| Australia is burning. The Arctic is melting. But Donald Trump wants to make carbon great again.
Even while on the brink of starting a war and getting impeached, Trump is gutting environmental rules. As a builder, he moaned it was hard to pave over paradise. As president, he is shredding climate change regulations that slow the approval of new pipelines, highways and bridges.
Anyone who's used a US airport or driven an interstate lately knows America has an infrastructure problem. And construction can put people to work in depressed post-industrial areas. So it's not a bad idea to speed up permitting procedures that can take years.
But the President is doing more than that. He has driven scientists out of government and chosen foxes from the energy industry to run the environmental henhouse. He's already decimated Obama-era environmental policy by rolling back offshore drilling rules, approving pipelines and lifting restrictions on emissions from vehicles and coal plants. Not to mention pulling out of the Paris accord, making the US a climate pariah. His latest brainwave weakens the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — a bedrock law since Richard Nixon was president. And since his family is still in the construction and golf business, the change will make life easier for The Trump Organization too.
Asked about his skepticism of global warming on Thursday, Trump resorted to his usual non sequitur. "I want clean air. I want clean water. I want the cleanest air. I want the cleanest water," he said.
"I'm a big believer in that word, 'the environment.'"
| | | The world and America
 Iran has invited the United States to join its investigation of the plane crash in Tehran.
The British and Irish governments released a draft proposal to restore Northern Ireland's government.
Scientists in Germany figured out a mystery hum heard around the world.
And the International Olympic Committee banned athletes from raising their fists again at future Olympics.
Meanwhile in America, Trump has quietly signed an emergency bill for Puerto Rico.
An Army officer pardoned by Trump will not be reinstated to the Special Forces.
And an alleged serial killer on the run for 17 years was returned to the US. | | |
'I am willing to talk to anyone to get answers'
Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday that intelligence showed Iran had shot down a Ukrainian plane carrying 176 people -- of which 138 were destined for Canada -- with a surface-to-air missile. "This may well have been unintentional," Trudeau said. He added, "I am willing to talk to anyone to get answers.
The UK's Boris Johnson separately seconded the conclusion, saying that "a body of information" implicated Iran, and US intelligence officials say they too believe it was Iran. | | | The ones to remember
The US-Iran showdown may have stopped just short of war, but it has already claimed victims.
It's looking more and more like the Ukrainian airliner that crashed in flames in Tehran earlier this week was indeed downed by anti-aircraft crews on alert for US attacks -- just days after a deadly stampede at the funeral of Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani.
If so, in a single week, at least 232 souls will have joined the long list of civilians lost in a nearly 70-year-old estrangement between the US and Iran. It would not be the first time a civilian airliner became a victim. In 1988, a US ship mistakenly shot down an Iranian Airbus carrying nearly 300 passengers and crew during another spike in tensions.
And if hostilities break out again between the US and Iran, it's a fair bet that the battlefield of choice would be Iraq — a country ripped by civil war and strife that has killed tens of thousands of civilians since the US invasion.
Across the region, only the middle-aged still remember peace after civil wars, proxy conflicts and superpower invasions that claimed a heavy toll. So when pundits and partisans claim victory for their sides and plump the egos of their leaders after episodes like this week's, remember who has already lost.
| | | The US and Iran, in pictures
| | | It's not just that the US and Iran can't get along. The tortured history of relations between the two has created a powerful mythology of confrontation that now influences domestic politics.
From time to time, leaders on both sides try to escape this vicious cycle but fail, leading to clashes that replenish a decades-deep store of imagery that drives fear and anger.
For many Iranians, the original sin was in August 1953, when the CIA overthrew elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who had tried to break Britain's colonial monopoly on Iran's oil industry. The US spy agency admitted its role in the coup in 2013.
Iran's monarch, the US-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, then returned from exile, prompting mass protests -- but also scenes of reconciliation between his fans and the Iranian army, like the one above. | | | By the late 1970s, the increasingly autocratic rule of the Shah (left) and the privations of martial law sparked massive demonstrations, strikes and civil unrest. Pahlavi fled the country on January 16, 1979, paving the way for the return of Ayatollah Khomeini (right) from exile in Paris.
Below, a group of Iranian anti-Pahlavi students in the UK celebrate the end of the Shah after the Iranian Revolution on January 25 of that year. | | | The Islamic Republic of Iran was proclaimed on April 1.
While Mossadeq's overthrow cemented itself in Iranian national lore, the hostage crisis of 1979 and 1980 imprinted itself on America's consciousness and helped end the presidency of Jimmy Carter. | | | The US embassy in Tehran was seized by protesters in November 1979, who took 90 people hostage, including 66 Americans.
The first group of US embassy staffers to be freed held a press conference on November 18, 1979, the day after Khomeini ordered the release of all women and black US hostages. | | | The last hostages were freed in January 1981, the day of US President Ronald Reagan's inauguration.
In 1988, American warship USS Vincennes shot down an Iran Air flight in the Gulf, killing all 290 people on board. The Airbus A300 had been mistaken for a fighter jet, but most of the victims were Iranian pilgrims on their way to Mecca.
| | | Thousands turned out for the funeral in Tehran.
Then in early 2002, with America reeling from the September 11 attacks, US President George Bush denounced Iran as part of an "axis of evil" with Iraq and North Korea, sparking outrage in Iran.
That same year, an Iranian opposition group revealed that Iran was developing nuclear facilities including a uranium enrichment plant. The US accused Iran of a clandestine nuclear weapons program, which Iran denied. Below, a satellite image from Space Imaging shows a nuclear reactor facility on January 13, 2002, near Bushehr, Iran. | | | In September 2013, a month after Iran's new moderate President Hassan Rouhani took office, he and US President Barack Obama spoke by phone -- the first such top-level conversation in more than 30 years. Two years later, the US clinched a deal to freeze Iran's nuclear program in return for an economic opening. | | | But in May 2018, Obama's successor Donald Trump, enshrining a new hardline policy against Iran to honor a campaign promise, pulled out of the nuclear deal and re-imposed sanctions. | | | On January 3, 2020, a US drone strike killed top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani, sparking a new cycle of escalation that led to this week's near outbreak of war. | | |
Thanks for getting to the end of the week with us.
Friday is the 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I.
On Saturday, elections kick off in Taiwan and German Chancellor Angela Merkel travels to Moscow to talk with Vladimir Putin about Ukraine and the Middle East.
And Sunday marks the 10-year anniversary of Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake. Top diplomats from South Korea and Japan will also be in the US to talk peace and security.
We'll be back in your inbox on Monday.
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