What to Be Thankful For (2021 edition)
Here’s the one thing environmentalists should be most thankful for this year.
If there is a single thing for environmentalists to be thankful for this year, it is simply this: the virulently anti-environmental Donald Trump is no longer in the White House.
My Thanksgiving post last year began, “Nearly four years into the Trump Administration, we’re now accustomed to waking up every morning to learn about a new attack on the environment.” Five years ago, in the aftermath of the 2016 election, the picture seemed even worse: “These are dark days for the cause of environmental protection, and it would be easy to give way to despair.”
In the ten months since Trump left the White House, we have forgotten just how bad things were. Our environmental law center has compiled a list of 200 environmental rollbacks during the Trump Administration. There were previous presidents who sought environmental rollbacks and favored the fossil fuel industry. But there were none so unremittingly hostile to environmental protection in all forms.
While disasters are taking place, they preoccupy our thoughts and dominate our emotions. In the aftermath, we do our best to put them behind us and move on. Think of the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, which was three times worse than COVID in terms of deaths per capita in America. The equivalent of its toll today would be 2 million deaths. It barely gets a mention in history books. Similarly, less than a year after Trump left office, our memories have faded.
Once they have taken place, events take on an air of inevitability. But there was nothing inevitable about the election outcome in 2020. Keep in mind that 47% of the electorate— over 74 million Americans — voted for Trump. Trump was not all that far out of touch with his party on environmental issues. Consider the party’s leadership in Congress: Kevin McCarthy, in the House, has a lifetime environmental voting score of 3%. Senator Mitch McConnell’s lifetime score is barely better at 8%. Their party nearly won control of both Houses in 2020. If not for Trump’s bungling of COVID, we might well now be facing a federal government under complete Republican control.
In short, environmentalists should be very, very thankful that Trump is no longer in the White House. But being thankful doesn’t mean being complacent about the risks the future may hold.
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About Dan
Dan Farber has written and taught on environmental and constitutional law as well as about contracts, jurisprudence and legislation. Currently at Berkeley Law, he has al…
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Americans have lead the way on climate change
marketing and while doing nothing to reduce government subsidies and tax credits and loopholes for the fossil fuel industry. The use of fossil fuels in transportation, energy production, and industrial, agricultural and global military operations will not be slowed thanks to the fossil fuel industry lobby which know how to ensure that Congress will continue to ignore climate change.
“But being thankful doesn’t mean being complacent about the risks the future may hold” is a gross understatment of the threats to our present and future we are living with as a way of life today.
It is the day after Thanksgiving 2021 and we still have totally out of control climate change disasters, attacks against American Democracy by too many of our own politicians, new pandemic variants and violence with no end in sight to disastrous threats we keep failing to control.
All we keep proving is that we have absolutely no institutional leaders capable of making the right things happen to produce an acceptable quality of life for our newest generations.
Time is running out faster every day and all we can do is document out of control events and finger-point!
Dan, I think humans are beginning to exist like frogs in boiling water because of the increasingly destructive threats we are living with.
The greatest threats that we are producing are the human-made us/them dichotomy caused tragedies that we could prevent and/or mitigate but we keep proving that we cannot evolve in time to protect our civilization as the water reaches the boiling point that ends life.
We refuse to admit that there is no way our civilization can survive with the kinds of social problems that are destroying our environment, health, governments and social systems, especially when our institutions continue to have leadership failures that fail to meet the challenges of change.