Trump's Environmental Policies Are Aiming for Our Kids' Future

Yesterday, the Trump Administration gutted environmental protections put in place by their predecessors, CNN reports, with a sweeping executive order:

“Specifically, the order rescinds at least six Obama-era executive orders aimed at curbing climate change and regulating carbon emissions, including Obama’s November 2013 executive order instructing the federal government to prepare for the impact of climate change and the September 2016 presidential memorandum that outlined the “growing threat to national security” that climate change poses.”

This is really bad news for the environment. In fact, this unilateral move was called “the single biggest attack on climate action in U.S. history, period” by the Sierra Club. And it’s particularly horrible news for our children, to be frank.

Climate change isn’t just an abstract looming threat, nor is it just about high tides and storm surges that will affect coastal cities. No, all the scientific evidence suggests that global warming contributes to serious problems for everyone’s future, like allergies, tick-borne diseases such as Lyme, and asthma as well as the stress, physical and mental, from events like “superstorms” and wildfires as well as “droughts, heatwaves and floods” that utterly ruin peoples’ lives. Globally, it will lead to famine and war and the kind of displacement and migration that is currently taking place with the refugee crisis.

Can we ask?

It's important to us to keep the warm, joyfully Jewish community on Kveller accessible for all. Reader donations help us do just that. Can you spare a few to keep Kveller free? (We'll love you forever.)

Support Us

It’s a mess, and our kids will bear the brunt of it. Don’t we owe it to them to be more angry about this?

Sometimes I wonder about myself, and my peers, why we get so worked up about playground squabbles and arbitrary school rules and relatives saying the wrong thing to our kids—and yet we can’t seem to marshal the same level of “furious mom” energy to protest the corruption and degradation of the very world that they will inhabit. Many writers have agonized about having kids in the face of this impending catastrophe (bookmark some good essays on the topic here and here).

But what about staving off that catastrophe to begin with? My theory about climate is that it feels like too big an issue for many of us, too far removed from our own ability to help. How can recycling really touch something as massive as the ocean levels?

This makes sense, yet we can’t be fatalistic. We have to fight this rollback tooth and nail, for the sake of our offspring. Check out this list of environmental organizations to get started, and consider joining the March for Science or People’s Climate March this coming month.

Sarah M. Seltzer

Sarah Seltzer, former editor for Kveller, is a writer and editor in New York City. She is a journalist covering culture, activism and gender, most recently as Deputy Editor at culture website Flavorwire.com. Her print and online work has appeared in publications including Poets & Writers, The Forward, Lilith, The Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, The New York Times, Salon, The Nation, The Wall Street Journal, Jezebel, The Hairpin, Refinery29, The Toast, Rolling Stone, and many more. She is a graduate of Harvard University, where she edited The Crimson’s weekend magazine, as well as the MFA in writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her first baby, Mikey, is growing up way too fast and she can objectively report that he is very cute. You can follow her at @sarahmseltzer and reach her at sarah@kveller.com.