s praise for the project does provide insights into his broader attitudes towards the environment, namely that projects that modify landscapes to make them suitable for commercial, agricultural, extractive, or real estate development represent appropriate uses of the environment.

Here Trump is invoking a longstanding trope--jobs vs. environment--that has long been featured in the anti-environmental politics associated with the New Right and movement conservatism in the US. Thinkers in this movement described environmental regulations as government overreach and an assault on what they saw as fundamental freedoms and the rights of business interests. Although other conservatives had sought to capture the enthusiasm and energy of the environmental movements of the 1970s, anti-environmentalist thinking came to be a part of New Right politics. On this topic, see Keith Makoto Woodhouse's The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism, pgs. 145-150 and James Turner and Andrew Isenberg’s The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump), chapter 1.

That said, concerns about the relationship between jobs and environmental regulation, particularly during the global economic slowdown of the 1970s, created tensions, most notably in the Pacific Northwest. As historian Erik Loomis has written, efforts to protect the spotted owl did not decimate the logging industry, which had already suffered declines as a result of the actions of logging companies and changes in the global economy. Moreover, many workers and their unions had long fought for environmental protections. Despite this, conservatives singled out depressed logging communities as examples of the harm environmental regulations did to US workers.

Fuel poverty/energy poverty is a recognized concern in Europe, and the European Union has convened a working group to study the problem and aggregate research and policy related to it. Rather than reducing consumer energy costs through increased fossil fuel production, which Trump suggests is his preferred solution, many European countries have created programs to subsidize energy efficient housing retrofits or have provided fuel to low-income and elderly residents as a part of broader social welfare programs.

Despite relatively lower energy costs, affordability is a significant struggle in the US as well. Similar programs to those in Europe subsidizing efficiency improvements and providing limited energy bill assistance exist in the US. The Trump administration, however, has sought to eliminate the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

European energy prices are, on average, higher than those in the US. The most recent analysis on European energy price data from the European Union shows a decline in the cost of household retail energy in 2017. It also demonstrates that a significant driver of energy costs in Europe stems from fossil fuel imports.

That said, US electricity infrastructure is often of lower quality, such as the aging, elevated power lines from California utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), which California fire authorities determined caused the deadly Camp Fire in 2018, than what exists in Europe. Amidst news that PG&E would issue a "Public Safety Power Shutoff,") over significant parts of California, Bloomberg reported on ongoing demands that California utilities bury their power lines like Europe.

Although the nominal price of electricity has increased, the inflation-adjusted price of electricity has not increased as Trump implies. In fact, the Energy Information Administration’s data indicates that the inflation-adjusted price of electricity is approximately 40% lower than it was in 1960 and 10% lower than it was in 1985.

Gasoline prices fluctuated during the Obama administration, but fell from $2.77 to $2.26 in inflation adjusted dollars between the start of the administration in 2009 and its final year in 2016.

Trump’s enthusiasm for “economic nationalism” is at the core of these claims—juxtaposing “foreign polluters” with “lower standards” against policies forcing multinational companies based in the US to relocate production to US facilities. Globalization has indeed produced adverse environmental consequences, but Trump’s narrative is muddled. Poor countries, rather than villainous “foreign polluters” poaching US jobs, have often been the victims of neoliberal globalization.

The whims of mobile global capital, enabled through political decisions in the US and other parts of the Global North, drove the process of offshoring and the relocation of manufacturing to China and nations in the Global South, often, as the environmental scholar Andreas Malm has shown, in pursuit of a cheap, skilled, disciplinable work force. Mobile capital demanded that states construct infrastructure to provide cheap, reliable power—with little concern for emissions, pollution, or other environmental issues—in order to receive foreign direct investment. Coupled with the period of “structural adjustment,” in which institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund with the political and occasionally military support of the US and European nations, undermined development efforts based on import substitution or protected industrial development in the Global South.

