Admiral Paul Zukunft, the commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, knows oil spills. As the lead coordinator for the government’s response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, he directed tens of thousands of responders as they attempted a herculean task: recovering 200 million gallons of crude oil from the Gulf of Mexico. Today, Zukunft admits that task was impossible to complete, and that’s why he knows that drilling for oil in the freezing, unpredictable Arctic Ocean would be far more dangerous than drilling in the Gulf. “I can assure you that if there is an oil spill [in the Arctic], we’re not going to recover all that oil,” he told an audience at the Naval Heritage Center in Washington, D.C. last month. “We don’t know what Mother Nature would do and we don’t know the long term impacts to one of the most pristine environments in the world. Its not an area we want to oil and then find out after the fact.”

But we are going to oil the Arctic. In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order attempting to open up offshore oil drilling in Arctic and Atlantic waters. “Today,” Trump said at the time, “we’re unleashing American energy and clearing the way for thousands and thousands of high-paying American energy jobs.” Without saying it, he also cleared the way for a potentially massive and unresolvable oil spill. That’s not just because Arctic drilling is inherently risky. According to the New York Times, Trump’s executive order “calls for the reconsideration of a critical safeguard that is the most important action the government has taken to reduce offshore drilling hazards. This safeguard, the well control rule, tightened controls on blowout preventers designed to stop explosions in undersea oil and gas wells. The rule was based in part on lessons the commission learned about the root cause of the BP disaster.”

Kickstarting Arctic offshore drilling isn’t the only thing Trump has done to increase the risk of a man-made environmental disaster in just six short months. He’s starting a process that could open up almost the entirety of U.S. coastal waters to offshore drilling. He’s moving forward with large pipelines like Keystone XL, a project that carries the danger of an enormous corrosive tar sands oil spill. He’s attempting (and so far, failing) to delay regulations on fracking while also trying to open up the practice on public lands, increasing the potential for man-made earthquakes. Trump’s hoping to ship more liquified natural gas, or LNG, using tankers that are likely targets for terrorist attacks. Trump is also loosening regulations to encourage more coal projects, and coal burning produces massive amounts of coal ash waste that is often stored in old, leaky ponds.

And yet, while Trump significantly increases the risk of a man-made environmental disaster in this country, he has done little to increase our preparation for it. He hasn’t yet named an administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Land and Emergency Management (OLEM), the department in charge of handling land-based environmental disasters. That’s important, said former EPA Region 2 Administrator Judith Enck, an Obama appointee. “In an emergency, what happens is, a lot of the direction comes out of Washington,” she said. Her fear is compounded by the fact that EPA regional offices—which do most of the grunt work during big inland oil spills—also don’t yet have Trump-appointed administrators. “Career staff there know what they’re doing, but no regional administrator has been named to provide real direction. If EPA headquarters is also a mess, that’s going to be a problem.”

Disaster preparedness experts are also concerned, not only by the lack of an OLEM appointee, but by the weakening of the regulatory state in general. “We’ve set ourselves up for a collision course of risk to the environment and human health,” said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. “On the altar of trying to deregulate, we’ve gone though a extreme state where basic safety precautions that the public desperately needs are being thrown by the wayside. It’s not going to end well.”