Endangerment Finding

It is true that, as President Trump says, that ending the 2009 “Endangerment Finding” of the Obama Era will be a major boost for the American car industry. It will probably help the Europeans as well.

It is also true that it will save car buyers more.  Trump is on the money when he says that the move will knock $2,800 off the price tag of every new car that rolls off a Detroit assembly line.

It is also a gold-plated economic fact that the deregulation will put billions of dollars in the pockets of fossil fuel companies and their shareholders.

The 2009 “Endangerment Finding” is the foundation stone upon which a a big chunk of subsequent climate change legislation is based. It basically says that fossil fuel emissions—especially those from cars–  are a danger to public health and should be regulated.

Any cyclist, motorcyclist or pedestrian that has stood behind a car for more than half a minute knows for a fact that breathing in car fumes is bad for you. But Trump—and the oil executives and manufacturers of petrol-driven cars—have decided that anyone who thinks so is peddling a “green scam.”

But cyclists are not alone. The UN has reviewed over 10,000 research papers on climate change and spoken with more than 10,000 climate change scientists. 97.1 percent of them say that our planet is warming. That this is a bad thing and cars are a major cause of the problem.

In 2024 greenhouse gases reached 424 parts per million, the highest ever in recorded history and 152 percent above pre-industrial era levels.

In the United States, cars, trucks and buses account for about 29% of total greenhouse gas emissions. Since Trump took office America’s fossil fuel emissions have grown by 1.9 percent.

But petrol and diesel are not the only polluters. Coal produces almost double the amount of greenhouse gas emissions as the transport  industry, and the latest developments in renewable technology means that renewable energy is now about half the cost of coal in both building and maintenance terms.

On the same day that Trump announced the end of the 2009 Endangerment Findings, the American coal industry presented him with a trophy and bestowed on him the title of “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal.”

The Washington Post

My first news story was published in “The Washington Post.” I was a 13-year-old boy scout, and I wrote a 500-word article on badge-swapping at the Scout World Jamboree. It actually appeared on the front page with my byline. I was quite chuffed.

So, for me, the rapid decline of “The Post” has a personal element. It is even more personal one-third of the Post’s staff who were recently laid off. They are the victims of a changing media-scape and Donald Trump’s attack on the free press.

When the founder of Amazon, billionaire Jeff Bezos, bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million everyone heaved a sigh of relief. The Post had been struggling for years against the onslaught of the internet. If it was going to survive and prosper it needed an owner with deep pockets who believed in its mission and was prepared to inject millions—billions if necessary—to maintain the Post’s  position in the pantheon of the great world newspapers.

Bezos promised to do just that. The local subscriber base had been shrinking as more and more readers switched to social media. So Bezos’s plan was to increase the subscriber base by going global. Which he did.

For about seven years, the Post thrived. And one of the reasons was that Bezos remembered the paper’s left of centre roots. Every editor must know what his readers want to read and produce articles that meet that demand. The Post’s readers are left of centre. They are mainly Democrats. During Trump’s first term Bezos kept to the paper’s traditional editorial line and it became a major thorn in the side of President Trump.