Given his campaign rhetoric and the fact that he has never seemed particularly interested in the topic, Donald Trump’s expected environmental policies are a primary source of concern in the Pacific Northwest.
Such consternation was reinforced by the president-elect’s nomination of Scott Pruitt to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general since 2011, has described himself as a “leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda,” has falsely claimed there is widespread disagreement among climate scientists regarding global warming, and has decried President Obama’s Clean Power Plan.
For a majority of people in Washington, such proclamations are anathema. This part of the country long has been cognizant of environmental issues, reveling in the pristine beauty that is a hallmark of the region while understanding that environmental protections do, indeed, pay dividends for all. A reduction in the burning of coal in, say, Ohio or China has an impact upon the kind of world we are leaving for our children or grandchildren here.
That generational impact is evident in two recent news items out of the Northwest. Last week, the federal EPA announced a billion-dollar cleanup plan for 10 miles of the Willamette River, from near its mouth to near the Broadway Bridge in Portland.
As Travis Williams, executive director of Willamette Riverkeeper, explained in a guest column for The Oregonian: “Over many decades, this portion of river was polluted by toxic chemicals, which remain today on the river bottom as well as much of the riverbank.” For nearly a century, the river was a dumping ground for heavy industry in an age when there was little understanding and little interest in protecting the environment from the ravages of industry.
In another development, Washington’s entire congressional delegation sent a letter to Trump urging him to fund cleanup work at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Contaminated from decades of producing the nation’s atomic-weapons arsenal, Hanford is regarded as the most toxic site in the nation, but it has received inadequate attention from a federal government that is tasked with cleaning it up. Hanford sits near the Columbia River, about 200 miles upstream from Vancouver, and many of the tanks holding radioactive waste are leaking.
The Willamette River and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation serve as beacons heralding the dangers of lax environmental protections. While many conservatives these days belittle regulations as a hindrance to economic growth, the fact is that such regulations often save money in the long run. It is less expensive to prevent toxic contamination than it is to clean it up decades later.
Meanwhile, the issue generates questions about what happened to the Republican Party. The EPA was established under Richard Nixon, and fellow Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush expressed concern about human-caused global warming a generation ago. But for many in today’s GOP, denying that humans contribute to climate change is viewed as a badge of honor.
Assessing the future of a Trump presidency is difficult, given his inconsistent or nonexistent declarations of policy. And over the next four years there will be some policy decisions that we agree with and others that we disagree with. The hope is that the incoming administration adopts some of the Northwest’s inherent interest in protecting our environment for the future, but the early indications are not encouraging.
