The cartoon in the Saturday edition of the Advocate-Messenger really hit home for me. The 72-year-old man-child currently residing in the White House has loudly proclaimed that the House Intelligence Committee is guilty of “presidential harassment.” Actually, all the committee is doing is exercising its oversight responsibility as laid out in the Constitution. Under Republican chairperson “midnight rider” Devin Nunes, the Trump administration had gotten used to operating with no oversight whatsoever. So merely returning to what the Constitution sets forth they declare to be “harassment.”

But the so-called president and the retinue of swamp dwellers he calls a cabinet have effectively declared war on the nation’s environment. Down in Mission, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, preparation for the construction of Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall is threatening the nature sanctuary that shelters more than 200 species of wild butterflies and other pollinators and wildlife. Even though it is widely recognized that the border wall will never be built, bulldozers and earthmovers are staged to destroy the preserve.

Why are they doing this? I will submit that it is largely because they hate and despise those of us who want to protect what little is left of our native ecosystem. The Trump administration declared that all environmental protections applying to the refuge and other borderland needed for “the wall” are null and void because of the (non-existent) national emergency.

The recently issued National Climate Assessment publication was produced by 13 federal departments and agencies and overseen by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. The report concludes that the outlook for global warming is much more dire and immediate than previously thought.

If humanity is to have any chance of avoiding climatic disaster we must cut our carbon emissions drastically over the next two decades. In spite of this compilation of scientific expert analysis, the Trump cabal wants to EXPAND oil production by drilling in ANWR and in the oceans off both coasts! Of course, a byproduct of this exploration will be the destruction of wildlife habitat, as well as the death many of the animals that live in ANWR and the creatures in the sea off our coasts.

These ill-advised efforts are to procure additional supplies of a substance that must be left in the ground if we are to avoid the very worst effects of global warming.

Jim Porter

Danville