Michael E. Mann writes:

To say that Donald Trump’s jaw-dropping display of environmental ignorance while in the United Kingdom is an embarrassment to all Americans would be an understatement. But the worst part of his ramblings about how we have “among the cleanest climates there are based on all statistics” isn’t that it sounds like the ramblings of a Fox News addict. It’s that his administration is doing everything it can to work towards the opposite: dirty water, dirty air, and, well, a very dirty climate.

Despite the US being responsible for the greatest buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of any nation on the planet, Trump engages in his all-too-familiar and predictable m.o. of projection and deflection, pointing the finger at other countries (“they don’t do [sic] the responsibility”.) While Trump insists it is other countries who have “not very good air, not very good water, and the sense of pollution,” his administration is giving his billionaire buddies and fossil fuel companies carte blanche to pollute.

Reuters reported that in one month in 2018, a coal company owned by Trump’s pal Bob Murray released over 200 times the allowable limit of aluminum into the rivers surrounding his coal mine. So much for Trump’s support for “crystal clean clear” water.

And throughout his administration, Trump’s political appointees (many of whom have come so recently from the swamp they’re still draped in algae and muck) are trying their hardest to expand malicious Trumpian environmental policies across the federal government. [Continue reading…]