In one week, Trump moves to reshape US environmental policy
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 12 hours ago
- 4 min read
By MAXINE JOSELOW
The environmental rollbacks came one after the next last week, potentially affecting everything from the survival of rare whales to the health of the Hudson River.
On Nov. 17, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed to strip federal protections from millions of acres of wetlands and streams, narrowing the reach of the Clean Water Act.
Last week, federal wildlife agencies announced changes to the Endangered Species Act that could make it harder to rescue endangered species from the brink of extinction.
The Interior Department moved to allow new oil and gas drilling across nearly 1.3 billion acres of U.S. coastal waters, including a remote region in the high Arctic where drilling has never before taken place.
If the Trump administration’s proposals are finalized and upheld in court, they could reshape U.S. environmental policy for years to come, environmental lawyers and activists said.
“This was the week from hell for environmental policy in the United States,” said Pat Parenteau, a professor emeritus and senior fellow for climate policy at Vermont Law and Graduate School. “Unless stopped by the courts, each of these proposed rollbacks will do irreparable harm to the nation’s water quality, endangered species and marine ecosystems.”
The quick pace of these proposals was notable, even for an administration that has enacted President Donald Trump’s agenda at breakneck speed.
While the administration was working in Washington to dismantle environmental protections, 3,300 miles to the south, negotiators from nearly 200 nations were trying to improve the planet’s health at the United Nations climate summit in Brazil.
A White House official, who declined to be identified, said the timing was unrelated to the U.N. climate summit, which the Trump administration boycotted this year. It was the first time since the annual summits began 30 years ago that the United States was not present.
“The Trump administration unveiled many historic announcements this week to further President Trump’s American energy dominance agenda,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said in an email. “President Trump serves the American people, not radical climate activists who have fallen victim to the biggest scam of the century.”
A range of industries supported the changes, including groups representing farmers, oil drillers, chemical manufacturers, homebuilders and real estate developers.
“The developments this week were definitely major steps toward the administration’s goal of achieving and restoring American energy dominance and manufacturing dominance as well,” said Chris Phalen, vice president of domestic policy at the National Association of Manufacturers, a trade group. “We’re definitely very pleased with what came out.”
The EPA kicked off the wave of deregulation Nov. 17, when it proposed to significantly scale back the Clean Water Act, which Congress passed in 1972 to protect all “waters of the United States” from pollution or destruction.
The agency said it would more narrowly define “waters of the United States” to exclude many wetlands and streams across the country. The changes could strip federal protections from up to 55 million acres of wetlands, or about 85% of all wetlands nationwide, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., said the changes would prevent people with the smallest of waterways on their properties from needing to obtain federal permits if they wanted to fill them in or dump pollutants. “Farmers, ranchers and landowners shouldn’t have every puddle or gully regulated by D.C. bureaucrats,” she said in a statement.
The deregulatory spree picked up Wednesday, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service announced changes to the way the Endangered Species Act, the bedrock environmental law intended to prevent animal and plant extinctions, is applied.
The proposals would allow the government to assess economic factors, such as lost revenue from a ban on oil drilling near critical habitat, before deciding whether to list a species as endangered. At the moment, the government considers only the best available science when awarding that designation, which triggers protections against killing or harming the species and interfering with its habitat.
It was easy to miss the announcement about endangered species, which came on the same day that Trump signed legislation calling on the Justice Department to make public its files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
But the move was worth attention, said Andrew Mergen, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School.
“It’s really hard for the public to keep track of this news, but it’s really important that they do,” Mergen said. “We’re going to lose species and their habitats in a death-by-a-thousand-cuts way, but there are things that can be done to right the ship and help these species recover.”
On Thursday, as the news cycle was dominated by Trump’s insult of a journalist, the Interior Department announced a plan to hold as many as 34 sales of leases in federal waters spanning roughly 1.27 billion acres, an area more than half the size of the United States.
The plan would require six sales of leases off the coast of California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat and critic of Trump, has promised to block any new drilling. It also would mandate seven auctions of leases in the Gulf of Mexico, which Trump calls the Gulf of America, and 21 auctions of leases off the coast of Alaska, including in an isolated region called the high Arctic stretching more than 200 miles offshore.
Analysts said oil companies may not rush to snap up leases off California, where Newsom could reject permits for the infrastructure on land, such as pipelines and terminals, that is needed to support offshore drilling. Companies may also avoid the icy high Arctic, given the severe weather conditions and the lack of existing infrastructure.
Instead, oil industry interest could be concentrated in the Gulf, where drilling rigs are already plentiful. “The Gulf has the infrastructure, workforce and expertise that make it uniquely productive,” said Erik Milito, the president of the National Ocean Industries Association, a trade group that represents offshore drilling companies as well as offshore wind firms.
Ultimately, it could take the administration up to two years to finalize the proposals unveiled last week. At that point, environmental groups and other opponents could challenge the rules in court, leading to lengthy legal battles.