Criminal Trump GOP RICO Kills Planet For Cash End GOP Save Life On Earth

Opinion

Trump to Miners, Loggers and Drillers: This Land Is Your Land

From Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, the Trump administration wants to despoil, not preserve, America’s resources.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

• 31 August 2019

Image

A section of clear-cut timber on Prince of Wales Island, in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.CreditCreditChristopher Miller

The tug-of-war over America’s public lands between those who would protect them for future generations and those who would exploit them for immediate commercial gain has a long history. The two Roosevelts, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were mostly sympathetic to the cause of conservation, Ronald Reagan and the second George Bush decidedly less so. But for sheer hostility to environmental values, Donald Trump has no equal. Mr. Trump arrived in the White House with little interest in conservation, his idea of nature framed largely by his golf courses. He was, to boot, almost pathologically dedicated to obliterating anything President Obama had done to reduce global warming gases, preserve open space and help endangered species. This translated into a simple operating strategy: Get rid of things the fossil fuel industry didn’t like  and rubber-stamp the stuff it wanted. Hence the rollback of Obama rules limiting power plant emissions of greenhouse gases, and the proposed rollback of regulations governing methane, a powerful global warming gas. (Next up, it seems certain, is the reversal of Obama rules mandating more fuel-efficient vehicles.)

Hence also the gifts over the last two years to mining and oil and gas interests of vast areas previously shielded from exploration — two national monuments in Utah, millions of acres reserved for the threatened sage grouse, much of the outer continental shelf and the long-protected coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Image

Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.CreditFrancisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune, via Associated Press

That’s not all. In the shadow of these big ticket items, Mr. Trump has presided over several less visible travesties. We offer three. One is his push to open the Tongass National Forest in Alaska to logging. The others are his efforts to revive two potentially destructive mining projects — one near Alaska’s Bristol Bay, the other near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota.

In all three cases, Mr. Trump has breathed new life into bad ideas thought to be dead and buried or getting there. Together they demonstrate again how Mr. Trump, when faced with a choice between commerce and conservation, reflexively sides with the former, even when the economic case for conservation is strong. . . .

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/31/opinion/trump-nature-minnesota-alaska.html?

Copyright 2019 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to The New York Times content)