Tallying the Damage of Trump's Presidency in 2017

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/tallying-the-damage-of-trumps-presidency-in-2017-w514687

Tallying the Damage of Trump's Presidency in 2017
Though the tax bill was the only piece of major legislation Trump was able to get passed this year, the 45th president got plenty done
By Tessa Stuart
19 hours ago

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Ironically, Trump has been most successful at the very thing he criticized Obama for – extensive use of executive orders to achieve his policy goals. And, for all his high-profile legislative belly flops, since assuming office nearly a year ago he's managed to do an incredible amount of damage – to the environment, health, education, civil and labor rights – entirely outside of Congress.

Here's a rundown.

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Environment

Under Trump, the U.S. withdrew from the Paris climate accord, and is now the only country in the world that is not party to the non-binding agreement to address global warming. The administration also announced it would cease payments to the U.N.'s Green Climate Fund and disbanded a federal advisory panel on climate change, while the Energy Department banned the use of the phrase "climate change" itself.

Trump's EPA greenlit completion of both the Dakota Access and the Keystone XL pipelines. The Keystone XL, according to a report produced by Obama's EPA, will increase and accelerate the rate at which greenhouse gases are emitted into the atmosphere, worsening climate change. Construction also threatens habitats of a number of endangered species, including the whooping crane and swift fox. The Dakota Access pipeline threatens the safety of drinking water.

Trump's EPA overturned, threw out or otherwise abandoned rules that banned lead bullets from National Wildlife Refuges and the sale of plastic water bottles at National Parks, created standards for recycling aerosol cans, protected whales and sea turtles, restricted what coal companies could dump into streams, reduced pollutants at sewage treatment plants, and limited methane and other greenhouse gas emissions. The agency also delayed implementation of rules aimed at preventing accidents at chemical plants and limiting power plants' ability to dump heavy metal-laden toxic waste into public waters. Against the advice of its own scientists, the EPA chose not to ban a widely used insecticide believed to harm children's mental development.

Trump reduced Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments by two million acres, introducing the possibility of future oil and natural gas exploration, mining and logging in an area sacred to local Native American tribes. He lifted an Obama-era moratorium on coal mining on public lands, signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to re-examine a ban on offshore drilling and revoked an order protecting the northern Bering Sea region in Alaska.


https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/tallying-the-damage-of-trumps-presidency-in-2017-w514687