The Donald Trump campaign has yet to declare its official stance on environmental protection, but some members of the local eco-justice community don't like what they've seen so far.
Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for President of the United States, has repeatedly made remarks about abolishing the EPA as a budget cutting method. Eliminating the EPA would seriously hamper the efforts of regional and state agencies in addressing issues that threaten environmental and public health in the Bay Area. iStock.com/scarletsails
By Bill Picture
Published: September, 2016
The Donald Trump campaign has yet to declare its official stance on environmental protection, but some members of the local eco-justice community don’t like what they’ve seen so far. Most troubling, they say, are his repeated remarks about abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a budget-cutting method.
Trump told Fox News’ Chris Wallace last October, “What [the EPA] do[es] is a disgrace. Every week they come out with new regulations.” When Wallace pressed Trump on whose plate he believes protection of the nation’s precious natural resources should fall, Trump responded, “We’ll be fine with the environment. We can leave a little bit, but you can’t destroy businesses.”
“That’s a red flag,” said Erica Maharg, staff attorney for San Francisco Baykeeper, which has been fighting to preserve water quality in the San Francisco Bay since 1989. Maharg, who pointed out that Baykeeper has not endorsed either party’s candidate (in fact, federal laws prohibit nonprofit organizations from officially endorsing a political candidate), said painting environmental protection as a hindrance to economic growth is a “giant step backward.”
“California is living proof that we no longer have to choose between a healthy environment and a healthy economy,” she said. California is widely regarded as a world leader in addressing climate change and promoting public and environmental health, while boasting the largest economy in the country and the sixth largest in the world.
California’s economy is also the second-greenest in the world, according to a 2015 study by the public policy group Next 10, which found that only France has a greener economy. That means that California has the second-smallest carbon footprint per dollar of economy activity.
How much damage can one person really do?
The EPA is just one of many links in the chain that is the nation’s environmental justice community. Get rid of it, and an entire network of regional and state agencies, watchdog organizations, community groups, activists and advocates remains to address issues threatening environmental and public health. Eliminating the EPA would do little to temper the passion of this network’s remaining members; but their ability to accomplish anything would be seriously hampered without the influence and leadership of a federal-level regulatory body.
“California has its own strong laws in place, so we’re sort of insulated,” Maharg said. “But we still rely heavily on federal environmental laws, and on agencies like the EPA to provide national leadership.”
“Eliminating the EPA would create a vacuum,” she added. “And without a voice at the top to push for ongoing investment in public health and the environment, I fear that investment might come to an end. And that really scares me.”
Plus, without an agency like the EPA to put its foot down, a green light from Congress isn’t out of the question for Trump’s proposal to bolster the nation’s economy by increasing oil and natural gas exploration and expanding coal mining. Trump has also vowed to get the Keystone XL pipeline expansion approved, to “cancel” the Paris climate agreement, and to cut U.S. funding for United Nations initiatives addressing climate change, which he argues isn’t real.
At an oil industry conference in North Dakota in May, Trump told the crowd, “[My] administration will focus on real environmental challenges, not the phony ones that we’ve been looking at.”
“Deregulation would set the stage for rolling back the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act,” said Andres Soto of Communities for a Better Environment (CFBE). “And that’s a very dangerous direction for our country to move in.”
CFBE’s Northern California chapter is currently working with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) to set a limit for greenhouse gas emission levels at five Bay Area oil refineries. “We want to cap them at current levels while we figure out how to reduce emissions,” Soto said. “If deregulation were to happen, local jurisdictions wouldn’t be able to take steps to limit greenhouse gas emissions; and our ability to protect air quality would be severely inhibited.”
CFBE is a member of the Community-Worker Coalition, a collection of public health advocates and environmental organizations pushing for cleaner air along Contra Costa County’s “refinery corridor,” whose residents and workers (including refinery employees) suffer from disproportionately high rates of heart disease and respiratory illnesses.
For instance, the City of Pittsburg has higher rates of asthma than any other city in Contra Costa County. “Pittsburg sits at the far end of the refinery corridor putting it right at the refineries’ tailpipe, so to speak,” Soto said.
BAAQMD is considering four strategies for improving air quality in the area, as well as the Community-Worker Coalition’s proposal to establish a numerical cap. BAAQMD hopes to complete an environmental impact report by next March, after which the public will have a chance to weigh in before a final decision is made on how best to deal with refinery-related air pollution moving forward.
Soto describes the push to find more oil as “troubling,” because he believes it will lead to increased fracking. The fracking process itself is believed to release harmful pollutants into the air and contaminate groundwater; and the low-quality crude it produces is believed to emit higher concentrations of pollutants during the refining process. One of the ideas Soto proposes for reducing refinery-related air pollution in the future is limiting the amount of shale oil or “dirty crude” processed at each refinery.
In an interview last month with Denver television station KUSA, Trump declared, “I’m in favor of fracking.” Trump did, however, argue that the decision on whether or not to allow fracking in a community should be left to its voters. Incidentally, California’s Central Valley sits on one of the country’s largest known oil reserves, making it a prime fracking area.
Bigger fish to fry
But weighing heavier on the minds of Central Valley farmers than the alleged environmental impact of fracking is not having enough water to irrigate their crops, which Trump argues is a result of mismanagement, not lack of water.
At a rally in Fresno in May, Trump told a crowd that farmers he’d spoken with claimed that “there is no drought.” Then he went on to blame environmentalists for having fresh water routed to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to “protect a certain kind of three-inch fish.”
The fish Trump referred to is the delta smelt, which is only found in the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and whose population is used by scientists to gauge the overall health of the Delta’s estuary. Giant pumps that move water from the Sacramento Valley to Central Valley farms can cause sections of the San Joaquin River to flow backward, which nearly killed off the smelt. To save it from extinction, the pumps are now switched off periodically to allow water to flow freely through the Delta, as it would naturally.
Environmentalists concede it’s easy for farmers to vilify them and the delta smelt, but argue that the water Trump says is being “shov[ed] out to sea” is just a drop in the bucket compared to what Central Valley farmlands actually need to make up for a fifth year in a row without significant rains.
Dramatically (and often falsely) simplifying complicated issues to pressure voters into choosing a side is something even Trump critics concede he does very well. In this case, that’s painting water management in a drought-stricken state desperately fighting to strike a balance between agriculture (and other industries), the environment and the public as a fight between farmers and a fish most Californians have never heard of.
“There’s no easy fix to California’s water crisis,” said Maharg, “or to any of the issues our country faces, really. There are choices that have to be made, and most of them aren’t easy. So to imply otherwise isn’t doing anyone any favors.”
