The Republicans always love to tell us that
they want to cut environmental protections
in order to save American jobs.
Now, not only do regulations not kill jobs,
but this talking point is merely a smoke screen
that Republican politicians use to give corporations
the green light to destroy the planet.
Donald Trump is doing his part to make sure
corporations can decimate our environment.
I'm joined now by Zoë Carpenter from The
Nation Magazine to tell us how the president
is weakening environmental protections.
Zoë, thanks for joining me today.
Hey, thanks for having me on.
You wrote a phenomenal piece in The Nation
recently talking about two orders from President
Obama that Donald Trump recently rescinded
that basically make it almost impossible for
the United States to really properly prepare
for climate change, negate any of the negative
effects, extreme weather that we're seeing.
Walk us through what Donald Trump has done
recently to destroy environmental protections
in the United States.
Sure.
A couple of weeks ago he issued an executive
order that was mainly directing a variety
of federal agencies to begin the work of dismantling
the Obama Administration's climate legacy.
So things like the Clean Power Plan, the moratorium
on the Federal Coal Leasing Program.
It's important to note that the executive
order doesn't, itself, do away with those
programs and orders.
It just starts the process.
In some cases it'll be a multi-year process
of trying to undo some of those regulations.
One of the things that wasn't as noticed about
this order is that it also rescinded two Obama
Administration directives that had nothing
to do with additional regulations on industry.
These two Obama directives were the backbone
of the government's climate adaptation work.
Essentially, in brief, what they did was direct
federal agencies to consider the risks from
heightened extreme weather events and then
to prepare for those risks to both protect
taxpayer investments and to help local communities
get ready for things like extended droughts,
lengthened wildfire season, and bigger and
more destructive storms.
Basically, and you point this out in your
article, this wasn't necessarily a partisan
issue.
Whether or not you accept the science or you
reject it, you still kind of have to agree
that it's probably a good idea to have coastal
cities prepared in the event of a hurricane,
or other areas prepared for floods, or droughts,
or whatever kind of weather event could happen.
Yet, for some reason, our current president
thought it was a good idea to go ahead and
say, ‘No.
We don't ... We don't want to prepare for
these things.
We, we don't want to allocate any, uh, uh,
money towards these programs.
We don't want to work to build up infrastructure
to protect ourselves.’
To me, especially given the fact ... I understand
when Republicans cut environmental protections.
They're doing it for corporations.
Corporations want that.
But this specific directive, I'm grasping
trying to find a motive here, because this
is actually bad for business, bad for economies,
bad for the planet.
I don't understand why he would go after this
specific ruling.
Yeah, it does seem pretty petty just trying
to dismantle as much of the Obama Administration's
legacy as possible.
Like you say, it is bad for business in the
sense that preparing for storms and other
adaptation work is really ... That's infrastructure
spending.
That creates jobs.
You have to build seawalls.
You have to, in some cases, move buildings.
You're weatherizing buildings.
There are a whole suite of projects that fall
under this kind of adaptation and risk management
work.
It actually, according to a recent article
in Wired, the "adaptation economy” worldwide
amounts to about $280 billion every single
year.
That's a missed opportunity to invest in American
business and American infrastructure.
What's really interesting, as far as the entire
climate discussion goes, here in the United
States, I think the economic part has been
missing from most of the conversations because
we do understand.
We have plenty of studies out there that have
shown that whenever we enact new regulations,
new safety standards, if it does get rid of
jobs in the energy industry, the dirty energy
industry, it actually creates more jobs on
the regulatory side.
There is still a net job gain, a net benefit
to local economies because of these.
For compliance issues, people have to spend
more money.
There's more people out there making sure
corporations are playing by the rules.
Those are jobs.
That economic part, the economic impact of
these regulations on the positive side, is
something that very few people are talking
about, and especially when we get into this
issue of the adaptation economy.
We're talking hundreds of billion dollars
across the globe a year that we're effectively
trying to opt-out of here.
Not only that, it's not only opting out, but
we're setting ourselves up for massive costs
if we don't prepare for the extreme weather
events that scientists predict are coming.
Take, for example, the Louisiana floods that
happened last year.
That cost $9 billion in the state and 13 people
died.
It was just one of 15 natural disasters last
year that cost more than a billion dollars.
If we don't start preparing for torrential
downpours or flooding, for extended drought,
for rising sea levels, not only are we missing
the opportunity to invest in the adaptation
work, but you're also setting yourself up
to incur huge costs from natural disasters
that, if we can't prevent them, at least we
could prepare for them.
Absolutely.
Zoe Carpenter, associate Washington editor
for The Nation Magazine.
Thank you very much for speaking with us today.
Great job.
Great work over there at The Nation.
Keep it up.
We will check back in with you very soon.
Thank you very much.
Thanks for 
having me.
