Earth Day 2025: Who’s Entitled to Destroy the Environment?
Today is Earth Day 2025. So, here’s a thought experiment:
The Scenario: A car is barreling down a wooded road, swerving over quickly to stop. The driver rolls down his window and tosses a bag of fast food trash – the remains of his takeout dinner – out into the woods. He then rolls his window back up and drives his car back onto the road, driving off at normal speed, unseen by others.
The Question: Is the driver more likely to have voted for President Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris?
Yes, this “experimental” question is unscientifically constructed and pretty dumb.
But, seriously….
Wouldn’t ideological Trump-voting Conservatives be far more likely to pollute the environment so brazenly? It's hard to picture a die-hard Liberal committing such an act.
After all, the Trump administration and the U.S. DOGE Service seem to enjoy mocking environmentalism, treating the call for basic environmental protection as some kind of effeminate nannyism, rather than our solemn duty to future generations and to the natural world that surrounds us.
So, who really believes they are so entitled as to purposely despoil rather than protect the natural world that surrounds us? And why does having so little concern for the environment become such a sought-after credential in the toxically masculine "manosphere" polluting our culture today? Let me guess: it's not Liberals.
Recall that in 2024, Harris voters and Democrats generally embraced strong environmental and wildlife protections and the strongest regulatory mitigations to date against climate change.
Whereas, in President Trump’s first term, he rolled back over 100 environmental rules, per The New York Times – 30 in Air Pollution and Emissions, 19 in Drilling and Extraction, 9 in Water Pollution, 10 in Toxic Substances and Safety, plus many others.
In President Trump’s first term, “The bulk of the rollbacks identified by the Times were carried out by the Environmental Protection Agency, which weakened Obama-era limits on planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and from cars and trucks; removed protections from more than half the nation’s wetlands; and withdrew the legal justification for restricting mercury emissions from power plants,” the Times reported. “All told, the Trump administration’s deregulatory actions were estimated to significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade and lead to thousands of extra deaths from poor air quality each year.”
Now, fewer than 100 days into his second term, President Trump has unleashed environmental policies likely to cause catastrophically more severe damage to the environment. After dissolving 31 environmental rules, Lee Zeldin – Trump's appointee as the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency – announced on March 12: "Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.”
Since when has the EPA head operated so far out of the agency's founding scope simply to: "protect human health and the environment," work to "ensure clean air, land, and water for Americans, and to reduce environmental risks based on scientific information," and to enforce "environmental laws, conduct research, and promote public education and partnerships to achieve its goals"?
According to The Wilderness Society – Thought experiment: is this group more likely to be “Liberal” or “Conservative”? – Trump’s environmental record “shows an unparalleled trail of destruction, some of it already impossible to repair, that winds its way through our shared lands, air, water and communities.” He has “undercut progress on climate, pollution, [and] oceans.”
The Wilderness Society continues: “Trump is the worst President for the environment in our history. No amount of spin from this administration can hide its legacy of abuse, neglect and corruption that threatens our health and the health of our environment,” said Wilderness Society President Jamie Williams in a statement. “Trump’s illegal land grab, which slashed Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, was the biggest single rollback of land protections in American history. And that’s just one low point in an abysmal record of attacking the most cherished places in the country, from the Arctic Refuge in Alaska to Minnesota’s Boundary Waters.”
“One of Trump’s signature anti-conservation efforts has been reducing the scope of the Clean Water Act to remove protections from more than half of U.S. wetlands. His administration is also responsible for many mining and energy proposals that would imperil crucial watersheds, including a push for sulfide-ore copper mining next to the Boundary Waters-Canoe Area Wilderness,” The Wilderness Society continued.
Recall that 2024 was the hottest year on record. “Carbon emissions, which help drive that warming, are also at record levels,” PBS News Hour reporter William Brangham said. On his first day in office this year, President Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord. "He’s tried to freeze billions in funding for clean energy projects, wants to boost coal production and declared a ‘national energy emergency’ to increase domestic fossil fuels.”
Asked by Brangham how he responds to critics of climate science who argue that doom-and-gloom climate scenarios are overblown, climate change author and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben responded: “Tell that, first of all, to the good people of Los Angeles, say, who watched large parts of their city burn after the hottest, driest weather on record. But then also go talk to the people in the insurance industry who are canceling policies up and down, East and West across this country because climate change has so scrambled their ability to predict what's going to happen that they can no longer figure out how to make a going business of writing insurance….”
“I spend a lot of time with young people. And what I find makes them anxious is the fact that nobody in authority now is doing anything to address what's … obviously the biggest danger facing their future,” McKibben continued. “They're not stupid. You can't wish this away. They have been studying physics and chemistry in school. What they want is people in leadership to stand up and show them that they take seriously what scientists are saying. We got a warning from science. We got it in time to act. So far, we have ignored that warning. And that is truly, truly sad, and it should make us anxious.”
On this Earth Day, let us hope that young people concerned about the environment around the world continue to embrace science and fight to protect our fragile ecosystems and the Earth's climate health for generations to come.
For more on Earth Day, see our historical piece from 2024:
Christopher Jones
By Christopher Jones
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