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By Rhea Suh
It may sound like green eyeshades stuff, but the massive budget proposal the White House sends up to Congress each February is a kind of road map to our future. It's the president's plan for spending taxpayer dollars to advance his priorities and goals.
President Trump's proposal landed with a thud Monday on Capitol Hill, where it should be dead on arrival. It calls for a record $4.4 trillion in spending for the fiscal year that begins in October. It would spike the federal budget deficit, adding $7.1 trillion to the national debt in the coming decade. And it would eviscerate environmental and health protections, stifle clean energy research, raid our public waters and lands, and abandon our children to the growing dangers of climate change.
That's the road map to a future none of us wants to see.
Americans believe in responsible public oversight to protect the air we breathe, the water we drink and the world we'll leave our children. An overwhelming 85 percent expect our federal government to do more to protect our environment or at least maintain existing protections.
Trump, however, calls for gutting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with staff and budget cuts of 21 percent and 24 percent, respectively, as compared with 2017 levels.
That means fewer people to monitor air and water quality; enforce our laws; and work with lawmakers, local businesses, public advocates and others to respond to emerging threats. Trump would cut by half, for example, the EPA work we all depend on to protect human health and the environment from cancer-causing radiation in our drinking water, indoor air, and industrial facilities. You don't strengthen environmental protections by taking the environmental steward off the beat.
And for what? The $1.9 billion Trump wants to cut from EPA spending is barely one-tenth what he wants taxpayers to fork out over the next two years to build his "great wall" to divide us from our Mexican neighbors, pure folly that more than six in ten Americans oppose.
Trump's assault on environmental protection, though, is part of a larger scheme to put profits for fossil fuel companies and other polluters first—and put the rest of us at risk. He calls for a 16 percent cut in funding for the U.S. Department of the Interior, which is charged with overseeing our national parks, wilderness areas, and other public waters and lands. Those cuts would eliminate thousands of employees that implement vital programs essential to the conservation of lands that belong to you and me.
Trump's budget, meanwhile, would add spending needed to expose special places to the hazards and harm of oil and gas drilling. Places like the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah; the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska; and Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, and Alaskan waters and parts of the Gulf of Mexico.
While heading up a fossil fuel raid on public waters and lands, Trump wants to burn the technological seed corn of the clean energy revolution that's remaking the global economy.
Trump calls for a 65 percent cut in the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Office at the U.S. Department of Energy. This office helps us do more with less waste in our cars, workplaces and homes and helps us get more clean, homegrown American power from the wind and sun, which more than seven in ten Americans favor over coal, oil and gas.
He's also proposed eliminating the successful Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy. Over the past decade, the program has invested between $180 million and $306 million a year in promising new energy technologies that can help clean up our dirty power plants, for example, provide cleaner fuels for our cars and trucks, and help make our electricity grid more efficient.
For that matter, Trump's budget would put energy efficiency out of reach for millions of low-income Americans by eliminating the popular Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and the Energy Department's Weatherization Assistance program.
Finally, Trump wants to turn his back on the central environmental challenge of our time, eliminating $160 million in investments through the Global Climate Change Initiative, which enables U.S. diplomats and aid experts to help developing countries find cleaner, smarter ways to power economic growth.
Trump's budget isn't a road map to the future. It's a blueprint for destruction that balloons the deficit, puts our environment and health at growing risk, and leaves our kids to pay the price.
The country deserves better than that―and so do our children.
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
By Dan Gray
- Research shows that 16 weeks of a vegan diet can boost the gut microbiome, helping with weight loss and overall health.
- A healthy microbiome is a diverse microbiome. A plant-based diet is the best way to achieve this.
- It isn't necessary to opt for a strictly vegan diet, but it's beneficial to limit meat intake.
New research shows that following a vegan diet for about 4 months can boost your gut microbiome. In turn, that can lead to improvements in body weight and blood sugar management.
By Jeff Turrentine
Nearly 20 years have passed since the journalist Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term tipping point, in his best-selling book of the same name. The phrase denotes the moment that a certain idea, behavior, or practice catches on exponentially and gains widespread currency throughout a culture. Having transcended its roots in sociological theory, the tipping point is now part of our everyday vernacular. We use it in scientific contexts to describe, for instance, the climatological point of no return that we'll hit if we allow average global temperatures to rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. But we also use it to describe everything from resistance movements to the disenchantment of hockey fans when their team is on a losing streak.
By Mark Mancini
On Aug. 18, Iceland held a funeral for the first glacier lost to climate change. The deceased party was Okjökull, a historic body of ice that covered 14.6 square miles (38 square kilometers) in the Icelandic Highlands at the turn of the 20th century. But its glory days are long gone. In 2014, having dwindled to less than 1/15 its former size, Okjökull lost its status as an official glacier.
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Whose Grid? Our Grid! Chicago’s Campaign to Put Electricity Under Public Control
By Alex Schwartz
Among the many vendors at the Logan Square Farmers Market on Aug. 18 sat three young people peddling neither organic vegetables, gourmet cheese nor handmade crafts. Instead, they offered liberation from capitalism.
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I’m a Psychotherapist – Here’s What I’ve Learned From Listening to Children Talk About Climate Change
By Caroline Hickman
Eco-anxiety is likely to affect more and more people as the climate destabilizes. Already, studies have found that 45 percent of children suffer lasting depression after surviving extreme weather and natural disasters. Some of that emotional turmoil must stem from confusion — why aren't adults doing more to stop climate change?
Bird watching in the U.S. may be a lot harder than it once was, since bird populations are dropping off in droves, according to a new study.