Things used to be so much simpler. If you self-identified as liberal and your presidential candidate lost, you spent the next six months checking Vancouver real estate listings, brushing up on hockey lingo, and practicing your charming mispronunciation of the word about. You weren’t really going to move to Canada, but it was comforting knowing Canada was there: sane, sensible Canada, where polite moderation reigns and demagoguery is nationally frowned upon.

Well, I’m here to tell you that this vision of a uniformly progressive Canada isn’t real—and, in truth, never has been. When it comes to weathering the incoming Trump administration’s likely assault on the environment, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s policies, I’m afraid, won’t offer you much sanctuary.

I can already hear you protesting. Wait! Not Justin! He’s so . . . so . . . dreamy! He loves pandas! And tolerance! And sounding reasonable! And taking his shirt off!

Yes, Justin Trudeau loves all of those things. But he presumably loves his job, too. And if he wants to keep it, he also has to love, or at least appear to love, Big Oil, the one entity that no Canadian leader from any political party can afford to spurn.

And just like his predecessor, Stephen Harper—the guy who cheerfully pulled his country out of the Kyoto Accord, trampled all over the rights and dignity of First Nations tribes, and dramatically curtailed environmental assessments under the fervently pro-business auspices of his Conservative Party—Trudeau’s crush on hydrocarbons is becoming obvious. He recently green-lighted two massive pipeline projects, giving his country’s tar sands industry a pair of Christmas gifts that will, as the saying goes, keep on giving (and taking). He then followed up with a friendly chat with our president-elect about the need to resuscitate the Keystone XL pipeline—yes, the one that we all thought was dead.

Trudeau, a skilled amateur boxer, knows how to feint with the best of them. Earlier this week, President Obama announced a permanent ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling in large swaths of the Arctic and Atlantic, an action presented as a joint effort between the United States and our friendly neighbor to the north. Trudeau does deserve credit for instituting a similar freeze on drilling in Canada’s Arctic waters and for promising to revisit the issue every five years. These bans represent a substantial win for environmentalists, and the benefits for Arctic ecosystems will be seen for decades to come.

But juxtaposed with his support for more pipelines, Trudeau’s admirable stance on offshore drilling is generating some major cognitive dissonance.

Together, the two new pipeline projects will carry an extra one million barrels of oil per day through some of Canada’s most vulnerable habitat. One of these, the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain project, will nearly triple the capacity of a 53-year-old pipeline to 890,000 barrels a day, pumping tar sands oil 715 miles south from Alberta to a newly expanded terminal outside Vancouver. The other, Enbridge’s Line 3 project, will stretch across 1,000 miles and transport 760,000 barrels per day as part of the company’s massive mainline system, which snakes across the U.S.–Canada border before terminating in Wisconsin.

And then there’s KXL. When President Obama announced in November 2015 that he was nixing the transborder pipeline at the studied recommendation of his State Department, he noted that Prime Minister Trudeau had “expressed his disappointment” at the decision. But Obama also said that the two men “agreed that our close friendship on a whole range of issues, including energy and climate change, should provide the basis for even closer coordination between our countries going forward.”

Cut to one year, and one political bombshell, later. TransCanada, the infrastructure company behind the pipeline, wasted little time after the U.S. election—just 24 hours, actually—in expressing hope that KXL was now back on the table. And after the latest conversation between Trudeau and our president-elect, TransCanada would seem to have even more reason to be excited.

“I’m confident that the right decisions will be taken,” Trudeau told an audience in Calgary right after his talk with Trump. Calgary is the seat of Canada’s oil industry, and the people in attendance surely knew what he meant by “the right decisions.” The many pro-oil folks among them  must have felt comforted by their prime minister’s professed confidence.

The rest of us are left to wonder if the word right in Canadian English means something different from what it means in American English.

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

The column you’re reading began its life last week with an unsavory, if relatively straightforward, goal: Explore the disastrous environmental ramifications of president-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Oklahoma’s attorney general—and oil-and-gas industry bestie—Scott Pruitt as the next head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

No sooner had I gotten started when news broke of another Trump pick: Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, for secretary of state, the government’s top diplomatic post. This Cabinet selection was so mind-blowing in its utter wrongness, on almost every imaginable level, that I instantly rethought the original structure of my piece. These two peas in a petrochemical pod definitely needed to be sharing the spotlight.

Then rumors began filtering in that Trump was nearing his final decision on our nation’s next secretary of energy. I had to rub my eyes to make sure I wasn’t misreading the headlines. Alas, it really was true: Trump was picking former Texas governor Rick Perry—late of one of the most woebegone presidential campaigns in modern history, not to mention Dancing with the Stars. That our next president wants his energy secretary to be the guy who once bragged about how he’d abolish the agency (or would have bragged about it, if he’d remembered its name) says a lot about the future of our national energy policy. Once again, my column was thrown into structural turmoil.

Just this morning, I was back on track, cruising right along, ready to frame these three picks as a new high-water mark in Cabinet-making depravity, the trifecta of environmental nihilism. And then I heard that sources were reporting Trump had settled on U.S. Representative Ryan Zinke for secretary of the interior. In support of the nomination, a Trump spokesperson had this to say: “Congressman Zinke believes we need to find a way to cut through bureaucracy to ensure our nation’s parks, forests, and other public areas are properly maintained and used effectively.” (The italics are mine. The nervousness they elicit, on the other hand, is—or ought to be—everyone’s.)

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the Four Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse.

