David Helvarg
For those of us committed to protecting the ocean, it’s always been clear that restoring healthy seas will be the work of our lifetimes, and that of others who’ll come after us.
Unlike the majority of Americans, I believe the Biden administration did a decent job, particularly in responding to the climate emergency we’re currently living through. During his term, Biden signed into law two major pieces of legislation: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
Nonprofit groups including Blue Frontier, which I founded, created an “Ocean Climate Action Plan” which helped in adding $10 billion to the IRA law, with a focus on coastal resiliency, including $3 billion for greening ports.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently distributed that money in the form of 55 grants to ports around the nation. The money will help ports electrify and decarbonize, which will also reduce air pollution in many adjacent low-income communities. That being said, the EPA is one of the agencies that the incoming Trump team is likely to gut or abolish.
This year will almost certainly be the hottest in recorded history (last year was the hottest to date). The president-elect and the Republican Party have made Big Oil and denial of climate science central to their ideology, identity and fundraising. It doesn’t help that Trump nominated Lee Zeldin, a former Republican congressman with no environmental background, to head (or behead) the EPA.
Whether you voted for or against Donald Trump, you should have no illusions that the health of our public seas is not one of his priorities. He’s made clear that he intends to “drill, baby, drill” and get rid of regulations and agencies that protect our waters, both salty and fresh.
Trump’s stance poses all kinds of dangers for the global ocean, which absorbs 90% of the heat and a third of the carbon dioxide emitted by the burning of greenhouse gasses. This has resulted in warming, rising seas that intensify hurricanes and ocean acidification that weakens shell-forming creatures. Warmer, more acidic seas also hold less dissolved oxygen expanding dead zones and harmful algal blooms.
However, protecting the blue in our red, white and blue is one of the few remaining areas of agreement among most Americans, both red and blue. This has helped, at least in the past, to minimize the damage that Trump has been able to do.
David Helvarg is an author, executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean conservation group and co-host of the Rising Tide Ocean Podcast. This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.
