The Trump administration has been dismantling environmental regulations with startling speed in the past few weeks, under the cover of two national crises.
 
Last Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed changing how it conducts regulatory cost-benefit analyses. “What this rule is doing is altering the math in such a way to potentially downplay the economic benefit to public health, so they are justified in writing weaker rules in the future,” Richard Morgenstern, an EPA official in the Reagan and Clinton eras, told The New York Times. (The American Petroleum Institute declared itself pleased.) Also on Thursday, Trump signed an executive order allowing the government, given the “national emergency,” to skip some of the usual steps in the environmental impact reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act for new infrastructure projects.
 
As Black Lives Matter protests continued across the nation on Friday, and daily coronavirus deaths in the country hovered around 1,000, Trump traveled to Maine, where he called the Democratic governor a “dictator,” confused right whales with “white whales,” and announced his plan to remove protections on the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, off the coast of Cape Cod—the nation’s only marine monument. “Go get ’em,” the president told the fishing community, adding that Maine’s lobstermen had “better remember” him. World Oceans Day came three days later.
 
Just yesterday, the National Park Service published new rules reversing Obama administration bans on hunting practices deemed cruel and damaging: “Baiting grizzly bears with doughnuts soaked in bacon grease. Using spotlights to blind and shoot hibernating black bear mothers and their cubs in their dens. Gunning down swimming caribou from motorboats,” as The New York Times reported.
 
Meanwhile, numerous fossil fuel companies have seized the current moment to portray themselves as anti-racist, standing on the side of social justice. But as TNR’s Kate Aronoff wrote over the weekend, “Fossil fuels’ rise and reign is a story of white supremacy: of Western powers and corporations claiming resources from the global south and maintaining access to them through imperial might.” That history continues to the present day. “The industry’s funding of denial and delay of climate action in recent decades … has bought it time to keep pouring greenhouse gases into the air. Cruelly, the places many fuels have been extracted abroad, the Middle East being only one example, are already shouldering the worst of the climate crisis, as black and brown communities stateside are disproportionately burdened, relative to wealthier white communities, with leaky, polluting fossil fuel infrastructure in their backyards.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn, Deputy Editor