President Trump’s Environmental decisions are endangering the planet

EDITOR: The Trump administration has repealed the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas “endangerment finding.” In 2009, the EPA formally concluded that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health, giving the agency its legal authority to limit pollution from cars, power plants, and oil and gas facilities.

The new rule strips away that foundation, and it is hailed by President Trump as “the single largest deregulatory action in American history.” It is, in reality, the deliberate blinding of our primary public‑health and environmental watchdog at the very moment the alarms are sounding loudest.

Climate scientists now warn that global warming is accelerating, possibly pushing Earth toward a “hothouse” trajectory. They describe a world in which ice sheets melt, forests die back, and oceans lose their capacity to buffer heat, triggering feedbacks that could lock in catastrophic levels of warming for centuries or more. There is no historical guide for what comes next because humanity has never before forced the climate system so far, so fast.

Scientist and author Jeffrey A. Lockwood, in his essay “The Fine Art of the Good Guest,” reminds us that we are “uninvited, but not unwelcome, guests of the planet.” A good guest, he says, asks little, accepts what is offered, and gives thanks. This decision does the opposite: it demands much, takes more, and denies any obligation to future generations who will live with the consequences.

If we took Lockwood’s ethic seriously, we would be strengthening climate protections, not dismantling them. A decent guest leaves a place better—or at least not worse—than they found it. Right now, the U.S. government is breaking that most basic rule.

Terry Hansen
Grafton, Wisconsin