By Gerald Winegrad

Back in July, I wrote a column on how I found myself in the throes of ecological depression. Environmental news has cast a disturbing pall over our planet’s future, including that of the Chesapeake Bay.

The catastrophic events scientists predicted to occur by 2100 from a failure to curb global warming gases were already proliferating as we experienced the hottest weather in 100,000 years. Thousands of people were dying from record heat. Thousands of wild animals from elephants to koala bears were perishing, too.

Chesapeake Bay water quality had improved little since formal bay restoration began 40 years ago with a resultant proliferation of flesh-eating diseases killing and maiming humans from water contact. Fisheries collapsed or were collapsing.

My acute environmental angst grew exponentially worse — Donald Trump’s election would empower and expand his outrageous assault on environmental laws and regulations he started in his previous presidency. Now, he is more prepared, guided by the 900-page Project 2025 playbook, with 150 pages devoted to attacking conservation measures.

Here are just a few of Trump’s proposed actions to dismantle environmental and wildlife protections. Many were enacted under supportive Republican presidents and by bipartisan congressional votes.

Ending the Chesapeake Bay Program. Starting in 2017, Trump acted to kill the Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program. His budget eliminated the entire $73 million to run the program, which President Ronald Reagan started in 1984. Congress wound up restoring the funding. Much of the money goes to bay states to reduce pollutants from farms and urban areas. The rest is for scientists and other professionals to run the Bay Program.

Withdrawal from Paris climate accords. Trump is a global warming skeptic who infamously called climate change a “hoax.” In 2020, Trump withdrew the United States from the critically important Paris Agreement, the only nation to do so. Trump embarrassed our country, the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. President Joe Biden returned the United States to the global agreement, but Trump pledged to withdraw again. This triggered threats to withdraw by such major emitters as Brazil.

Reversing global warming reduction efforts. Trump invited two dozen top oil executives in April to his Mar-a-Lago Club, urging them to contribute $1 billion to his presidential campaign. In return, he would reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies, including ones to fight global warming. He also would stop new regulations from being enacted. Giving $1 billion would seal the “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him.

When I was in office, this would have been prosecuted as a bribe. Even under the regulations the corporations complained about, ExxonMobil and Chevron, the largest U.S. energy companies, reported their biggest annual profits in a decade last year.

Trump is planning to deliver by rescinding every energy and climate-related regulation put in place by the Biden administration including sensible measures promoting clean energy and electric vehicles. Regulation of air pollutants like methane and other greenhouse gas emissions would be eliminated or weakened. Our waters would be opened to greater offshore drilling and restrictions lifted on drilling in the pristine Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other environmentally sensitive public lands.

He would increase coal extraction from federal lands — 42% of U.S. coal already comes from public lands. Trump’s mantra of “drill, baby, drill” comes despite the United States being the greatest producer of oil and natural gas in the world and a net energy exporter.

Global warming induced drought and heat led to the record 450 Quebec forest fires burning 11.6 million acres nearly twice the size of Maryland’s land mass. The smoke led to a Code Purple, the highest-level dirty air alert in this area, threatening public health.

Weakening Endangered Species Act. Despite the Sixth Great Extinction with 1 million species at risk, Trump plans to eviscerate the Endangered Species Act. Enacted under President Richard Nixon in 1973, it is the nation’s bedrock law protecting our nation’s wildlife and plants from extinction. The Biden administration revoked Trump’s previous changes that had gutted the ESA. The new crippling changes will put vulnerable animals at risk, from wolves, grizzly and polar bears to monarch butterflies and sea turtles.

Decimating protection for millions of migratory birds. Just before leaving office in 2021, Trump reversed a century of migratory bird protection from incidental killing under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. This meant the removal of protections for birds killed by oil and chemical spills, oil pits, electrical line collisions and electrocutions, communication tower collisions and construction activities unless these killings were intentional. These sources kill more than 35 million birds a year. Successful MBTA prosecutions of oil companies would be stopped such as the BP guilty plea for killing 102,000 birds of 93 species in the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Biden reversed Trump’s decision, restoring avian protections as in the past 100 years. Trump is expected to reinitiate these radical changes.

Repealing protection for our sensitive lands and waters. Trump is expected to revoke Biden’s seminal 30-by-30 plan, which aims to conserve 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030. He also will seek to repeal the Antiquities Act of 1906, potentially dropping protections for millions of acres designated as national monument lands. These lands would be open to commercial activities such as more oil and gas drilling, despoiling natural heritage lands. Trump had cut 3.2 million protected national monument acres in Utah, but Biden reversed Trump’s actions and restored protection. Trump will direct agencies that manage millions of acres of federal lands and waters to maximize corporate oil and gas extraction.

He also will reverse decades of protection for our only temperate rainforest, the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. By repealing a Roadless Rule protecting 9 million of the forest’s 16 million acres, building of roads, logging, electric transmission lines, and water and sewer projects can proceed. And plans are afoot to make it easier to drill for oil and gas on Alaskan federal and in state waters and wetlands. Nontidal wetland protections also would be weakened throughout the United States.

In 2020, Trump opened 9 million acres of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska to the devastation from this type of clearcutting as depicted here. The acreage had been protected since 2001. Biden reversed Trump and saved the forest but who will stop Trump in 2025? (Colin Arisman, Alaska Magazine)

Instituting barbaric wildlife slaughter practices. Baiting grizzly bears with doughnuts soaked in bacon grease, using spotlights to blind and shoot hibernating black bear mothers and their cubs in their dens, and gunning down swimming caribou from motorboats were banned by the Obama administration on millions of federal Alaskan wilderness acres. But Trump repealed the ban and now wants to expand such barbaric practices and hunting rights on millions of acres of most all Alaskan federal lands by turning over hunting and fishing decisions to the state.

Cabinet picks’ anti-environmentalism. The one absolute requirement for Trump’s Cabinet picks in the environmental area is obsequious, sycophantic, submissive loyalty to Trump and his anti-environmental agenda. This is a bigger priority than experience or expertise. Any denier of Biden’s legitimate election in 2020 or who may have condemned the Jan. 6 riot and attack on our Capitol is disqualified. I will cover these disastrous nominations in a later column.

With compliant Senate and House Republican majorities and an anti-regulatory Supreme Court, a century of environmental gains is at grave risk. I am distraught and have never been as pessimistic about our nation’s future.

In Trump’s previous four-year reign, Earthjustice sued to block the dismantling of environmental regulations 200 times and won 85% of their cases. I am ramping up my contributions to them, and if you care about our environment, you may want to do so, too.

Gerald Winegrad represented the greater Annapolis area as a Democrat in the Maryland House of Delegates and Senate for 16 years. Contact him at gwwabc@comcast.net.