Since the ex-president and his ilk are still festering dangerously, I must continue with my Donald Trump report card. Domestically, my grading system revolves around “conservative values,” which somehow became synonymous with air and water pollution and environmental destruction. Why this is so is a mystery. Economic growth needn’t depend, first and foremost, on degrading the environment. New technology creates new jobs.
The latest fracking boom, which propelled America back to energy self-sufficiency and market dominance, and for which Trump obviously likes to claim credit, began sometime in 2005, more than 10 years before he took office. The fracking peak may have already started its decline even before Trump was elected.
Even so, the Obama era economic fracking success contributed to Trump’s GOP vision of greatness — “retro-success” by removing environmental protections and proposing rollbacks of existing regulations on oil and gas operations and just about everything else related to the environment.Ignoring science and nullifying hard-earned progress is an odd and rather simplistic, one-sided vision for a brighter tomorrow.
Trump’s visions of greatness seem to be reactive in the genre of meat-eaters versus vegetarians and vegans. If you are convinced that the non-meat crowd is comprised of liberal wimps, and not of people concerned with health and clogged arteries, then you poke fun at the whole idea and refuse to discuss the matter rationally, which means you close your mind to it.
So, fracking became synonymous with success and success supplanted environmental concerns, and that translated into rescinding motor vehicle emission regulations in California and ignoring water and contamination problems nationwide. Trump did get it right about poor forest management, due in part to liberal tree-hugging environmentalist overprotection, but he flubbed his response — to “rake the forest.”
It seems obstinate denial was never a true blue — or red — American “conservative value” until Trump promoted it as such. I give him a D-minus on domestic issues.
— Ken Green
Cooper Landing
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