American - Journalist | 1955 -
Indeed, for all Donald Trump's railing about the efforts to curb climate change, nobody in his administration seems to have paid any attention to what they actually are.
Charles C. Mann
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Obama issued a slew of executive orders about climate change during the eight years of his presidency. Inexplicably, President Trump revoked about half of them but left the other half in place. Since Obama's orders were intertwined, it's unclear exactly what applies.
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You know how in movies the new president comes in and promises to perform sweeping actions with a stroke of a pen? The Administrative Procedure Act is designed to thwart this sort of maneuver.
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The queue of activists, interest groups, and ordinary people wringing their hands over what a President Donald Trump might do in office is long, and environmentalists are at the front of the line.
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Americans are willing to cheer on politicians who denounce bureaucratic overreach and job-killing red tape in abstract terms. But they turn out to like specific regulations against toxic chemicals in their drinking water.
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Prediction is a mug's game, but taking the side of water polluters has not been a winning political strategy for 50 years. Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II all undertook to weaken water regulations in the name of economic growth. They left office; the regulations remained.
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All parents remember the moment when they first held their children - the tiny crumpled face, an entire new person, emerging from the hospital blanket.
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Like other parents, I want my children to be comfortable in their adult lives.
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Seoul and Shanghai, Jaipur and Jakarta; shining skyscrapers, pricey hotels, traffic-jammed streets ablaze with neon - all were built atop a foundation of laboratory-bred rice.
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Farmers can't plant much more land because almost every accessible acre of arable soil is already in use. Nor can the use of fertilizer be increased: it is already being overused everywhere except some parts of Africa, and the runoff is polluting rivers, lakes, and oceans.
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Artificial lighting, air-conditioning, and automobiles, all powered by fossil fuels, swaddle us in our giddy modernity. In our ergonomic chairs and acoustical-panel cubicles, we sit cozy as kings atop 300 years of flaming carbon.
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By the 1980s, businesses had realized that environmental issues had a price tag. Increasingly, they balked. Reflexively, the anticorporate Left pivoted; Earth Day, erstwhile snow job, became an opportunity to denounce capitalist greed.
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