Earth Day Celebrations: Despite Positive Remarks, President’s Environmental Track Record is Questionable

President Donald Trump celebrated Earth Day on Sunday last week by giving credit to his administration, despite all its efforts to roll back major environmental measures and protections.

Earth Day Statement

In a White House statement released Sunday last week, Trump reiterated the importance of taking care of life’s sustaining gifts such as the magnificent waterways, land, natural resources, and breathtaking wildlife.

In a continuation, he stressed that it was the responsibility of the nation and its citizens to take care of the environment to benefit the generations to come. After this, he praised his administration for revoking regulations meant to do exactly that.

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Double Standards at play

Ironically, the president appointed the leader in charge of Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, who has lately taken a negative turn towards supporting Obama-era environmental regulations, which were geared towards environmental protection.

In fact, Pruitt divulged plans last month to eliminate fuel standards that were initially put in place to minimize carbon emissions. Which is in fact, the country’s leading source of greenhouse gas pollution.

Moreover, in January, The Trump administration put in place plans to increase offshore drilling by giving access to millions of acres of public land that was once protected, so as to spike fossil fuel development.

Moreover, in June 2017, President Trump delivered an adverse statement against the fight towards elimination of global warming by revealing that the United States had plans to withdraw itself from the Paris climate accord.

Twitter Backlash

Despite many environmental activists dubbing the recent plans and steps taken by the Trump administration as a never-ending assault on environmental protection, Trump requested Americans to thank the environment for its sustenance, as well as being that it’s where billions of people call their home.

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Some Americans took to Twitter to highlight the hypocrisy of Trump’s comments and statements.

The Science Behind Climate Change

The truth is, earth’s climate is transforming rapidly. This information has been collected from the millions of observations carried out over the years, including the thousands of texts and journal papers that have been released by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Moreover, the primary cause of this change is the excessive emittance of Carbon dioxide as a result of burning natural gas, oil, and coal.

Of worthy note is that the Earth has already reached the 1-degree threshold, despite active measures that have been put in place to reduce millions of tons of carbon dioxide emittance via the use of renewable sources of energy; not to mention conservations efforts to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere.

A Runaway Train

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That being said, international plans geared to deal with climate change are extremely difficult to execute, and normally take decades to mark their achievements. In fact, when the United States opted to pull out from the Paris agreement, many negotiators and climate scientists were in dismay.

The carbon dioxide that builds up in the atmosphere acts like a warming blanket that in turn, retains heat. This then increases the average temperature of the surface of the Earth, resulting in the heating of the oceans as well as the melting of the polar ice caps.

With these changes taking place, the sea level in turn rises. That being said, the effect of global warming could be detrimental to agriculture, and the normal way of living.