fCrusader against the shower feels he doesn’t wash his hair enough to reverse the protection of the little fish, which he calls “worthless.”
While withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Accord and declaring an “energy emergency,” one of Trump’s most notable executive orders on his first day in office was to “improve consumers’ Further down the list of priorities issued by the White House were the selection of vehicles, showerheads, toilets, washing machines, light bulbs, and dishwashers.
Meanwhile, another Trump executive order titled Putting the People Above the Fish directs federal agencies to divert more water from Northern California to the southern part of the state. The order condemns the “catastrophic shutoff” of water to protect the delta smelt, a small endangered creature that Trump recently called an “inherently worthless fish.” .
Trump has long complained about poor water pressure in appliances and repeatedly attacked California for its water policies, but experts say trying to promote these complaints throughout his presidency will create inconvenient obstacles. I said it would collide.
“It was very impressive that the White House memo included toilets and showerheads as a priority for the president,” said Andrew DeLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. “But I think Donald Trump’s concerns are somewhat outdated, to tell you the truth, and that supporting federal standards for appliances is illegal.”
The last time he was president, Trump scrapped stricter energy efficiency standards for light bulbs and created loopholes for less efficient appliances like dishwashers and showers. Those moves, later reversed by Joe Biden, followed longstanding complaints by Trump about water pressure.
“You know, I have this gorgeous head of hair. When I take a shower, I want water to pour on me,” the president said in 2023. Trump separately claimed in 2019 that “people are washing 15 times, 15 times 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once” because of a lack of water pressure.
Under federal law, the Department of Energy reviews appliance standards every six years to improve or maintain efficiency benchmarks that have not deteriorated. Supporters of the rules say they helped save Americans money by wasting less energy and water and helped lower pollution that gains the planet. Voting shows that the standards are widely popular with the public.
But Trump, some Republicans, and gas and housing lobbyists have cast the rules as overreach, with unified Republican control of Congress gaining control of Congress and the White House calling for a rollback of the standards. , or at least eliminate the stricter rules Biden has put in place.
“While we definitely don’t like shower heads and are nostalgic for the old ones, our testing shows a wide selection of products that work very well while saving energy and water,” DeLaski said.
“There were some performance issues with some products, but we’re back in the 1990s. Consumers generally like efficient products now. The president manipulated some outdated information. I’m sure the White House has very good showers.”
Meanwhile, the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles have resurfaced Trump’s animus toward Delta confectionery. “Los Angeles has an enormous amount of water available,” Trump said Tuesday. “All they have to do is turn the valve.”
Experts say this rhetoric misunderstands the more complex situation in California, where water resources under pressure from rising global heating are closely managed for large users such as agriculture. It is said that it is. California’s reservoirs were full of water when the wildfires erupted, and there were no “valves” that could release more water from the north.
said John Durand, a scientist at the University of California, Davis, who studies the Sacramento-Joaquin River Delta ecosystem. Several inches long – has been driven to extinction by water diversion, pollution, and development.
“Confectionery is not as charismatic to many people as salmon,” Durand added. “It’s an indicator species that points to the extinction of more species if we don’t ease water use…
“It might be interesting to leverage this fish, but it’s not surprising because we’ve been leveraging everything for 150 years to help support power and money in California’s water wars.” there is no.”
Environmental groups said Trump is maneuvering to weaken protections for endangered species in order to strengthen fossil fuel interests and developers. The energy emergency order signed by Trump requires these protections to be set aside for projects deemed essential.
“It’s disgusting that President Trump is exploiting the deadly Los Angeles wildfires to blame endangered fish that have nothing to do with the fires to extinction.”Biological Diversity said Keian Suckling, executive director of the center. “These fish are in the way of big agribusiness and developers who cash in on destroying our environment.”