In some cases, the dirtiest industries were foisted on poorer countries against their will. As historian Emily Brownell has shown, beginning in the 1980s as increasing pressure on land and resistance to dumping near communities increased disposal costs in the United States, states and municipalities began exporting waste, including hazardous materials across state lines and in a transnational trade. Governments in the Global South often resisted these efforts, but Global North governments, including the US, used sovereign debt and the threat of “structural adjustment” to pressure poorer countries into accepting waste and hazardous materials. The presence of these coercive markets both created profit opportunites for US waste exporters and undermined efforts to reduce and process waste close to its point of origin.

The Chinese state's recent policy shift to cease accepting plastic recyclables with a higher contamination rate (the presence of food residue and other materials that must be removed when recycling), has led to the cancellation of municipal recycling programs and bales of potentially recyclable materials piling up at US ports.

This statement is transparently false. Much to the chagrin of many environmental groups, the Obama administration promoted an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, supporting continued fossil fuel use alongside renewable energy development. The environmentalist blog Desmog) pointedly complained that despite efforts to shutter the oldest coal-fired energy plants, the Obama administration, particularly Department of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, continued to support carbon capture and storage, which would enable the continued use of fossil-fuel power generation with subsidies greater than those offered for renewables. During his term, the administration promoted fracking at home and abroad, touting it as a “bridge fuel.” There was some movement away from fossil fuels through a freeze on federal coal leases, which the Sierra Club praised, which may look like a war on extraction. Recently, however, Obama gloated that he had enabled a US oil-and-gas production boom, urging a Houston audience to thank his administration for their profits—hardly the words of the leader in a war on US extractive industries.

Trump’s claim about a war on energy is also an allusion to the declining fortunes of coal, but blaming this on the Obama administration ignores the history of coal production in the US. Coal mining across the US has experienced ebbs and flows amidst a pattern of longer-term decline throughout the twentieth century. For example, states like Illinois with long histories of mineral extraction often forgotten in national reporting emphasizing Appalachia, have a complicated history with coal. Strip mining operations in Fulton County, IL, themselves a technological shift that increased extraction efficiency but put many miners out of work, saw a decline in the 1970s and mine closures in the 1980s, leading to debates over how best to reclaim land no longer viable for coal production. Despite this history, from the last two years of the George W. Bush administration through the final year of the Obama administration, coal production increased in some southern Illinois mines. As the Chicago Reader reported, however, increased production coincided with decreased employment due to new mining technology requiring fewer workers. Increased production has not improved the financial health of Illinois mines—natural gas consistently outcompetes coal on the state’s deregulated energy markets. In addition to financial difficulties, opposition to mining has come not only from environmental groups but also from farmers and residents of rural towns who support coal production but object to the consequences that new extraction methods have for nearby agriculture. The Obama administration championed efforts to support Illinois’s coal-fired energy industry through this period of transition. Beginning in 2008, it supported “clean coal” projects in Illinois, only abandoning one proposed plant after years of lawsuits from competing retail energy providers rendered it impossible for the project to be completed before federal funding expired.

Although announced with great fanfare, the changes EPA is proposing to the 1991 Lead and Copper Rule (LCR) which governs lead in the nation’s drinking water, will virtually ensure that the timeline for replacing the estimated 6 million old lead service lines that supply drinking water to an estimated 15 to 22 million people will be significantly lengthened, and that more drinking water crises, like those in Flint, MI and Newark, NJ will occur in the meantime. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) estimates that the EPA’s new rule will lengthen the lead service line replacement process by approximately two decades, exposing more generations of children to lead in tap water before this problem is solved.

The proposed LCR revisions also do not set an enforceable Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) for lead. Instead, EPA proposes to continue to rely on the old, outdated Action Level of 15 ppb. Public health advocates have argued that there should be an MCL of no more than 5 ppb to bring the nation’s drinking water into alignment with the compelling science that there is no safe level of lead exposure for children. The NRDC also notes that the Trump Administration’s proposed changes to the LCR, which slow down the required pace for violators to replace lead pipes from about 13 years to over 33, are “illegal” as they “violate the anti-backsliding provision in the Safe Drinking Water Act, which prohibits EPA from weakening any drinking water standards that are on the books.” Should these changes go, they will become an open invitation for lawsuits.

