Download Climate and Environmental Policy in Trump`s First 100 Days: A

Climate and Environmental
Policy in Trump’s First 100
Days: A Summary through a
Gender Lens
Of all the actions President Trump has taken in his chaotic
first months in office, moving to roll back the previous
administration’s environmental and climate rules may have the
greatest impact on future generations. Against the
overwhelming evidence, scientific consensus, and trends in
public opinion, Trump threatens to dramatically reshape
climate and environmental policies – many of which will lead
to disparate outcomes for men and women.
The Trump Administration has made announcements and taken
actions to slow or repeal Obama-era environmental protections
related to coal mining waste, clean water, oil and gas
drilling, vehicle emissions, and power plant carbon dioxide
emissions. By some estimates, Trump rolled back 23
environmental rules in his first 100 days. The Administration
has also removed information on climate change from EPA
websites, proposed a budget that would significantly cut back
federal funding for environmental protection and clean energy
research, made significant cuts to the scientific advisory
boards to the EPA, and nominated individuals with notable
anti-environmental regulation positions for key regulatory
positions.
Why Coal Jobs?
The nominal motivation for Trump’s environmental agenda thus
far has been to support employment in the U.S. coal sector. As
he signed the March 28, 2017 executive order “Promoting Energy
Independence and Economic Growth,” President Trump was joined
by Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry,
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, and 12 coal industry workers
(see photo below). Trump seemed to enjoy asking the coal
workers, “You know what this says?” He answered his own
question: “You’re going back to work.” The moment appeared to
begin fulfilling a promise Trump repeated during the campaign
that coal miners would “start to work again” and be “proud
again to be miners” if he became president.
Image by Inside Climate News
The coal industry, however, is one of the least genderbalanced sectors in the U.S. economy—it comes as no surprise
then that every coal worker who stood behind Trump during the
signing of this Executive Order is male. Of the 279 industries
that the Bureau of Labor Statistics compiles gender ratios
for, coal mining ranks 278th (behind only logging) with a 4%
female workforce in 2016[1]. Jobs classified as “support
activities for mining” (all forms of mining, not just coal
mining) are a bit more balanced, at 13.4% women. The mining
sector’s gender imbalance permeates the mining sector.
According to a 2014 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the
mining sector employs the fewest women on its boards among all
industries, with “women occupying only 5 per cent of the board
positions of the top 500 global listed mining companies.”
The gender imbalance of the coal mining industry is not a new
issue. In fact, one of the earlier workplace hiring gender
discrimination lawsuits brought forward under the 1964 Civil
Rights Acts came in 1978 from the Coal Employment Project, an
advocacy group seeking to end “the blatant employment
discrimination which … exists in the coal industry” so that
women might claim “economic equality in the coal fields.” The
group’s efforts are credited with raising female employment in
the coal sector to 830 by 1978, and increasing that figure
five-fold by the mid-1980s.
As more women entered the coal mining industry in the late
1970s, sexual harassment became pervasive. One study found
that, in the early 1980s, 54% of female miners had been
propositioned by a superior at least once and 17% had been
attacked physically. The Coal Employment Project again played
a role in addressing the issue by participating in the
landmark 1986 Supreme Court case Meritor Savings Bank v.
Vinson, the case that first recognized workplace sexual
harassment as a violation of the Civil Rights Act. Yet gender
discrimination in the coal sector persists. It was only this
year that Mach Mining, L.L.C. settled a $4.25 million gender
bias case that had reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015.
Trump’s moves to reverse environmental and climate policies
and bolster the coal sector employment also ignores much
larger losses of employment in many other sectors, including
the retail sector, which had a loss of some 89,000 workers in
the last quarter of 2016 and the first quarter of 2017 (that’s
more than the total employment in the coal industry – see
figure). The irony of rolling back environmental regulations
in the name of increasing coal sector employment is that these
actions will in all likelihood be ineffective for this goal.
The economics of energy decisions have changed dramatically in
the past decade as the costs of natural gas and renewables
have plummeted, and yet coal workers have remained highly
politically significant.
Figure originally published in the Washington Post
Jamelle Bouie, chief political correspondent for Slate,
recently published a piece offering several possible
explanations for this puzzling political significance. Bouie
concludes:
Work is gendered and it is racialized. What work matters is
often tied to who performs it. It is no accident that those
professions dominated by white men tend to bring the most
prestige, respect, and pay, while those dominated by
women—and especially women of color—are often ignored,
disdained, and undercompensated … The story of our outsize
concern for coal and manufacturing, or rather our
indifference to the collapse of retail, is inescapably the
story of how worth, value, and citizenship are still tied to
those traits we can’t control.
