Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), delivered a lecture on potential rollbacks to environmental policies under President Donald Trump's administration, as well as the efforts being made by the environmental community to combat these rollbacks.
The discussion, titled “Climate Strategy During the Trump Years,” took place yesterday in the Alumnae Lounge and was the 150th installment of the Environmental Studies Program’s weekly Lunch and Learn lecture series.
Kimmell was preceded by several speakers, including Professor Colin Orians of the Environmental Studies Program, who discussed the Lunch and Learn series’ beginnings in 2011. Dean of Academic Affairs for the School of Arts and Sciences Barbara Brizuela then introduced Kimmell.
Kimmell began the lecture by saying Trump is both a threat to efforts to combat climate change, as well as a possible galvanizing presence for environmentalists.
“The dark cloud is the combination of four words: climate change and Donald Trump,” Kimmell said. “The silver lining is that there are opportunities that we can get from resisting what we think is going to happen.”
Describing Trump's view of climate change, Kimmell talked about the president's claim that climate change is a hoax propagated by the Chinese government. Kimmell added that Congress is particularly beholden to special business interests due to a 2010 Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that has allowed corporations to give uncapped amounts of money to political groups.
“Congress’ desire is essentially to transfer power away from these federal agencies [such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)] that are armed with experts and scientists and are making policy based on the facts, and transfer that power back to Congress, where every one of these issues becomes a political football and in which vested interests start out with an advantage,” he said.
In terms of the public, Kimmell believes citizens have lost trust in many institutions claiming to help them discern fact from fiction.
Among the threats directly posed by the Trump administration, Kimmell first brought up the transience of regulations on carbon emissions, such as the Clean Power Plan and fuel economy standards. These regulations were issued by former President Barack Obama to help meet the United States’ promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 26-to-28 percent by 2025, as part of the Paris Agreement.
“The problem is [regulations on carbon emissions] are just regulations,” Kimmell said. “They're not in law. President Obama issued them and just as he can do them unilaterally, President Trump can undo them unilaterally. And so the combination of weakening or repealing these and [other] various actions that the president has talked about in his campaign are quite dramatic.”
The speaker also noted that actions can be taken that would be difficult for a future president or Congress to repeal. Among these is increased usage of the Congressional Review Act, which, according to Kimmell, allows Congress to overturn regulations that have recently been issued and prohibit agencies from issuing anything similar without Congress’s permission.
Kimmell also warned that what he referred to as “anti-science laws” have been making their way through Congress, including the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act, which does not allow a regulation to go into effect unless both houses of Congress approve it.
“The problem with allowing Congress to do that is that it will basically paralyze all of this work, because it is very difficult to get any law passed in Congress and any regulation that imposes any real costs on industry would be bitterly opposed," Kimmell said. "If a law like that got put in place, even if we had the best president coming in to succeed Mr. Trump, he or she would have their hands tied in trying to address what was done."
Kimmell added that agencies such as the EPA and the Department of Energy could have their budgets cut, citing a circulating proposal to slash the EPA’s budget by 24 percent. In addition, he believes the administration is censoring its scientists, particularly through threats to EPA scientists preventing them from publicly speak about their work.
“Imagine if we took a U-turn and the government all of a sudden started funding all the crackpot alternative theories about climate change and became a propaganda machine of doubt,” Kimmell said. “That would be a very, very scary prospect.”
The silver lining, for Kimmell, has been the public outcry to the Trump administration's actions. He referenced the Women’s March, as well as the Indivisible Movement, as incarnations of this resistance.
“We have what I would say is a coalition of fact-based people. It's broad and it's strong and I'm proud as part of the Union of Concerned Scientists to be part of that,” Kimmell said.
The UCS, according to Kimmell, is devoted to mobilizing scientists across the country to resist the administration, and to protect government scientists from abuse and the suppression of their work. In addition, Kimmell said UCS will work to block “scorched earth” bills in Congress.
Among other possible actions to support environmentalism, Kimmell called on Tufts to divest from fossil fuels.
“For all of us to meet those goals in Paris, about two-thirds of the reserves in coal and gas have to stay in the ground. That means that oil company, coal company, gas company stocks are a bubble right now which eventually is going to burst," Kimmell said. "The question for this university is whether to sell off those assets while the market is still valuing them highly or wait until this bubble bursts, and I think that the economically proven thing to do in addition to the morally right thing to do is to divest now.”
Ending the lecture, Kimmell mentioned that UCS would sponsor the March for Science on April 22 in Washington, D.C., as well as the People’s Climate March a week later.
“This is the real opportunity we have as a country to get out and resist," Kimmell said. “Part of the theory of [the People's Climate March] is to link hands between the climate movement and other movements because so many communities are under attack.”
Miranda Willson contributed reporting to this article.
