Our environmental priorities have been distorted

The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, or EERE, has been targeted with one of the most severe budget cuts in the Energy Department. Under President Donald Trump’s proposal, funding for the office would drop by 69 percent.

An executive order directs review of national monument designations. Clean water and clean power plans have been ordered to be reviewed, and likely gutted.

We all want to conserve the earth. So what happened to conservatives? Teddy Roosevelt pushed a federal system of parks and forests. In 1970, Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency. George W. Bush and John McCain supported environmental protection issues as recently as 2008.

Now, it is “OK” to dump coal ash into rivers, and “OK” for commercial vessels to discharge untreated ballast water into the ocean. We manufacture single-use petroleum-based plastic bags that end up in our oceans and rivers. Sealife dies, and the sealife that survives in the food chain is seafood consumed in our local restaurants.

It is “OK” to drill for oil in the Atlantic, when it has already been decided that there is not enough reward in drilling in that ocean. But we persist.

We applaud the White House as we abandon the Paris agreement. Somehow, our priorities have been distorted.

At some point we need to take care of our mother — Earth.

This story was originally published June 23, 2017 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Our environmental priorities have been distorted."