Donald Trump and “Deep Ecology”. Pushing GMOs, Minimizing Environmental Protection
In summarizing environmental issues from the previous year, I would like to say that Donald Trump’s wining of the presidential race was the most significant eco-event of 2016. And all other events, regardless of their apparent importance (from the merger of GMO giants Bayer and Monsanto to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Marrakesh) pale in comparison when you imagine the possible consequences.
To put it mildly, Trump is famous for his skepticism on global climate change, which he has many times called “Chinese mystification,” and has confessed that he does not believe in the “human-caused nature of global warming,” and many of his teammates share these views.
Thus, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt was nominated for the head of EPA, who is a tough critic of green economy and sued the Obama Administration regarding its Clean Energy Incentive Program for reducing greenhouse gases. One American journalist sneered, “If there has ever been a person in the United States to be called an environmentalists’ nightmare, Trump has found him. It is Pruitt.”
But Pruitt is only the tip of the iceberg. Trump’s relationships with brothers David H. and Charles G. Koch, American tycoons and key sponsors of far-right wing of the GOP, in particular the Tea Party movement, bring more sense in understanding his “environmental agenda.” They uphold libertarian “anarchist and capitalist” views and believe that the role of government in all social areas, including environmental protection, should be minimized.
Being worshippers of the oeuvre of Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged) and economist Friedrich von Hayek (The Road to Serfdom), the Koch brothers dream of a society with the ruling “invisible hand of the market” and “entrepreneurial genius.” In this worldview, genuine businessmen are “the heroes of the present-day Wild West.” Such problems like the greenhouse effect, groundwater contamination during shale gas extraction and harm from GMOs should not worry them any more than the fate of the American Indians worried the Old World colonists.
Newly elected US Vice-president Michael Pence’s ties with the Koch brothers have been widely covered in the US Mass Media. But one should not forget Michael Pompeo, a Republican and a member of the Tea Party whom Trump appointed as CIA Director. A congressman from Kansas, Pompeo was one of the central figures for a lobbying campaign by Koch Industries, Inc. and Monsanto against mandatory GMO labeling in the United States.
