Will Trumps presidency have a major negative impact on the environment?

I haven't heard anything about National Parks specifically. In terms of fracking, the majority of it that goes on here happens on private land, and the owners are paid royalties. This is in contrast to, for example, Canada, which does most of its fracking on public land, which the oil companies lease. So doing more oil development on publicly owned land would be doing things more like our neighbor. There can be some advantages to doing it this way; for example, lease amounts can vary based on environmental conditions. This gives companies incentives to leave things as nice as possible when they're done.

Also, when you think about the West, remember that's it's not just a giant urban area with a few small, pristine, protected areas that Trump is now going to go destroy. A huge amount of it is actually "federally owned land" - 35% of New Mexico, 36% of Colorado, 39% of Arizona, 46% of California, 48% of Wyoming, 53% of Oregon, 61% of Alaska, 62% of Idaho, 65% of Utah, and 85% of Nevada.

It's not like you are all of the sudden going to see oil rigs in Yellowstone. Trump would not dare messing with the most beautiful and iconic places, it would cause public outrage. Now, of course, that alone doesn't mean everything is fine and dandy - just because someplace isn't a famous national park doesn't mean it's OK to damage its environment - but it's difficult to evaluate what the impacts will be until we have specific proposals.

It's worth noting that Ryan Zinke, Trump's pick for Interior secretary, fought against a Republican proposal to hand public lands to the states (presumably so they could apply more lax environmental standards to its use). And Trump himself has expressed opposition to giving away federal land.

As for climate change - I personally think Trump's view of it as a "hoax" is idiotic. But I wish the left would take reality more seriously when it comes to energy. Wind and solar just aren't up for the job yet, and the only reason we're using them as much as we do is because of government subsidies. Yet even with all these subsidies, they supply barely 1% of the world's energy. On the other hand, we've been able to achieve a TON of decarbonization with hydro, nuclear, and natural gas. Yet the environmental groups fight those energy sources vigorously!

In my view, the best thing we can do to fight climate change is a) keep decarbonizing with the technologies we know work. It will be tough to build more hydropower since a lot of that is already exploited, but let's keep moving away from coal and building more natural gas plants. Let's keep our nuclear power plants going and not shut them down out of fear. Maybe even build some more. And then b) work on R&D for better clean energy sources in the future, that will actually be able to compete with fossil fuels on their own without government subsidies. The great thing about that is that poorer countries that may not be able to afford generous subsidies might pick those clean, cheap, renewable sources over dirty coal as they do now.

Yes, Trump says he wants to bring back coal (which would be terrible for climate change), and he doesn't like renewables. But I doubt he will be successful at doing the former (the decline in the coal industry has mainly been due to cheap gas and the free market, not Obama), and I don't see him being able to work against the momentum of R&D, regardless of his opinions on the latter, even if he tries. Yes, there's the Clean Power Plan and the Paris Agreement, but those were mostly toothless and wouldn't have made much of a long run difference in climate change anyway. So, my prediction is that Trump really won't do anything to change the overall climate picture. CO2 emissions and climate change were happening long before he came up with the idea to run for president.

As for the Dakota Access Pipeline, most of the arguments against it by the protesters and the tribe were on shaky ground. The tribe was contacted numerous times before construction so the government could hear their concerns, but they repeatedly ignored communications and flaked out on meetings. Then all the sudden these protests start after the pipeline is basically already built. An Obama-appointed federal judge chewed out the tribe for their behavior in a recent ruling.

In summary, I hate Trump and I didn't vote for him. But personally I'm going to wait and see what he actually does, instead of assuming the apocalypse is coming.

/r/AskAnAmerican Thread Parent