Over the last eight months, President Donald Trump’s doctrine on environmental policies has become clear. Did Barack Obama do it? Then get rid of it. Does it mention climate change? Then throw it out the window.



This strategy is red meat for Trump’s base, but crowd-pleasing rarely makes for wise policy. Case in point: Ten days before Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, Trump decided that America should no longer require federally funded projects like roads and hospitals to be built to withstand rising seas or heavier rainfall. He repealed these widely popular flood protection standards—put in place, of course, by his predecessor—for no apparent reason, other than wanting to speed up project approvals.



But now that back-to-back record-breaking hurricanes have caused deadly flooding far outside of federally designated floodplains, Trump is reevaluating this decision. Last week, the Washington Post reported that Trump is considering proposing similar flood standards to the Obama-era ones he just repealed. This shift, the Post noted, “represents a striking acknowledgment by an administration skeptical of climate change that the government must factor changing weather into some of its major infrastructure policies.” In other words, Trump is open to preparing the U.S. for some of climate change’s worst impacts, but only now that he’s seen those impacts with his own eyes.

Trump shouldn’t have needed to see this devastation firsthand, as scientists have spent years explaining the risks rising seas and worsening storms pose to infrastructure. But that’s how petty and spiteful Trump’s climate policy has proven to be. Triggered by “climate change” and Obama’s fingerprints, he refuses to maintain common-sense adaptation policies that will save lives and money as the weather worsens.

The administration insists they’re protecting Americans from the effects of a changing climate. “We continue to take climate change seriously, not the cause of it, but what we can see right now,” Tom Bossert, Trump’s homeland security adviser, told reporters on Monday. This is patently untrue. Even if Trump eventually reinstates the flood risk standard, he is seeking to dismantle the federal government’s climate adaptation mechanisms—undoing policies and scrapping funding for projects that seek to prevent death and destruction due to rising seas, more intense heat waves, longer droughts and wildfires, and other extreme weather.