Trump’s Environmental Agenda
Trump’s actions in his first 100 days have jeopardized the
international pledge made by the Obama Administration to
reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 26% by 2025. Already,
the Trump Administration has discussed federal actions that
would increase annual greenhouse gas emissions by 530 million
tons – and Trump has already proposed specific actions that
would have about half of this impact. The below chart gives
the context for these figures. The Obama pledge (blue line)
would have been a significant departure from historic
emissions (grey line) and from “business-as-usual” (or
“reference”) emissions (dotted-gray line). But discussed (red
line) and proposed (orange line) Trump Administration policies
would put the U.S. far off track from the Obama trajectory.
(See here for calculations).
Figure originally published in Climate Advisors
The key Obama policy the Trump Administration has threatened
is the Clean Power Plan (CPP). The CPP would have reduced U.S.
greenhouse emissions by an estimated 233 million tons per year
by 2025, but Trump’s executive order instructed the EPA to
review the rule with an eye to revision or suspension. Undoing
the CPP will be extremely complicated for administration
lawyers, but has been a top priority for the president and his
newly-appointed Administrator of the EPA, Scott Pruitt (who
sued the Obama EPA over the CPP, the exact rule he would now
be responsible for enforcing).
Local Air Quality
There is some irony that, in the short run, the greatest
impact of repealing the CPP would not be on climate change but
on local air pollution. The CPP is the result of a Supreme
Court ruling that mandated that the EPA must regulate
greenhouse gases because of their contribution to global
warming. But burning coal to produce electricity
simultaneously creates greenhouse gases and local
environmental pollutants, notably particulate matter and
ozone. Therefore, it’s impossible to reduce one without
reducing the other. When the Obama-era EPA conducted a
thorough cost-benefit analysis of the CPP (the study appears
to have been removed from the EPA’s website, but is available
through some university websites) it found that, in most
models, the health benefits of reducing particulate matter and
ozone pollution would be at least as important and possibly
even more significant than the climate benefits.
How does gender equity figure into a discussion about cleaner
air? The answer appears unclear. While there is some
scholarship examining gender differences in local air
pollution impacts, studies have come to different conclusions,
particularly with respect to whether gender differences in
health responses to air pollution can be attributed to
“socially derived gendered exposures, to sex-linked
physiological differences, or to some interplay thereof.”
There are fairly clear divides in the impacts of air pollution
along socioeconomic and racial lines, however, and early
evidence shows that gender plays a role in how people
understand and respond to the health impacts of outdoor air
pollution.
Global Climate Change
Telescoping out to look at global climate change, it must
first be noted that U.S. federal policies, even before the
Trump Administration, were already inadequate for staving off
the worst effects of climate change. Avoiding climate change
requires global cooperation, because its causes and impacts
are global; once coal, oil, and gas are burned anywhere in the
world, the emitted carbon-dioxide disperses around the globe
in a matter of days. So Obama’s climate rules could not have,
in themselves, stopped climate change. But they were essential
in building trust with other large-scale polluting countries,
like China and India. The biggest climate impact of Trump’s
first 100 days may actually have been in damaging the U.S.’s
reputation and ability to lead the rest of the world.
The goals of the historic 2015 Paris Agreement are now
dangerously close to being out of reach. There is an apparent
significant rift within the President’s inner circle whether
the U.S. will even remain a party to the Paris Agreement—and
as one of the countries with the greatest per-capita
greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. signaling disinterest in
the Agreement could unravel other counties pledges too.
At the global level, there is increasing scholarly agreement
and international policy action to mediate the linkages
between gender equity and climate change.
Most studies have focused on developing countries, where
overall climate impacts are likely to be most acutely felt. In
this area, one of their overarching themes has been the notion
that climate change vulnerability can be exacerbated by
multiple dimensions of inequality, including gender, age,
race, caste, ethnicity, and disability. Women’s vulnerability
is argued to come as a result of their greater dependence on
natural resources, less ready access to independent sources of
finance, and a painful trifecta of repressive social
practices, underrepresentation in decision-making, and
inadequate legal protections.
Researchers also point to the disproportionate death rate of
women in natural disasters as evidence of gender differences
in climate vulnerability. For example, after the 2004 Indian
Ocean tsunami (a natural disaster unrelated but potentially
analogous to climate change impacts), the death toll among
women was three to four times higher than among men. In a
study comparing the death rates following natural disasters in
141 countries over 22 years, researchers found that while
natural disasters did reduce life expectancy for women
significantly more than for men, this difference was
importantly mediated by women’s socio-economic status. From
this, the researchers conclude that the gender differences in
vulnerability to natural disasters could be largely explained
by social structures and norms. This finding provides strong
motivation for a more holistic approach to climate change
policy in the context of sustainable development, for example
by developing coherent policy strategies that work across
individualized “Sustainable Development Goals.”
Such strategies capitalize on the synergies across goals by,
for example, reducing climate change impacts by taking action
to reduce gender inequity.
