By the time he leaves office, due to his horrendous leadership on the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump may have close to a half a million dead Americans on what passes for his conscience. But he’ll also have a lasting effect on our environment.
The Trump administration is asking oil and gas firms to pick spots where they want to drill in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as it races to open the pristine wilderness to development and lock in drilling rights before President-elect Joe Biden takes office.
The “call for nominations” to be published Tuesday in the Federal Register allows companies to identify tracts on which to bid during an upcoming lease sale on the refuge’s nearly 1.6 million acre coastal plain, a sale that the Interior Department aims to hold before Biden takes the oath of office in January. The move would be a capstone of President Trump’s efforts to open up public lands to logging, mining and grazing — something Biden strongly opposes.
A GOP-controlled Congress in 2017 authorized drilling in the refuge, a vast wilderness that is home to tens of thousands of migrating caribou and waterfowl, along with polar bears and Arctic foxes.
We can hope that most drilling operations aren’t actually interested in the bad public relations that will follow any bid to despoil this pristine wilderness, and also that perhaps President Biden will be able to undo some of the damage. This same article says we should expect the Department of Energy to roll back regulations on shower heads, so we have that to look forward to.
All Republicans are terrible on the environment, but Trump seems to take a malicious pleasure in the enterprise.
There’s bad publicity, yes. That could be a deterrent. More likely? These remote sites are probably fairly expensive to drill, and I am not sure at what the value Brent Crude needs to be at before they could be even marginally profitable. If the peak oil demand scenario is one that is playing out, I’m not seeing a scenario when Brent Crude is anywhere near the $100 per barrel that it was before it fell off a cliff mid-decade last decade. At $40 per barrel? I am skeptical.
Most of Trump’s executive orders to undo Obama’s administration were petty and spiteful. And it’s unclear how effective they’ve been aside from throwing red meat to his base. Yes, he can try to undo regulations on showerheads. Problem: corporations that make showerheads long ago retooled to make appliances that were more water efficient. It would be expensive to try to retool back to some imagined “good old days” scenario. Same with fuel economy. US automakers and those international automakers who manufacture here have already retooled their assembly lines for more hybrid and electric vehicles. Yes, a lot of those vehicles are SUVs and trucks (I’m an SUV owner by the way, although one of my kids seems to have permanently borrowed it), Thing is, once the production process is in place, it’s going to be there for a while. GM is not going to be reinventing V8 conventional motors, or go back to heavier weight metals for its truck and SUV lines after going to great expense to comply with the regulations it had anticipated pre-Trump. Biden’s going to dial a lot of this back. Maybe not all of it, but a lot of it. In the meantime, Trump better get used to having to flush his toilet 10 times every time he takes a dump. Just knowing that will make my day.
Is there the ability to rescind rules changes that are made in the previous 6 months as Trump did for many of the Obama rules and regs? Or did we need both parts of the legislature to do that?