Americans, just like any other people, are simply not hard-wired to notice subtle changes to the environment that occur over an extended time period. That is why a slow-rolling but undeniable threat to our existence such as climate change, for example, creates no immediate sense of urgency in the general population, even as our best scientists and researchers collectively scream from the rooftops about both its reality and its dangers.
Whereas a sudden, highly visible insult to human life, like a jet crashing into the World Trade Center, triggers an instantaneous, reflexive mobilization of all the pent-up energy and resolve the country can muster, the gradual accumulation of boring data and the disparate unpredictability of climatic events provides no comparable shock to our systems, no “wake-up call” that compels us to act quickly out of self-preservation.
The result is that while the arc of our intelligence regarding the environment is wide, it bends towards complacency, especially if we aren’t seeing these changes every day, in our own backyards. And corporations who seek to trade-off the danger their products pose to human life with the profits they can make in the meantime, are all keenly aware of this.
They know that when they can buy themselves a governmental rollback of a complex, buried federal rule prohibiting certain pesticides from being sprayed near people, that even if scientists and public health officials react with fury and alarm in their research papers and medical journals, the public, more or less, will not notice. It’s only after people die or their children sicken from being poisoned—often years down the road—where the consequences of those trade-offs become all too apparent.
In just two years, President Trump has unleashed a regulatory rollback, lobbied for and cheered on by industry, with little parallel in the past half-century. Mr. Trump enthusiastically promotes the changes as creating jobs, freeing business from the shackles of government and helping the economy grow.
The trade-offs, while often out of public view, are real — frighteningly so, for some people — imperiling progress in cleaning up the air we breathe and the water we drink, and in some cases upending the very relationship with the environment around us.
The poisoning of the country by the gutting of regulatory protections under the Trump administration’s warped concept of “environmental protection” has already, after only two years, reached the point where large areas of the nation have been permanently damaged. But because the effects are so widely spread out, their cumulative damage has been hard to see—which was the whole point.
Unfortunately, that is no longer the case. The states of California, West Virginia, Texas and North Dakota have all begun to suffer visible and documented effects of Trump’s rollbacks, as explained in a comprehensive analysis authored by three Pulitzer- Prize-winning journalists for the New York Times.
Had Donald J. Trump not won the presidency in 2016, millions of pounds of chlorpyrifos most likely would not have been applied to American crops over the past 21 months. It would not have sickened substantial numbers of farm workers, or risked what the Environmental Protection Agency’s own studies suggest could be continued long-term health problems for others exposed to the chemical at low levels.
California farmers grow one-third of this country’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits. On May 5, 2017, forty-eight farm workers working near Bakersfield in the state’s Central Valley were poisoned by the pesticide chlorpyrifos, whose usage had been completely banned by the Obama Administration, but reinstated under Trump as a reward to the DowDuPont corporation, its leading manufacturer, for its political support of Donald Trump.
DowDuPont, not out of the goodness of its heart, had donated one million dollars to Trump’s inauguration. So one of the first actions by Trump’s EPA, under the leadership of Scott Pruitt, was to reverse the pesticide’s ban, against the uniform advice of EPA scientists. This marked the beginning of over 80 Obama-era environmental rollbacks under Trump’s EPA, most of which were made at the request of corporations whose bottom line profits had been impacted by such rules. As a result of the ban’s reversal, the toxic pesticide chlorpyrifos continues to be widely marketed and employed under various trade names, despite its proven deadly effects on human beings.
The farmworkers sickened by chlorpyrifos in California (nearly all poor, Hispanic and many undocumented) were hospitalized with symptoms ranging from fainting, to headaches, to violent nausea after a cool breeze blew the poison from the fields they were working into their eyes and lungs. Many continue to suffer severe health problems as a result of their exposure. The Times article profiles a mother and daughter, who have no idea what the long-term consequences will be to their lives from breathing DuPont’s poison.
But the danger—the trade-off—which the Trump Administration so eagerly embraced, is not limited to the farm workers working the fields, as schools and public buildings are intertwined in the same areas sprayed by the pesticide. No one knows what the long-term consequences will be to area residents or their children. The reason no one knows is that the pesticide is too toxic to actually test on humans, which is one of the reasons it was banned in the first place.
Chlorpyrifos is part of the same chemical family as sarin nerve gas. An estimated six million pounds are spread each year across dozens of agricultural crops nationwide, including alfalfa, almonds, citrus, corn, cotton and grapes. It is useful as a broad-spectrum pesticide, farmers and agricultural experts say, because it kills virtually every kind of insect.
The chemical’s effect on humans is the subject of some debate but its toxicity is not in doubt. Acute poisonings, from things like spills or drift, can result in respiratory distress, vomiting, convulsions, unconsciousness and death.
This past July, ten more California workers were sickened by chlorpyrifos. In August a three-judge panel for Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Trump’s EPA to reinstate the ban on it. The EPA under Trump has appealed the decision, and the product remains in use.
The Times article is divided into separate segments, each explaining how Trump’s environmental rollbacks have resulted in real-world consequences to Americans’ health and safety in various places throughout the country. These areas include the suburbs around Houston, Texas.
Prior to Trump’s election, the air quality in Texas had measurably improved as a result of the shutdown of multiple coal-fired power plants. These plant shutdowns were primarily the result of the state’s gravitation towards natural gas production and the use of alternative energies such as wind and solar, a trend that was further encouraged by tighter restrictions on air pollution imposed under the Obama Administration. Still, Texas remains among the worst polluting states in terms of sulfur dioxide emissions. If you’ve ever spent a summer in Houston you will need no further convincing of this.
