ENVIRONMENT: Trump vs “We Are Still In”
The environmental struggle to stop the advance of the climate change giant has suffered hard blows during the first year of Donald Trump leading the White House, as the the United States has executed a 180 degrees turn, says an EFE News Agency report.
The exit from the Paris Agreement, the elimination of clean energy against emissions, cuts in environmental policies, the expansion of the zones open to oil drilling and the reduction of bans on exploitation in National parks are the main decisions made under Trump’s command, says EFE
The president of the world’s greatest power does not believe that climate change is real and considers that it was an invention of the Chinese Government to ballast the competitiveness of American industry.
“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make American manufacturers non-competitive,” he said on Twitter as early as 2012.
Over Christmas, when a storm was freezing big cities like New York, the tycoon returned to Twitter to make fun of climate change saying that, given the low temperatures, The US needed “a good dose of global warming.”
For Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes, professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College in California, Trump’s “indifference” towards the protection of the environment was evident with the departure of the US from the 2015 Paris climate agreement making the USA the only country outside of the pact.
In a statement to EFE, the expert highlighted the role played by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), led by Scott Pruitt, a climate change skeptic and industry
One of the elements that most concerns Douglass-Jaimes is the departure of scientists from the EPA and their replacement by those with more political and less specialized profiles.
Since the inauguration of Donald Trump, a total of 700 workers have left the agency, while they have hired only 129, according to an investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times.
“It is very obvious that the EPA directive is very focused on prioritizing corporate profits
about environmental health “, lamented the professor, who foresees that Trump will be remembered as the worst president in relation to the climate.
Trump’s attacks on the environment gave rise to the “We Are Still In” movement, created by states, cities, universities, NGOs and companies in the country five days after the exit from the Paris Agreement.