The Green New Deal "plan" referred to is actually a non-binding Resolution proposed in the House, which itself cost nothing. It suggested general goals and directions, but no specific policies on which to base any cost estimates. Fact-checker tracked the $100 trillion estimate back to a figure suggested over a decade ago by a conservative nonprofit policy group, coauthored by John McCain’s chief economic adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign. That estimate — which actually ranges from $51 trillion to $93 trillion between 2020 and 2029 — only includes costs, and doesn’t account for any economic or other benefits, from new jobs and more climate-friendly growth to the diminution of warming’s impacts. The more proximate source, as reported by Fortune and Politico, is a February 2019 estimate by another conservative group, the American Action Forum. It is funded by the American Action Network, a newer funding vehicle (alongside those of the Koch brothers and Karl Rove's American Crossroads) for conservative political campaigns whose money sources have remained "dark."

CNN also commented on distortions involved, and Politico reported more on how this estimate came "out of thin air.”

CNN rated this claim "true but requires context." "US has seen the largest absolute decline in carbon dioxide emissions since 2000," they explained, but "America is still the second largest global producer of carbon emissions and last year [2018] saw its largest increase since 2010." Factcheck deemed Trump's claims here "accurate but misleading," and pointed to a blurring between aggregate percentage reductions. Not only did US emissions actually rise in 2018, the reductions of 2019 and 2020 are projected by the US Energy Information Administration only because of warmer ("milder") weather, which lessens energy consumption.

On the claim about particulate matter, Factcheck notes that while Trump "has a point," "the global average he cites is skewed by high levels of dust in countries located in North Africa and the Middle East." The Western European average is much lower, and four of these countries have levels lower than those in the US.

And as Politico notes, there has been a"15 percent increase in the number of high air pollution days in the two years of the Trump administration as compared with the last four years of the Obama administration. That’s a setback from a long-term decline under the previous four presidents..." Other outlets from Mother Jones to Scientific American offered additional points countering Trump's claims.

This true claim is based on the 2018 Environmental Performance Index compiled by Yale University, Columbia University and the World Economic Forum. The US is tied with nine other countries: Canada, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain.

As Factcheck notes, "America’s score is not based on anything Trump has done as president," and actually uses data for the sanitation and drinking water indicators from 2016.

League of Conservation Voters ratings for 2018: Senator Cramer (R, North Dakota; no rating, elected 2018), Senator Steven Daines (R, Montana) 14% (4% lifetime); Senator John Barrasso (R, Wyoming) 7% (8% lifetime); Congressman Bruce Westerman (R, AR-04) 0% (1% lifetime). Source.

The Trump administration has systemically sought to curb the policy-making influence of environmental scientists, our society’s main reservoir of rigorous and trustworthy environmental knowledge. “Sharpie gate,” which revealed the willingness of top NOAA and National Weather Service officials to bend their conclusions to fit the President’s faulty claims, is just one of many spectacular examples; many others were further-reaching and more consequential. The administration has sought to cut advisory committees by one-third across the board, and stripped the EPA’s science advisory committees of academic scientists (down 27% on the Scientific Advisory Board and 48% on the Board of Scientific Counselors). From greenhouse gases to chlorpyrifos to lead, EPA policymaking under Trump has disregarded the advice even of its in-house scientists, while the agency has also set about curbing their travel to professional conferences and defunding the research on which their knowledge is based. By September 2019, a team at the Union of Concerned Scientists tallied 120 attacks on science by the Trump Administration. As a team headed by Preet Bharara (former district attorney for the southern district of New York) and Christine Todd Whitman (former EPA Administrator under George W. Bush) recently concluded, we have seen a broad effort “not only to politicize scientific and technical research on a range of topics, but also, at times, to undermine the value of objective facts themselves.”