As the West Goes Up in Flames, Trump Couldn’t Care Less
By Robert Reich
The
air outside my window is yellow today. It was orange yesterday. The Air Quality
Index is over 200. The Environmental Protection Agency defines this as a
“health alert” in which “everyone may experience more serious health effects if
they are exposed for 24 hours.” Unfortunately, the index has been over 200 for
several days.
The West is
burning. Wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington are incinerating homes,
killing scores of people, sickening many others, causing hundreds of thousands
to evacuate, burning entire towns to the ground, consuming millions of acres,
and blanketing the western third of the United States with thick, acrid and
dangerous smoke.
Yet the
president has said and done almost nothing. He’s in California today for a
quick photo-op, and then high-tails back to Washington (or is it Mar-a-Lago?)
as fast as he can.
A month ago,
Trump wanted to protect lives in Oregon and California from “rioters and
looters.” He sent federal forces into the streets of Portland and threatened to
send them to Oakland and Los Angeles.
Today, Portland is in danger of being burned and Oakland
and Los Angeles are under health alerts.
Trump couldn’t
care less. These states voted against him in 2016 and he still bears a grudge.
He came close to
rejecting California’s request for emergency funding.
“He told us to
stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down because he was so rageful
that people in the state of California didn’t support him,” said former Department of Homeland Security chief
of staff Miles Taylor.
Another explanation for Trump’s indifference is that the wildfires are tied to human-caused climate change, which Trump has done everything humanly possible to worsen.
Extreme weather disasters are rampaging across America. Last Wednesday, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration released its latest State of the Climate report, finding that just in August the US was hit by four billion-dollar calamities. In addition to wildfires, there were two enormous hurricanes and an extraordinary Midwest derecho.
These are inconvenient facts for a president who has spent much of his presidency dismantling every major climate and environmental policy he can lay his hands on.
Starting with
his unilateral decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, Trump has been
the most anti-environmental president in history.
He has called
climate change a “hoax”. He has claimed, with no evidence, that windmills cause
cancer. He has weakened Obama-era limits on planet-warming carbon dioxide from power plants and from cars and trucks. He has rolled back rules governing
clean air, water and toxic chemicals. He has opened more public land to oil and
gas drilling.
He has targeted
California in particular, revoking the state’s authority to set tougher car
emission standards than those required by the federal government.
In all, the Trump
administration has reversed, repealed, or otherwise rolled back nearly 70 environmental rules and regulations.
More than 30 rollbacks are still in progress.
Now, seven weeks
before election day, with much of the nation either aflame or suffering other
consequences of climate change, Trump unabashedly defends his record and
attacks Joe Biden.
“The core of
[Biden’s] economic agenda is a hard-left crusade against American energy,”
Trump harrumphed in a Rose Garden speech last month.
Not quite. While
Biden has made tackling climate change a centerpiece of his campaign, proposing to invest $2 trillion in a massive green
jobs program to build renewable energy infrastructure, his ideas are not
exactly radical. The money would be used for improving energy efficiency,
constructing 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations, and increasing
renewable energy from wind, solar and other technologies.
Biden wants to
end the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity by 2035, and to bring America
to net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by no later than 2050. His goals may
be too modest. If what is now occurring in the west is any indication, 2050
will be too late.
Nonetheless,
Americans have a clear choice. In a few weeks, when they decide whether Trump
deserves another four years, climate change will be on the ballot.
The choice
shouldn’t be hard to make. Like the coronavirus, the dire consequences of
climate change – coupled with Trump’s utter malfeasance – offer unambiguous
proof that he couldn’t care less about the public good.
Robert Reich's latest book is "THE SYSTEM: Who Rigged
It, How To Fix It," out March 24.
He is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the
University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center. He
served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time
Magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the
twentieth century. He has written 17 other books, including the best sellers
"Aftershock," "The Work of Nations," "Beyond
Outrage," and "The Common Good." He is a founding editor of the
American Prospect magazine, founder of Inequality Media, a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning
documentaries "Inequality For All," and "Saving
Capitalism," both now streaming on Netflix.
