The scientific journal The Lancet takes stock of Donald Trump's presidency on the environmental and health front. Reaching very damning conclusions.
"Hostility to environmental regulations", "contempt for science", "executive actions that endanger health". These are just some of the expressions found in a lengthy analysis of the environmental and health policies of now former United States president Donald Trump. Extremely harsh and weighty words, all the more so because they were not published by a political opponent or an environmental NGO, but by The Lancet, one of the most well-known and authoritative medical journals in the world.
56 pages, more than 350 bibliographical references, 33 authors including university professors, doctors and researchers. And a single diagnosis: Donald Trump's environmental and health policies are a failure on every front, a failure that must be remedied as soon as possible.
The position expressed by The Lancet is a strong one that may come as unexpected. "If someone had told me four years ago that scientific journals would come out against Trump, I wouldn't have believed it," commented Gretchen Goldman, president of the organisation Union of Concerned Scientists, speaking to Business Green. "But there has been a big change since then that reflects both the seriousness of what Trump has done and the new willingness of the scientific community to participate in political conversations."
The Trump administration moved against 104 different regulations protecting the environment and workers' health, managing to repeal or weaken 84 of them over the four years of its term. In the other 20 cases, the amendment process was still under way at the time of the elections. The researchers examined them one by one, finding that 29 rules on atmospheric emissions and air pollution had been affected, along with 20 restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, 9 water pollution standards and 8 on toxic chemicals.
The coronavirus pandemic was used as a "pretext for further deregulation", with the suspension of enforcement of air and water regulations, in a "brazen attempt to entrench permissive standards ahead of a possible change of administration", the report states.
These ongoing compromises had a dramatic outcome: between 2016 and 2019, the annual number of deaths attributable to environmental and occupational causes increased by more than 22,000, sending sharply upward a curve that had been declining for fifteen years. One of the main mortality factors was fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations, which from 2016 began rising again, particularly in southern states and the Midwest, where mining, oil and natural gas extraction is concentrated. Nothing similar had been seen since the Clean Air Act signed by Nixon in the 1970s. With the relaxation of health and safety regulations, workplace injuries in the mining and oil sectors also multiplied.
The White House has now changed occupant, but the legacy of the Trump era cannot be undone overnight, the scientists remind us. The fossil fuel revival has brought an increase in greenhouse gas concentrations that will remain in the atmosphere for decades, accelerating global warming. Hence The Lancet's appeal to the new president Joe Biden and his vice president Kamala Harris: to rejoin the Paris Agreement, a process already initiated by the new president on his inauguration day. But not only that: "this action must be followed by significant changes".
