With the recent presidential election, we end up with Donald J. Trump coming out on top, becoming the United States President once again. Recently, the world seems to be in a negative state in terms of our environment; especially with the recent excessive weather conditions, like the heatwaves, air quality, and wind. Looking at Trump’s past presidency and actions, will he learn from his last encounter in office or will nothing change about our environment?
When looking back at Trump’s previous actions towards America’s environment, according to a Brookings’ commentary in August, “What is the Trump Administration’s Track Record on the Environment,” Trump was focused on rolling back policies that address climate change. What this means is that Trump planned to withdraw from actions that would aid in pushing back climate change, essentially keeping the current state of the world in terms of climate change, which over time will become worse. Also, in 2017 Trump promised to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, which is an agreement to cut down greenhouse gas emissions to soften the impact of climate change. Although Trump was not able to pull through with this withdrawal in his last presidency, Trump will most likely try again in his upcoming term. There will most definitely be a dramatic impact if Trump decides to withdraw from this agreement as the United States is among one of the most major emitters of greenhouse gasses. This is only one of the instances where Trump chose to weaken the United States’ impact on reducing climate change. Another instance includes the Trump Administration replacing the Clean Power Plan with a weaker regulation, which makes us clearly see that Trump doesn’t think climate change as being a great problem.
From Trump’s previous decisions on impacting the effect of climate change, the United States will have a greater impact contributing to climate change. Not only will we see a greater prominence in climate change but also experience decreases in air quality; increases in various types of pollution like air and water pollution; and greater intensities of natural disasters. All due to the fact that regulations will either not be effective enough or will have never been put into effect.
Well, what can Trump possibly do to improve the state of our environment? Rather than withdrawing from climate change efforts, Trump needs to realize that climate change needs attention and establish and join efforts tackling climate change. This can include things like laws to regulate the efficiency of carbon emission vehicles, introducing and promoting the normality of low emission, hybrid, and electric vehicles in turn reducing everyone’s car. Normalizing the use of solar panels over every household can also contribute to slowing down the effect of climate change, by allowing more houses to be relying less on other forms of energy which can produce harmful excrement.
It is in our President’s hands to improve our environment and society as a whole, we need Trump to realize that these problems are real and the consequences can be detrimental to our world. The United States needs to incorporate new and existing protocols to improve our impact towards a better world for all. With Trump as our new President we need to hope that he won’t continue his previous plans, and rather work in the other direction, contributing to fixing the environment.
