Trump Digs Coal. This week in CIB:

Campaign Watch: Trump and the RNC Dig Coal

The hand-held signs waving in the hands of delegates in front of the stage said it: Trump Digs Coal. Donald Trump himself pressed home his support for ramping up fossil fuel production during his presidential nomination acceptance speech. The platform officially adopted by the Republican National Convention reflects their emphasis on more digging and drilling, in more places, with fewer rules.

Trump’s party is passionately dedicated to dirty energy.

We use the phrase “Trump’s party” deliberately. Traditionally (and certainly in this case), a major party’s platform takes on the stamp of that year’s presidential nominee. Throughout the campaign, Trump has been outspoken as a skeptic of the reality of climate change, an enthusiast for increased exploitation of fossil fuels, and an opponent of effective pollution control regulations.

Here are some of the specific provisions in this year’s adopted Republican Party platform which reflect that emphasis:

• It would cancel the Obama EPA’s Clean Power Plan (designed to address greenhouse gas emissions coming foremost from coal-fired power plants). In fact, the relevant GOP platform section incredibly calls coal a “clean” power source.
• It calls for completion of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline which would bring oil from the Canadian tar sands oil fields (an especially dirty version of petroleum deposits), and other pipelines like it.
• It would “forbid the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide,” the most important greenhouse gas building up in the atmosphere to cause climate change.
• It would prohibit any funding toward implementing the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the treaty system for nations to work together on the issue. The platform specifically says, “We reject the agendas of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.” (Those are the previous international agreement for climate change control, and the one recently negotiated by the Obama Administration.) Among other impacts, this would bar any U.S. participation in the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund, a central tool for assisting developing nations in building up clean energy sources and controlling the rise of their greenhouse emissions.
• It would bar federal regulations on fracking.
• It would turn the Environmental Protection Agency itself from an executive branch federal regulatory agency into “an independent bipartisan commission” as part of the process of shifting environmental regulation (such as would remain) to the states.
• It would turn over the management of energy resources on federal public lands to the states. (The presumption is that states, in most cases, would more aggressively exploit coal, gas, and oil reserves in those publicly owned lands.)
• It calls for invalidation of the EPA’s Waters of the United States rule (known as the Clean Water Rule), the keystone action of the Obama Administration to protect wetlands and waters from wholesale destruction

There are other anti-environmental provisions in the platform, but these should suffice to show the dramatic and dangerous bent of the document. The relevant sections can be read in full on pps. 17-22 of the document.

Even in the year of Trump, it’s worth noting that not all the delegates to the Republican National Convention were climate deniers and opponents of clean energy. Some are still trying to turn their party back to environmental responsibility. Their efforts are appreciated, even though it doesn’t look as though they will meet with much success within their national party this year.

The national League of Conservation Voters (LCV) issued a statement after Trump’s nomination, calling him disqualified for the presidency based on his “blatant ignorance of basic science and insistence that climate change is a hoax.”

Next week, CIB will examine the Democratic Party platform and its nominees’ environmental stances following its own national convention.

Legislative Watch: Thank Opponents of ‘Duke Energy Protection Act’

NCLCV has issued an action alert inviting citizen conservation advocates to sign on to a “thank you” to the 32 North Carolina state legislators who voted against HB 630, known by conservationists as the “Duke Energy Protection Act.” As reviewed in previous editions of CIB, that law allows Duke to leave coal ash in leaking, unlined pits at fully half its current coal ash storage sites in North Carolina.

Click here to thank these responsible legislators for “prioritizing people before polluters.”

Executive Watch: McCrory Administration Scrambles to Defend Law

Once again, Gov. Pat McCrory’s environmental point people have released a video in their scramble to defend the latest bad bill signed by their chief (the same “Duke Energy Protection Act” cited above). The video stars McCrory’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) Secretary Donald van der Vaart and his assistant secretary Tom Reeder.

Environmental reporter Lisa Sorg of NC Policy Watch has reviewed their dog-and-pony show and helpfully provides an annotated version with some of the facts the DEQ’s political leaders conveniently left out.

Conservationists: Stanback Intern Nick Younger

NCLCV welcomes our Stanback Interns each summer to join our team of citizen advocates for a clean, green, and healthy North Carolina. This week meet 2016 Stanback Intern Nick Younger.

That’s our report for this week.