He May Be Inconsistent but His Administration Is Not on the Environment

Will this place still be Carrizo Plain National Monument (Photo – Bureau of Land Management California, flickr).

In these first 100 days, our new president has backtracked on many promises, completely reversed course in others, and demonstrated an alarming disregard for the truth.

By Ethan Elkind

It’s enough to make some political observers think that he’s basically a malleable mishmash of blathering, with his only core desire to self-promote and perhaps increase his riches from from his various business dealings.

As Andrew Sullivan wrote recently:

What on earth is the point of trying to understand him when there is nothing to understand? Calling him a liar is true enough, but liars have some cognitive grip on reality, and he doesn’t. Liars remember what they have said before. His brain is a neural Etch A Sketch. He doesn’t speak, we realize; he emits random noises. He refuses to take responsibility for anything. He can accuse his predecessor and Obama’s national security adviser of crimes, and provide no evidence for either. He has no strategy beyond the next 24 hours, no guiding philosophy, no politics, no consistency at all — just whatever makes him feel good about himself this second. He therefore believes whatever bizarre nonfact he can instantly cook up in his addled head, or whatever the last person who spoke to him said. He makes Chauncey Gardiner look like Abraham Lincoln. Occam’s razor points us to the obvious: He has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. Which is reassuring and still terrifying all at once.

That may be true when it comes to Trump personally and as a politician.  But it does not apply when it comes to his appointees in the administration on the environment.  Because across-the-board, the administration seems motivated by one thing when it comes to the environment, and that’s boosting the oil, gas, and coal industries at the expense of everything else.

There are too many examples to cite, but it’s worth going through some of them:

1. Attempting to roll back key regulations like the Clean Power Plan and the fuel economy standards
2. Gutting the budget for the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy clean tech research, and public transit, among others
3. Overturning environmental regulations with Congress through use of the once-obscure Congressional Review Act
4. Reviewing, with the likely intent of undoing, prior national monument designations, including the Carrizo Plain.

So while Trump may be incoherent and bereft of some core principles, he has empowered an administration full of individuals dead set on boosting oil, gas, and coal exploitation, at the expense of the environment and public health.

Ethan Elkind directs the climate program at UC Berkeley Law, with a joint appointment at UCLA Law. His book “Railtown” was published by the University of California Press in 2014.