Trump on Earth

If you've been following climate change, the coronavirus pandemic might feel oddly familiar these days. Many countries have implemented radical policies that would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago to slow the spread of the virus. Is this what it will take to solve the climate crisis? On this episode, climate journalist Emily Atkin on the intersection of climate change and coronavirus.

How does doubt about science play out in a moment like we're experiencing now where public health and millions of lives depend on good science and trusting scientists? Our guest is David Michaels, an epidemiologist and author of "The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception."

Industry is struggling during the coronavirus crisis and one way the Trump administration has responded is by suspending enforcement of some environmental regulations. The EPA made the announcement on Thursday.

Companies are usually required to report when they discharge certain levels of pollution into the air or water. But EPA is now telling them to monitor themselves for an undetermined period of time during the outbreak.

Our guest is Rachel Franzin, energy and environment reporter for The Hill.

Yes, Trump has cozied up to oil companies. He's said we should have taken the oil from Iraq. And it does seem like we are cozying up to petro-state strongmen in Russia and Saudi Arabia. But is this any different from how the United States and other western powers have operated over the last 150 years? Our guest is Matthieu Auzanneau, author of the book Oil, Power, and War which looks at the deep history of big oil's influence over the affairs of the U.S. and other Western powers.

At more than 100 years old, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was among the first environmental laws in the United States. Until recently, power companies and other industries could be prosecuted by the federal government for causing egregious bird deaths, even accidentally. Not anymore.

The Trump administration is proposing that only the intentional killing of birds would be prohibited under the act.

This despite recent research that finds a nearly 30% decline in birds from North America - that's a loss of nearly 3 billion birds - over the past 50 years.

Our guest is Brad Bortner, one of 17 former directors and high-level appointees from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who co-signed a letter denouncing the move.

Did the Trump administration manipulate wildfire science to promote the logging industry? An investigation in the Guardian newspaper says yes.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is often called the Magna Carta of environmental law. President Nixon signed it into law 50 years ago this month. And President Trump honored the anniversary by announcing plans to drastically scale back the law.

On this episode, we dig into what many are calling Trump's biggest environmental rollback yet with Sharon Buccino from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

Word leaked a few weeks ago that the EPA is poised to finalize a rule to limit the types of scientific studies that can be used to create new regulations. The proposal -- named "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science" -- would require public health researchers to release their raw scientific data in order for their work to be considered when the EPA sets regulations. These regulations dictate things like how much pollution companies can release into the air and water.

When the rule was first proposed, the agency received nearly 600,000 comments, the vast majority of them in opposition. One of those came from Dr. Mary Rice, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She also studies the effects of air pollution on lung health. On November 14th, Dr. Rice was one of 5 scientists to testify before the House Science Committee on the proposed rule.

The Paris Climate Agreement was put in place to prevent catastrophic and runaway global warming. And since taking office, President Trump has been threatening to pull the U.S. out of it. Earlier this month, he made it official.

On this episode we hear from the man who helped put the U.S. in the agreement in the first place. Todd Stern was President Obama's chief climate negotiator and now he's a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.

President Trump came into office promising to save coal and coal jobs. Instead, the industry has continued to slide. The question now is--how far will it go?

The coal industry once employed hundreds of thousands of workers. Now, it's just about 50,000. And eight coal companies have declared bankruptcies in the last year. The latest is Murray Energy, the biggest privately held coal mining company in the country.

We check in on the state of the coal in the Trump era with Taylor Kuykendall who covers the industry for S&P Global Market Intelligence.