Last week’s article, Bully the Bad Guys, began a four part
series on President Trump’s unfolding agenda. If you haven’t already, you might
to read it before moving on to this week’s article.
In the Trump administration’s first week they put a gag
order on all employees of the EPA and the Department of Agriculture. This order
prohibits all employees from communicating with the press or public, including
the use of social media. This includes all research scientists. As of February
26, 2017 this order has not been lifted.
President Trump also signed executive orders authorizing the
immediate restarting of construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline and the
Keystone Pipeline. Both of these pipelines had been reluctantly stopped by
President Obama after unrelenting public pressure. President Trump obviously
felt none of that pressure.
The administration nominated Oklahoma Attorney General Scott
Pruitt to head the EPA. What are Mr. Pruitt’s qualifications to run the
Environmental Protection Agency? He sued the agency fourteen times in his
tenure as Oklahoma’s AG. Thirteen of these fourteen lawsuits were with oil and
gas companies as co-parties. These same co-parties also happened to be large
scale contributors to his election campaigns. A reported $300,000 in total.
His confirmation was pushed through the senate last week so
he could be confirmed before thousands of emails from his time as Oklahoma
Attorney General were released. This was done in spite of requests of democrat
senators to wait for the emails so a more informed decision could be made. These
emails subsequently revealed an extraordinarily close relationship with oil and
gas companies. He even copied and pasted an email from Devon Energy onto his
own letterhead and sent it as a complaint to the EPA he is now tasked to head.
He was found to again be copying and pasting language from
emails from lobby group American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers in a
complaint he filed with the EPA about ozone limits.
Mr. Pruitt is on public record denying the science that
mercury “poses public health hazards.” It should be noted that while he was
Attorney General of Oklahoma the number of lakes in the state listed for
mercury contamination went from fourteen to forty. His contention during his
confirmation hearing that states should be setting and enforcing environmental
protection laws also needs to be pointed out.
Is it Mr. Pruitt’s intent that the EPA allow states to deny
environmental science and allow their jurisdictions to become continually more
toxic?
I am sure we won’t have to wait long to find out.
According to Myron Ebell, who ran the EPA transition for the
new administration, the Trump administration is planning a one billion dollar
budget cut in the first physical year. The 2017 FY budget is $8.27 billion.
Down from $10.3 billion in 2010.
As we watch the dismantling of the EPA and other agencies in
the government by this administration, we need to ask ourselves some difficult
questions.
1.
Does the earth from which we are formed and
sustained, our only home, have any value outside of profits corporations can
extract from it?
2.
How important is clean air, clean water, and
clean soil to me?
3.
Am I willing to stand by and watch as
corporations collude with their political caddies in Washington to take us back to
the fifties, sixties, and seventies with burning rivers, toxic smog, poisoned
ground water, and subdivisions built on soil so fouled it causes cancer and
birth defects in the residents?
4.
At what point do we value the health and
vitality of flesh and blood humans, wildlife, and the ecosystem that makes life
possible over the profits of soulless and rapacious corporations?
In his inaugural speech at the Environmental Protection
Agency, Mr. Pruitt called for civility. I wonder how long he expects us to
remain civil while he ignores and suppresses the environmental science and
insists on harming the population of the planet for the profit of his corporate
donors.
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