That I kept having to rework this column—three do-overs in less than a week!—is itself a bone-chilling sign of just how eager president-elect Trump is to give the oil and gas industry everything it could ever ask for, and more. Taken together, these appointments constitute a preinaugural Christmas present to all those climate deniers and fossil fuel dead-enders who helped nudge him over the electoral finish line. He may be willing to take the occasional meeting with Al Gore, and his high-profile daughter may even publicly flirt with reasonableness on climate change from time to time, but make no mistake: These appointments are the signal buried within any semi-hopeful noise that you may have heard.

And here’s the signal’s message: The lands and waters of the United States of America are once again open for business, assuming your business happens to be sucking massive amounts of hydrocarbon out of the ground for the purposes of burning and emitting our way toward an uninhabitable planet.

As I type, more rumors are circulating—although these reports, I’m happy to say, offer some small glimmer of hope. One of them is that a number of Republican senators are privately grumbling about the Tillerson appointment, citing his bromance with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his acceptance of the Russian Order of Friendship award in 2013. In case you haven’t heard, the incoming administration isn’t exactly looking for more coverage of the many, um, surprising links between the Kremlin and the newly ascendant GOP. The mere fact that Tillerson is experiencing any intraparty turbulence at all, as opposed to a perfectly smooth ride into Foggy Bottom, may be a sign that he’s not a shoo-in.

The other rumor is that President Obama is preparing, as in right now, to wield his executive power in order to permanently ban drilling in U.S. waters off the Atlantic and Arctic coasts. Thanks to a somewhat obscure clause embedded deep within the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act—you are familiar with the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, aren’t you?—a sitting president has the authority to prohibit the leasing of offshore areas in such a way that future presidents cannot rescind it. If he chooses to avail himself of this option, it will be the best thing—and perhaps the only thing—that Obama can do to save these vulnerable areas from the rapaciousness of the Four Horsemen and their oil industry minions.

Were that to happen—and were the Senate to also say nyet to a Russia-backed oil executive becoming our top diplomat—it just might buy environmentalists enough time to take a deep breath, collect our energy, and gear up for the next fight. Because rest assured, there will be a next fight. And a next one. And a next one.

These four men could make for a very busy four years.

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Winter is coming, and so is truckload after truckload of rock salt. By the time daffodils start popping up in the spring, Americans will have dumped more than 24 million tons of the stuff on our roads, parking lots, and driveways. Dissolved in melting snow and ice, the salt will enter streams, rivers, and ponds—with some serious consequences for wildlife, especially frogs, which may spend their formative weeks immersed in this slurry.

Studies have found that rock salt can cause lethargy, weight loss, and deformities in tadpoles and that increased salinity hurts survival rates for the eggs and the tadpoles of wood frogs and spotted salamanders. By messing with how quickly gray treefrog tadpoles break down leaf litter, road salt can even affect an ecosystem’s nutrient cycle. We’re just beginning to comprehend the ecological impact of those crunchy crystals, but the latest discovery might be the most bizarre.

Road salt may be turning little girl tadpoles into little boy tadpoles. According to a new paper published in November in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, salinity has the power to alter sex ratios in wood frog tadpoles, reducing the proportion of females by around 10 percent.

This finding is important, says lead author Max Lambert, a doctoral candidate at Yale University, because we don’t tend to think of salt as a chemical that affects sex. The herbicide atrazine and contraceptives made of synthetic estrogen have long been known to feminize male frogs, but salt? Good ol’ NaCl?

“These other chemicals are certainly in the environment and having an effect,” Lambert says, “but we may have focused on them to the exclusion of other things out there.”

It’s pretty obvious that removing females from a species’ natural sex ratio could lead to population declines and even collapse. Which is, you know, just lovely considering the numbers: Seventy percent of the world’s amphibian species are dropping fast, and while those in the United States are doing a little better, they’re still contending with habitat destruction, chytrid fungus, and other types of hormone-disrupting pollution.

Chemicals found naturally in the environment can affect an amphibian’s development, too. As tadpoles, some frog species eat leaves that are chockful of phytochemicals, and when those leaves get good and wet, they leach those substances into the surrounding water. In a 2010 study, researchers found that when they soaked oak leaves in their tadpole pools, the little guys grew up to have more endocrine system abnormalities than usual, particularly the males.

To follow up on their research, Lambert and his coauthors also looked at how different kinds of leaf litter can influence whether tadpoles end up male or female. Specifically, they compared tadpoles raised in pools with only submerged oak or maple leaves, as well as tadpoles growing up in pools with oak or maple leaves in addition to road salt. Both tree species are common across the northeastern United States, but maples are quickly outpacing oaks thanks to an overabundance of deer (which gobble up oak seedlings and acorns), fire suppression, and logging. Overall, the scientists wanted to see if this shift in plant life might be having an effect on tadpoles, too, and if road salt is making these impacts better or worse.

Interestingly, the experiment showed that oak leaves tended to have a slight feminizing effect. Female tads are usually bigger than males, but the oak leaf pool produced females that were more than 3 percent bigger than normal. When the researchers added salt, however, that sexual dimorphism got turned on its head, with the males becoming 0.7 percent larger than the females.

That oak leaves might supercharge females is something that hasn’t really been identified before, Lambert says. “This could be pretty ecologically important, particularly if salt contamination completely undoes the size advantage females get from the oak litter.”

Next, Lambert and his colleagues want to test these findings in other frog species, as well as incorporate other kinds of rock salt. The recent experiments used pure sodium chloride, but various other salts and mixtures are available on the market. There’s really no way to know what any of them might do to tadpoles until we run the tests.

If nothing else, Lambert’s research adds to a growing body of knowledge that suggests the effect of road salt on the environment is not neutral. This winter we’ll sprinkle enough salt to fill up Epcot Center 296 times. As with the salt on our tables, perhaps we should learn some moderation. 

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.