The People’s Climate March in Washington, DC, on April 29, 2017. (Photo: John Light)
Many of President Trump’s priorities have foundered in his first hundred days, but his efforts to roll back President Obama’s climate change legacy has not. The Trump administration has moved swiftly to hand out favors to coal and oil companies and has advised the Environmental Protection Agency to prepare for deep cuts. On Friday night, a web page that, for 20 years, had given information about climate change, was removed from the EPA’s website “to reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt.”
And so it is perhaps appropriate that, the next day — Trump’s hundredth in office — some 200,000 protesters marched from the Capitol Building to the White House to express their concerns about climate change, the environment and climate justice. As Trump prepared to decamp for Harrisburg, where he had a rally scheduled to counter-program the White House Correspondents Dinner, these marchers surrounded his new home in an attempt to make their displeasure known.
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The march drew people from across the country and around the world, and, though it borrowed a name — People’s Climate March — from a similar protest held in New York City in 2014, yesterday’s event occurred under very different circumstances.
In 2014, momentum was building toward a UN agreement on climate change. That deal was finally hammered out in Paris in December 2015, and though environmental groups maintained that it didn’t go far enough, most viewed it — and the steps the Obama administration had taken to comply with it — as a jumping-off point to finally begin dealing with the threat of climate change, about which scientists had already been warning the public for decades.
Three short years later, Trump is president, one of the EPA’s chief critics now heads the agency, the CEO of ExxonMobil is the Secretary of State, and…