By Glynn Wilson –

The Trump administration’s partisan war on the environment is taking its toll not only on public lands and the planet.

A new Gallup poll shows that and the booming economy due to the Obama administration’s policies are driving public opinion away from unregulated economic growth and toward more environmental protection.

By the widest margin measured since the year 2000, more Americans, a large majority of 65 percent, now say environmental protection should take precedence over economic growth when the two goals come into conflict. Only 30 percent say economic growth is more important than the environment, a number that corresponds to a majority of Trump’s political base and those who get their news from conservative talk radio, alt-right websites like Breitbart News and media mogul Robert Murdoch’s Fox News on cable TV.

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Since taking office in January 2018, Trump has appointed one anti-environment cabinet member after another, none more controversial than Scott Pruitt, who was finally forced to resign as head of the Environmental Protection Agency last summer for legal and ethical scandals, when he should have been fired for going against the agency’s mission by deregulating the government to open up the country for rampant economic development, including oil and gas exploration, coal and uranium mining in and around America’s national parks.

EPA’s mission since it was established in the early 1970s by Republican President Richard Nixon was to “develop and enforce regulations” to “ensure that Americans have clean air, land and water … to reduce environmental risks … based on the best available scientific information (and) … to enforce federal laws protecting human health and the environment.”

Scott Pruitt Should Have Been Fired from EPA for Violating the Agency’s Mission

Gallup has been asking the question since 1984 whether “protection of the environment should be given priority, even at the risk of curbing economic growth” or “economic growth should be given priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent.”

A preference for environmental protection has typically led economic growth on this question by a significant margin, according to Gallup. Between 2009 and 2013 as the economy struggled to emerge from the Bush Great Recession of 2007-2008, more Americans prioritized the economy over the environment, with a brief exception in May 2010 in the aftermath of the largest, most costly and worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, the BP Gulf oil spill catastrophe in 2010.

Demographic differences show that younger adults between the ages of 18 and 34 are more likely than those 35 and older to give precedence to environmental protection over economic growth. But the sharpest difference shows up in party affiliation, with 82 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independents favoring environmental protection, while only 35 percent of Republicans saying they feel the same way.

A majority of Republicans, 60 percent, say economic growth should be considered first, while only 24 of independents and 13 percent of Democrats say they feel that way.

“With the U.S. unemployment rate holding at or below 4 percent for much of the past year, Americans are less likely to prioritize economic growth over environmental protection,” Gallup says in its analysis.

These public opinion survey results should come as good news to those in the Democratic Party who want to push for a Green New Deal to boost jobs in green, alternative energy sources like wind and solar power and work to reduce the economic dependence on the burning fossil fuels like oil and coal to combat climate change due to global warming.

“While the two goals don’t always conflict, to the extent they do, it appears that now is a good time to promote aggressive climate legislation such as the Green New Deal being discussed in Congress, as most Americans are currently willing to accept some economic costs,” Gallup concludes. “Indeed, the same March poll found a majority of Americans saying they would favor policies aimed at reducing the use of fossil fuels within the next 10 or 20 years.”

A Significant Majority of Americans Support Efforts to Reduce Energy from Fossil Fuels to Combat Climate Change

This stands in stark contrast to fake news comments made by the president on the campaign trail this week at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual spring dinner in Washington, when he literally said in a speech that was captured on C-SPAN and broadcast on every news outlet in the land that windmills reduce the value of people’s homes and making the outrageous, false claim that the noise from windmills “causes cancer.”

The question now is will this contrast in public opinion begin to show up in the polls related to Trump’s job performance and public preferences for president in the 2020 election.