One of the strongest actions taken under Obama’s EPA was to require remaining coal-fired plants to install technology that would clean up those plants’ emissions. The ”scrubber” technology was costly and predictably opposed by the coal industry, including NRG Energy, the owners of the W.A. Parish coal plant outside of Houston. The Parish plant already had a “scrubber” which worked effectively in one of its units, but it didn’t want to spend the money needed to install the technology on three others. Scientists have attributed 180 unnecessary deaths annually for every year that the Parish plant continues in operation, as people in the surrounding area die from heart disease, asthma and other ailments caused by the plant’s toxic spew. The plant also emits a foul-smelling haze that spreads out over hundreds of miles (reaching as far as the Caney Creek Wilderness Area, 400 miles away at the Arkansas border, and into Oklahoma), for literally months at a time.
Just before leaving his post in disgrace due to mounting reports of rampant corruption, Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt directly contacted NRG energy to assure it that the Administration would no longer require NRG to submit to such costly cleanup requirements. The plant would be free to continue polluting the air with its sulfuric emissions. The Times describes how George Thurston, a professor of environmental medicine at NYU, in a futile effort to convince Pruitt of the dangers of that rollback, prepared a comprehensive report demonstrating how many fewer people in Pruitt’s native Oklahoma would die if the regulation remained in place. Pruitt ignored the report, calling it “irrelevant.”
The Times article also profiles the Kanawha River, which flows through the Charleston, West Virginia area in a stretch so laden with chemical plants it is known as “Chemical Valley.” The river is so polluted with fecal material, bacteria, and heavy metals that local residents warn against the deadly effects of actually coming into physical contact with the river’s water. In an effort to work with the companies in attempting to clean up the river and its environs, the Obama Administration and its (then) science-based EPA drew up action plans to limit sewage discharge through the issuance of stronger permits, as well as increased monitoring of chemical spills and discharge, and stiffer regulation of leaks from abandoned mine sites, with the ultimate goal of making the river viable for swimming and fishing.
All those efforts came to a sudden halt with the election of Donald Trump, and the river is now becoming more polluted by the day. A water treatment system that would have eliminated mercury, arsenic, and selenium from discharge into coal ash ponds and the river was gleefully abandoned by the John E. Amos coal-fired plant, owned by the Ohio-based AEP company, that sits downstream from Charleston on the Kanawha. Such coal fired-plants are responsible for one-third of the toxic pollutants released into the nation’s freshwaters, threatening the drinking water of the nearly three million people who live near them.
The report’s final example of how Trump’s rollbacks have directly harmed Americans centers around the Fort Berthold Indian reservation in North Dakota. A “confidential” report of an EPA investigation conducted in 2018, and obtained by the Times, revealed improper burning of methane wells, the excess allowed to spew into the air because it was not retrievable by the oil companies drilling for it. The tribes on the reservation are paid royalties and native residents receive yearly disbursement checks for each barrel of oil dredged up by the fossil fuel industry. Their economy—and their tribal government’s budget—has ballooned as a result. But the long-term health effects of the multiple oil spills and methane “flares” which now constantly light up the evening sky-- often at a volume similar to a jet engine--at Fort Berthold have never been determined. From the Times article:
[T]hese benefits often have serious costs. Funding for an early-childhood learning center came from a $1 million donation made by a pipeline company, Crestwood, after it was blamed for spilling more than a million gallons of fracking wastewater. The spill reached the lake that supplies the reservation’s drinking water.
The “confidential” report obtained by the Times also emphasizes that the burning of these wells produces compounds which include carcinogens and neurotoxins linked to birth defects.
The Obama Administration had set limits on the number of wells allowed to “flare” and leak. These rules were meant to apply until 2026 and were estimated to have potentially reduced the amounts of these toxic emissions on the order of 50% by requiring the installation of special equipment to contain them, and inspections to monitor them. Again, the Trump EPA moved to halt these rules. The implication from the Times report is that some of the tribal leaders have made a Faustian bargain with the energy companies, with the tribes understandably eager for the economic benefits but lacking the power (or assistance from Washington) to regulate how their land is being plundered.
A common thread running through all of the objections raised by energy companies to these types of regulations is their cost. Of course, an Environmental Protection Agency paid for by the US taxpayers would be perfectly justified to take such costs into consideration. However, the costs to staggeringly wealthy corporations—including the legitimate question concerning the value of the continued existence of anachronistic industries like coal-fired plants-- must also be weighed against the potential for permanent despoilment of the environment which Americans and their children will have to inhabit for the rest of our lives.
The number of jobs supposedly preserved or created by such polluters must be weighed against the potential for harm that each of these industries cause to American citizens’ health, over the long and short term—a value that should be very nearly unquantifiable, but certainly worth more than a few thousand “jobs” in an industry that is rapidly dying for reasons having nothing to do with “over-regulation.” Or, for that matter, in any industry where the health of our citizens is at stake. That is why the EPA exists—to protect our environment for our citizens, not to pollute it for the sake of profits.
But there is no indication that the EPA under Donald Trump has accepted this as its legitimate function. Rather, the balance of its regulatory rollbacks shows it now to be, overwhelmingly, simply a clearinghouse for industry wish lists. The Times report is filled with examples of this wholesale abandonment of the public interest by both the industry and the EPA under Trump, supposedly meant to regulate them.
The regulation of our country’s environment is overwhelmingly assigned to the Executive branch of government. Congress and the Courts can only do so much to contain the damage by an administration that has made the conscious choice to sell out the health and welfare of American citizens for the sake of placating the fossil fuel industry. The only way to stop these rollbacks and the decimation of our country’s environment is by electing a new President.
For the sake of the country, we better do that, before it is too late.