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Wayne Madsen: Congress should heed warnings and fight climate change

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Wayne Madsen

Although the Trump administration believes man-made climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese, the Senate and House of Representatives should not abrogate their responsibility to maintain America's commitment to halting the steady melting of polar ice caps and the rising of sea levels.

These catastrophes are caused by greenhouse gases being belched into the atmosphere.

With a single stroke of a pen, President Donald Trump signed an executive order slashing environmental regulations, an act that may run afoul of environmental laws enacted by presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama.

Congress should act promptly to ensure that Trump does not unconstitutionally violate by executive fiat federal environmental laws intended to protect the atmosphere and our precious water resources.

Trump's order requires that for every new regulation, including those that protect the environment, two others must be eliminated.

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This decision represents an absurd attack on the protections now afforded to our environment from the ravages brought about by human-caused climate change.

Only a few days into his administration, Trump told the CEOs of Ford, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler that he believed that current environmental regulations were "out of control."

In the same breath, Trump said, "I am, to a large extent, an environmentalist." Trump declaring that he is an environmentalist in a meeting with three top automotive industry executives is like the president avowing his support for healthy foods to the top executives of America's three largest candy companies.

Scrapping environmental regulations will do nothing to curb rising sea levels, disappearing shorelines and increasingly erratic weather conditions.

Congress should immediately correct the sharp deviation of U.S. environmental policy by taking decisive steps to maintain the country's commitment to clean energy.

The Trump administration and its Republican and a few Democratic supporters in Congress are falling under the spell of "inexhaustible" tar sands oil via the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines and "clean coal," an environmental oxymoron if there ever was one.

Congress should guarantee that the Trump administration does not pull out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — also known as the Paris Accord.

This can be done by passing legislation, immune to a certain Trump veto, that would keep the United States bound to the Paris agreement's targeted decreases in carbon dioxide emission levels.

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In this regard, Congress should seek the assistance of the nation's new secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, ironically, a backer of the Paris accord even though until recently he was the CEO of Exxon Mobil.

Tillerson may be able to ensure legislation binding the United States to the Paris agreement has enough congressional support to override a Trump veto.

Congressional Republicans in the hip pocket of anti-environmental lobbyists like the Koch brothers are vulnerable to political pressure from the voters.

Since 2012, the Midwest breadbasket has experienced its worst drought in a hundred years.

The farmers of Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Missouri, Oklahoma, northern Texas, Iowa and other drought-plagued states and regions can and should apply painful pressure on their congressional representatives to shape up on climate change or face being shipped out of office.

When President Nixon pushed through environmental laws during his administration, he had the support of many Great Plains Democrats, the old "prairie populists."

There is no reason why Midwest farmers cannot compel their Koch brothers-financed legislators to make a choice between supporting environmental laws or finding a new line of work.

Trump and time are not on the side of our planet's continued well-being. That is why action by Congress must be taken now.

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Wayne Madsen is a progressive commentator whose articles have appeared in leading newspapers throughout the U.S. and Europe.

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