Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for President, so it’s worth looking at his views on the environment.  And from the perspective of environmental protection, they are not promising, to say the least.

For starters, Mr. Trump would like to eliminate the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which would mean undoing federal protections for clean air and water and devolving that authority to states.  It’s unclear then how states would manage interstate pollution problems.  It would also mean the United States would no longer be able to uphold much of its international Paris commitments to reduce greenhouse gases: US negotiators relied on EPA’s Clean Power Plan and its effect of reducing emissions from the electricity sector to meet our country’s commitments under the accord.  Of course, the plan is under judicial attack anyway, but eliminating EPA destroys the institution that would administer and enforce it.

On energy, he doesn’t seem to be a fan of renewables, although he doesn’t discuss this issue much in public.  But he once sued to stop wind turbines going in near his Scotland real estate project and complained back in 2012 that solar panels are not economical.  Meanwhile, he’s a big fan of fracking.  And he not only supported the Keystone XL pipeline, he’s an investor in one of the companies that would have built it.

On climate change, he does not accept the scientific consensus, per his recent exchange with the Washington Post editorial board:

I think there’s a change in weather. I am not a great believer in man-made climate change. I’m not a great believer. There is certainly a change in weather that goes – if you look, they had global cooling in the 1920s and now they have global warming, although now they don’t know if they have global warming. They call it all sorts of different things; now they’re using “extreme weather” I guess more than any other phrase. I am not – I know it hurts me with this room, and I know it’s probably a killer with this room – but I am not a believer. Perhaps there’s a minor effect, but I’m not a big believer in man-made climate change.

But there is a potential positive that a President Trump would bring for the environment: namely, his views on infrastructure spending and mass transit investment:

We have to spend money on mass transit. We have to fix our airports, fix our roads also in addition to mass transit, but we have to spend a lot of money.

He’s also — amazingly for a Republican — spoken out in favor of Obama’s priority of high speed rail deployment:

You go to China they have trains that go 300 miles per hours and our just go chug, chug, chug and then they have to stop because the track split. We’re like the third world.

These views appear to spring from his background as a real estate developer who likes to build stuff (not just a wall with Mexico).  But it also may come from his non-interventionist foreign policy, where he decries “nation building” overseas while our cities crumble from the lack of infrastructure investment:

And I just think we have to rebuild our country. If you look at the infrastructure — I just landed at an airport where, not in good shape, not in good shape. If you go to Qatar and if you go to (inaudible) you see airports the likes of which you have never seen before. Dubai, different places in China. You see infrastructure, you see airports, other things, the likes of which you have never seen here.
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We have a country that is in bad shape, it’s in bad condition. You look at our inner cities, our inner cities are a horrible mess. I watched Baltimore, I have many, many friends in Baltimore, we watched what happened. St. Louis, Ferguson, Oakland, it could have been much worse over the summer. And it will probably be worse this summer. But you look at some of our inner cities. And yet you know I watched as we built schools in Iraq and they’d be blown up. And we’d build another one and it would get blown up. And we would rebuild it three times. And yet we can’t build a school in Brooklyn. We have no money for education, because we can’t build in our own country. And at what point do you say hey, we have to take care of ourselves. So, you know, I know the outer world exists and I’ll be very cognizant of that but at the same time, our country is disintegrating, large sections of it, especially in the inner cities.

So if Donald Trump becomes president, we could actually see more mass transit, high speed rail, tall Trump-like buildings in our downtowns, and rebuilt inner cities.  And whether he believes in it or not, this kind of downtown, transit-oriented development is one of the best ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s about the only bright spot in what is otherwise a dismal set of views on environmental protection.