As Hurricane Dorian approaches the U.S., Trump defunds disaster relief
Hurricane Dorian devastated the Bahamas over the weekend, killing at least five people, including children. Now, it’s heading toward the southeast United States. Instead of monitoring the situation and helping to prepare the nation over the weekend, Trump cancelled his visit to Poland so he could spend his time tweeting and golfing.
Last week, as communities were scrambling to prepare for climate change-fueled Dorian’s chaos, Trump stripped $155 million from FEMA’s disaster relief fund and reallocated it to ICE. Why? To make sure ICE has all the money it needs to carry out his cruel immigration agenda.
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Since day one, Trump has done everything he can to exacerbate climate change, undermine the science, and exploit our environment by pushing a pro-polluter agenda:
- Broke his promise to invest in U.S. infrastructure: Had Trump invested in rebuilding and modernizing America’s infrastructure like he promised (remember “infrastructure week”?), it could have helped reduce the pollution that fuels extreme storms like Hurricane Dorian by 13% over the next decade. The Center for American Progress explains how this should be achieved in a new report.
- Appointed climate deniers and fossil fuel lobbyists: No surprise here. Trump, who himself alleges that climate change is a “Chinese hoax,” has packed his administration with climate deniers and fossil fuel lobbyists whose main goal is helping the fossil fuel industry profit. Take Andrew Wheeler, for example: the EPA head is a former coal lobbyist who lies about Trump’s environmental record and weakens climate regulations to appease his coal-industry friends.
- Abandoned the Paris Agreement: In June 2017, Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, abandoning our international commitments to combat climate change and decrease fossil fuel emissions.
- Rolled back clean car standards: Trump’s rollback of clean car standards will cost at least 60,000 jobs and cost families $24 billion at the gas pump—and that’s in addition to the environmental damage and pollution it will cause. Automakers don’t even want it, only oil companies do.
- Weakened Obama-era coal rules: The Trump administration’s plans to repeal the Clean Power Plan and gut standards for coal-fired power plants will increase carbon pollution and cost up to 1,400 lives per year. That’s 1,400 annual premature deaths and increased climate change-inducing pollution, all to please Trump’s industry donors. And Trump is stiffing coal workers just like the rest of us; it’s just coal billionaires he’s helping.
- Censoring government scientists and agencies: Trump’s administration consistently censors its own scientists, preventing them from publishing their findings on the serious impacts of climate change. Within the first week of taking office, the administration scrubbed all references of climate change from government websites.
As Trump and his Republican allies cater to their industry donors, progressive leaders are rolling out bold plans to tackle the climate crisis before it’s too late. Tune in to CNN’s climate town halls tomorrow night at 5pm EST to hear a progressive vision for combating climate change, and follow @CAPEnergyPolicy on Twitter.