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Former EPA chiefs blast the Trump administration over rollbacks, budget cuts, bad science
One of the larger themes at this week’s massive Global Climate Action Summit taking place in San Francisco is the relationship between climate change and human health.
“Health is the best way to relate to human beings on the issue,” former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said Friday during a session titled “Health is where climate change hits home.” “Let’s put a face on climate.”
Activist artist (and 2018 Grist 50 honoree) Favianna Rodriguez was among those to lend their visage to the cause. “I grew up in a very dirty community — a community that is plagued by asthma as a result of fossil fuels burning up and down the freeway,” said the Oakland native, who spoke at a session on climate justice and equity (where health was also front and center).
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In response to the public health threat posed by warming, members of the health care sector pledged to go beyond just treating patients and shrink their carbon footprints. That might not sound huge, but consider that if America’s health care system were a country, it would be the world’s seventh-largest producer of carbon dioxide.
Earlier this week, health care institutions representing more than 17,000 hospitals and clinics across more than two dozen countries agreed to slash four coal plants’ worth of carbon emissions from their operations each year. The initiative, led by the Global Climate and Health Forum, calls climate change “the greatest health threat of the 21st century. ” The forum notes that warming threatens food and water systems, helps to spread mosquito-borne diseases, and exposes more people to heat waves and other extreme weather events.
“Our biggest hope is that the summit will serve to mobilize people in the health sector around the world to really step up and take action,” says Linda Rudolph, who heads the Public Health Institute’s Center for Climate Change and Health and also hosts the U.S. Climate and Health Alliance.
Rudolph and the Global Climate and Health Forum have outlined a call to action encompassing 10 priorities that they are pushing other health organizations to endorse. They include everything from exceeding the commitments of the Paris Agreement, making solutions to climate change a critical part of health systems, and ensuring that action to stop warming includes gender equity.
“The health sector can reduce its own footprint by moving to renewable energy, by using a food supply chain that’s local and healthy and sustainable,” Rudolph tells Grist. “The health sector can make sure that we build resilience in our communities.”
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Hospitals take aim at ‘the greatest health threat of the 21st century’
If the last year and a half has been rough for you, just imagine you’re Gina McCarthy, former EPA administrator under Obama, watching as your legacy is dismantled by Scott Pruitt.
In a speech in Seattle on Wednesday, McCarthy said people have been coming up to her and asking, “Gina, how are you?” like she’s a dead woman walking.
Her response? She’s doing just fine.
McCarthy, now the director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard, addressed a crowd gathered to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Climate Solutions, a nonprofit working to give the Pacific Northwest a 100-percent clean energy grid.
The best advice she gave to EPA employees when she left office, McCarthy said in her keynote address, was to “keep your asses in your seats” and wait out the Trump era. Her speech contained some great advice for the rest of us too.
McCarthy didn’t mince words when it came to Pruitt, her scandal-ridden successor at the EPA. “You’ve got an administrator who doesn’t know the law … and huddles in the corner with the few people he trusts,” she said.
In Pruitt’s eagerness to reverse Obama-era rules, he’s produced sloppy work that risks being struck down by the courts. It’s happened to six of his proposed rollbacks already.
McCarthy admitted that she’s “ticked off” about what’s going on in Washington, D.C.: “The Trump administration is rolling back everything we did — or even considered.” But she added, “Good luck with that.”
McCarthy points that creative ideas generally don’t start with the federal government. “It’s not trickle-down economics, it’s trickle-up grassroots,” she said.
Grassroots efforts like the Women’s March have inspired McCarthy. Her favorite sign? “I can’t believe we still have to march for this shit.”
She says that young people demanding equity and justice are going to keep the country from moving backwards, in addition to local climate action and the business community’s growing commitment to social causes.
“If you think young people can’t change the world, look at Florida,” she says. There, high schoolers from Marjory Stoneman Douglas stood up, sparking a gun control law in Florida and a renewed national movement against gun violence.
McCarthy sometimes wakes up in the morning and her husband is watching TV, upset about the latest Trump Twitterstorm. And she tells him, “Shut up!” as nicely as possible.
“Let’s be hopeful once in a while,” she says. “Get off MSNBC and Fox News and get out there.”
This article –
A self-described “anonymous environmental activist collective” spelled out “NO MORE TIGERS, NO MORE WOODS” in six-foot-high letters at the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.
“It’s a protest piece against Trump’s administration’s handling of our environmental policies,” one of the activists told a local ABC affiliate, using a voice disguiser. “He’s been very aggressive in gutting a lot of the policies that we’ve had in place for a very long time. We felt it necessary to stand up and go take action against him.”
Plus the activists don’t like golf courses. “Tearing up the golf course felt justified in many ways,” one activist told the Washington Post. “Repurposing what was once a beautiful stretch of land into a playground for the privileged is an environmental crime in its own right.”
The Washington Post article originally called the action a “daring act of defiance.” Though accurate, the description irritated Eric Trump, the president’s second-oldest son:
The Post then changed its story to say the group “pulled off an elaborate act of vandalism.”
No comment from Tiger Woods, who has golfed with Donald Trump and said he plays pretty well for an old guy.
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Trump is sending Obama’s auto fuel economy standards back to the drawing board.
Somehow, Gina McCarthy — who could very well see much of her work at the Environmental Protection Agency reversed in the next administration — is not freaking out.
In her first public remarks since Election Day, McCarthy told the National Press Club that the U.S. is making solid progress even without the federal government forcing states to clean up their act in the power sector.
“I truly believe, guided by President Obama’s deliberate vision, history will show that the Clean Power Plan marked a turning point in American climate leadership,” she said. “But the global transition to a low-carbon economy is much more than one regulation … If you take nothing else from my speech today, take this: The train to a global, clean energy future has already left the station.”
As McCarthy rattled off, power plant carbon emissions are already down 24 percent below 2005 levels, more than halfway to CPP’s target reduction of 32 percent. Meanwhile, nearly half the country (24 states) have already surpassed their 2022 emissions goals.
Ironically, the same stats suggest that the CPP wasn’t doing anything special to lower U.S. emissions in the first place, except to bring overly coal-reliant states into the 21st century.
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The EPA chief’s post-election message: Keep calm and carry on.
The Ross Sea marine reserve, which covers 600,000 square miles of the Southern Ocean off coast of the Antarctic, will be protected from commercial fishing for the next 35 years. Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, an international consortium of governments, approved it unanimously on Thursday.
At nearly twice the size of Texas, the area is home to over 10,000 species of flora and fauna, including penguins, seals, whales, seabirds, and fish.
But Ross Sea is also important for the valuable role it plays in research on the impact of climate change on marine ecosystems.
Secretary of State John Kerry celebrated the park as “one of the last unspoiled ocean wilderness areas on the planet,” and a sign of “further proof that the world is finally beginning to understand the urgency of the threats facing our planet.”
There are some environmentalists who say the designation doesn’t go far enough. World Wildlife Foundation’s Chris Johnson noted that the agreement must be made permanent.
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EPA chief says her agency “has a lot to prove” on environmental justice.
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