Are we really better off? Environment Edition

Talking Points Do Not Equal Reality

 

I saw a Trumpian's post about what a great job he has done with the environment. Three areas were cited. They were air quality, clean water and GHG emissions. None of it was true.
After decades of improvement, America’s air may not be getting any cleaner.

Air

Over the last two years the nation had more polluted air days than just a few years earlier, federal data shows. While it remains unclear whether this is the beginning of a trend, health experts say it’s troubling to see air quality progress stagnate.
There were 15% more days with unhealthy air in America both last year and the year before than there were on average from 2013 through 2016, the four years when America had its fewest number of those days since at least 1980.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed just the opposite, saying earlier this month in Ireland: “We have the cleanest air in the world, in the United States, and it’s gotten better since I’m president.”

Water Quality

Lack of clean water is a problem older than the Trump administration. In Denmark, South Carolina, the water has not been drinkable since at least 2008. Residents in Flint, Michigan, have not had clean water since 2014. The water in Pittsburgh has been contaminated since 2016. Officials in Airway Heights, Washington, discovered PFAS, which can cause cancer, in their drinking water in 2017.
But Trump’s administration has rolled back more than 70 environmental protection rules—including allowing the Environmental Protection Agency to disregard the dangers of certain toxins. (A court found this to be illegal, but environmental watchdogs say the administration has not fully shifted course.) He has weakened rules that block companies from dumping waste in local waterways. The administration has proposed giving utility companies twice as much time to remove lead piping from systems highly contaminated with lead. And Trump’s EPA diminished a portion of the Clean Water Act, clearing the way for federal agencies to provide permits for projects that don’t adhere to local water-quality requirements.

GHG

Carbon emissions dropped because of COVID-19. The drop is temporary.

Sources AP/Slate/Time

Are we better off?

 Refugees in squalid surroundings at our border

From the NY Times:

Hundreds of people stranded by President Trump’s asylum limits are languishing in squalid conditions in a tent camp on the border.

Members of this displaced community requested refuge in the U.S. but were sent back into Mexico and told to wait. Many have been living in fraying tents for more than a year, surrounded by rotten debris, human waste and uneaten food swarming with flies. It is one of several refugee camps that have sprung up on the doorstep of the U.S. for the first time in the country’s history.

When the issue of immigration came up at the final presidential debate last week, Mr. Trump was correct in saying that the Obama administration expanded the number of border facilities with chain-linked enclosures. But separating children from parents was a policy all Mr. Trump’s own. How, exactly, does this make us great again? Pardon me, I'm not buying it!

A Glimmer of Hope

It's been a long time coming.

2020 Could be the year that hope in the future is reborn. It's been a dark year, but if you think about the last 10 years, our future has gone from gloomy to dark. 

2010 That's the year conservatives took control of both both houses. They yearned for the way things used to be. They got their wish in 2016 when they elected Trump. Democracy and the hope for a better future for all of us has taken several steps back.

What are we losing under Trump and his conservative cohort?

• The right to vote
• Equal =justice and civil rights for minorities
• Women's rights
• Fair housing laws
• A clean and safe environment
• A widening of the wealth gap
• Freedom of religion (This is not the same as religious freedom)
• Freedom of speech
• Life, Liberty and the pursuit Happiness

Seems pretty dark. Then, I saw this quote in Verse and Voice from Angela Davis.

Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don't yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it's actually going to be possible.

Since I'm a child of the 60's, I was reminded of this lyric.

Turn turn any corner
Hear you must hear what the people say
You know there's something that's goin' on around here
The surely, surely, surely won't stand the light of day, no   

-David Crosby

Crosby says, "It was written the night Bobby Kennedy was killed. I believed in him because he said he wanted to make some positive changes in America, and he hadn't been bought and sold like Johnson and Nixon - cats who made their deals years ago with the special interests in this country in order to gain power. I thought Bobby, like his brother, was a leader who had not made those deals. I was already angry about Jack Kennedy getting killed and it boiled over into this song when they got his brother, too."