Solutions to address climate change are also likely to have
important gender differences due to the important role that
women hold in resource management and agriculture, where they
contribute an estimated 60-80% of agricultural production in
the developing world. These sectors are critical for
mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate
change. And while gender imbalance has begun to influence the
practice of international development, efforts to “mainstream”
gender in international climate policy are still in their
early stages (see more here).
Again, Trump’s actions and inactions have not yet
fundamentally altered the trajectory of climate change. Still,
they have not yet shown any respect to social inequality,
either. The Obama Administration had begun to give voice to
more gender-responsive climate policies, and important moves
like the establishment of the USAID’s Global Climate Change
Initiative (GCCI), founded in 2010, are being rolled back. One
of the “guiding principles” of the GCCI, detailed in its 2012
strategy document, was to “utilize gender-sensitive approaches
across climate programming.” The GCCI also was quite
progressive in its efforts to integrate climate change across
USAID’s full development portfolio, including in relation to
gender equity. One example of how the initiative integrated
climate change and gender equity shows how the GCCI and two
other State Department programs, Power Africa and the Young
African Leaders Initiative, brought together a gender-balanced
group of African leaders for a six-week program to catalyze
clean energy in Africa. One fellow of the program, Fatima
Oyiza Ademoh of Nigeria, credits the GCCI program for helping
introduce her “to a whole new dimension: the economic and
technical aspects of gender issues in large- and small-scale
energy projects.” Ademoh stated that the GCCI-supported
workshop was “immensely useful for me to think about as I
develop [my own] mini-grid projects in rural off-grid
communities in Nigeria. It will help me develop a more genderresponsive business model as I scale up my business.”
Trump’s proposed “skinny” budget would eliminate all U.S.
funding for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s
Green Climate Fund (GCF).
The GCF, formed in 2010, is a key body for the implementation
of the Paris Agreement, intended to be the primary vehicle to
facilitate the pledge made by developed countries to, by 2020,
mobilize $100 billion per year toward developing countries’
climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. As of March
2017, $10.3 billion had been pledged to the GCF, $3 billion by
the U.S., which has only actually deposited $1 billion,
including a dramatic, last-minute deposit of $500 million in
the final three days of the Obama Administration. Now the
remaining $2 billion of the U.S. pledge is unlikely to
materialize, decreasing the global availability of GCF funds
by nearly 20%.
The GCF offers perhaps the most detailed gender guidelines of
any international climate body and has been at the forefront
of incorporating
climate policy.
gender-responsiveness
in
international
For example, the GCF requires all partners who propose and
implement GCF-funded projects to document their gender policy
and gender expertise. This requirement has already catalyzed
change: Deutsche Bank developed its first-ever gender policy,
which observers attribute to its desire to participate in the
GCF. Much is yet to be seen as to whether the GCF’s
progressive gender policy will translate into greater gender
equity and more sustainable climate investments, but President
Trump’s efforts to disengage from the fund will mean that the
U.S. will lose capacity to shape practices moving forward.
Room for Hope?
Important actions against the Trump Administration’s signals
of disengagement from global climate change efforts offer
signs of hope. Thousands of protesters marched in Washington,
D.C. and across the country in support of greater
environmental protections. States have largely maintained
their environmental commitments, with some, like California,
proposing even more stringent environmental policies in direct
response to federal rollbacks. And major companies have voiced
their preference for continuity in U.S. engagement in
international climate policy and for slowing down
environmental deregulation. Countervailing forces to Trump
Administration
rollbacks
are
also
taking
shape
internationally. Just prior to Trump’s inauguration, China
announced a plan to invest $360 billion in renewable energy by
2020.
Climate change impacts are not felt over 100 days, but over
the course of decades.
The full impact of the Trump Administration is yet to be seen.
Smart leadership is needed to design policies that account for
vulnerable populations and give voice to marginalized groups
at the front lines of environmental harm. The U.S. has never
been close to perfect in this regard. But at the same time
that the U.S. cedes international leadership on climate policy
to the next group of leaders—whether they be U.S. states,
other countries, or civil society groups—the challenge of
addressing environmental problems is becoming even greater.
Groups beyond the White House should find ways to put the
international community’s focus on the key intersectional
issues affected by climate and other environmental policies
and must press the issue of fairness in environmental policies
by centering the differences in environmental impact across
income, race, age, and, as highlighted here, gender.
Highlighting the connections across these multiple dimensions
will help build broader coalitions of action and drive the
world to solutions that benefit populations justly.
— Gabriel Chan is an Assistant Professor at the Humphrey
School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.
— Photo of female farmer in Bhutan, one of the world’s “hot
spots” where 7 in 10 families depend on agriculture, by Asian
Development Bank
[1] Notably the coal mining sector ranks last out of all 279
industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the
combined workforce that is either Black or African American,
Asian, or Hispanic or Latino.