Pr*sident Trump’s tone in his Tuesday night address to Congress was a bit gentler than it’s been for the past six weeks, but the content was the same as ever, a truck-load of lies, both of commission and omission. Nowhere was this more evident than in his discussion of energy and environment.
Take, for instance, this bit:
We have undertaken a historic effort to massively reduce job‑crushing regulations, creating a deregulation task force inside of every government agency; imposing a new rule which mandates that for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated; and stopping a regulation that threatens the future and livelihoods of our great coal miners.
The 2-for-1 plan is absurd and illegal since agencies undertake rule-making because they are required to do so by congressional statutes. But it sure sounds good to those who agree with Trump and other elected Republicans that the nation is being ruined by “burdensome regulations.”
The regulation he boasted about stopping is the Stream Protection Rule drawn up by the Office of Surface Mining. He signed a bill on Feb. 16 eliminating it, noting that getting rid of this rule that was approved in December would save thousands of mining jobs. The rule was meant to keep coal-mining waste out of streams, but it was considerably watered down thanks to industry lobbying. The rule did not ban mountain top removal that is used to get at coal seams, with the overburden of soil and rock dumped in stream valleys.
Even though the rule was far weaker than it needed to be, now instead of making companies stop dumping their coal waste in those valleys, the consequences will continue to fall as it has for more than a century on the people who live where the companies befoul the water and land with their leavings.
As for those thousands of saved jobs? It’s BS. The National Mining Association claimed the Stream Protection Rule could reduce coal-related employment by 281,000 jobs. However, the Congressional Research Service concluded the rule would cut coal-related work by an average of 260 jobs year. And it would also create 250 jobs a year. To be sure, some of those jobs would require top skills, say in biological sciences or engineering. But others would require skills that many in the coal industry already have, say, running a bulldozer.
Trump also noted in his address:
We have cleared the way for the construction of the Keystone and Dakota Access Pipelines -- thereby creating tens of thousands of jobs -- and I've issued a new directive that new American pipelines be made with American steel.
Those pipelines, if completed, will move some of the dirtiest oil on the planet from the tar sands and fracked oil from the Bakken shale formation to refineries in Illinois and Texas. In fact, only 35-50 permanent jobs would be created by Keystone XL, with 3,900 annual construction jobs over the two years it will take to complete the project. How many construction jobs the Dakota Access Pipeline is creating as it’s built hasn’t been calculated, but there will only be 40 permanent jobs. As for the steel? Here’s Ryan Koronowski:
First off, Trump’s directive that the pipeline be made with American steel is likely to have little effect, because the American steel industry is not equipped to meet the project’s requirements, and because the pipeline segments have for the most part already been purchased and constructed. What’s more, an investigation by DeSmogBlog found that a steel company with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin stands to gain should the project move forward.
While Trump mentioned jobs nine times in his speech, not once did he point out that there are in the United States, at last count, 260,000 solar jobs and 88,000 wind jobs. In both cases, that’s more than three times as many people who were employed in those fields in 2010. The numbers, some analysts say, could triple again by 2030.
While Trump made one brief mention of clean air and water, he didn’t say squat about his plan to cripple the Environmental Protection Agency by whacking $2 billion from its $8 billion budget. Nor did he say anything about his expected reversal of President Obama’s three-year moratorium on coal leasing of public lands. Nor his plan to get rid of Obama’s Clean Power Plan that mandates emissions cuts in electricity-generating plants to protect people’s health and reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the atmosphere to our detriment.
While Trump and the fossil fuel industry lament what they say will be the CPP’s impact on jobs, particularly in coal, the EPA estimates annual benefits from the plan would reach $93 billion by 2030. Various studies estimate that the gain in jobs because of the plan could be as high as 273,000 by that same year. And then there are the health and safety benefits, which the EPA has calculated at 150,000 fewer asthma attacks and 6,600 fewer premature deaths annually because of the CPP.
Of course, details like these cause most people to glaze over into a numbers-coma. This allows Trump and his ilk in industry and politics to talk deceptively about tens of thousands of lost jobs from “burdensome regulations” and tens of thousands of saved jobs from killing those rules without ever discussing the jobs that are created by imposing the rules.
Like the coal waste companies are free to dump, Donald Trump’s lies are polluting the nation and his moves on energy and the environment are literally going to kill people. For this the man gets tremendous applause.