You Don’t Have to Give a Hoot if You Do Pollute

Donald Trump embraced the GOP platform of cutting back environmental regulations with a vengeance. They were “job-killers” even though the pollution of air and water were clear people killers and implementing environmental controls actually created new jobs. He vowed to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accords, again arguing that environmental controls were based on unsubstantiated science. Thus the United States became the only country in the world to reject that accord and what is well-established scientific fact – that man’s use of fossil fuel has caused and/or exacerbated the accumulation of gases in our atmosphere creation an effective greenhouse heating effect on the world’s average temperatures.

But the GOP and the Trump administration were committed to decimating the Environmental Production Agency (part of draining the swamp), and appointed a former state attorney general (R-Oklahoma), Scott Pruitt, who made a career out of suing the EPA to cut or reduce their environmental rules. His new mandate was to cut regulations and reduce the staff of the EPA in order to enable business to work unencumbered by anti-pollution rules. Here’s what’s really going on:

“[In mid-August,] the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it would be rolling back limits on wastewater from coal plants. The limits on coal plants and other steam electric power plants are part of a 2015 Clean Water Act regulation known as the Effluent Limitation Guidelines for steam electric power plants, or the ‘ELG Rule.’ The announcement was made in a filing with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which is hearing legal challenges to the merits of the 2015 ELG rule.

“‘This is exactly what I feared when I saw the agency abandoning the polluter pays principle,’ said Betsy Southerland, former Director of the Office of Science and Technology in the EPA Office of Water, which promulgated the ELG rule in 2015. ‘They are just transferring the costs of polluted water to public and private treatment systems downstream of these plants. Now the public, not the polluter, will have to pay to clean the water. And it is much cheaper to prevent pollution than to clean it up after the fact.’

“Coal power plants routinely discharge large quantities of toxic heavy metals and other chemicals. Until 2015, they were operating under outdated standards last revised in 1982. Each year, the industry was discharging over 2 billion pounds of pollutants, including carcinogens and neurotoxins like arsenic, mercury and lead. According to EPA, these pollutants are causing excess cancer and neurological damage in people exposed to contaminated fish. Over 6,000 river miles are unsafe for recreational fishing, and over 10,000 miles are unsafe for subsistence fishing. These pollutants also present serious risks to wildlife and ecosystems.” Environmental Integrity Project, August 15^th.

The New York Times (December 10^th), put some numbers to the new downsized Environmental Production Agency, starting with the professed mission statement and followed by some very contradictory actions: “Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, has said the Trump administration’s high-profile regulatory rollback does not mean a free pass for violators of environmental laws. But as the Trump administration moves from one attention-grabbing headline to the next, it has taken a significant but less-noticed turn in the enforcement of federal pollution laws… [BUT]

“During the first nine months under Mr. Pruitt’s leadership, the E.P.A. started about 1,900 cases, about one-third fewer than the number under President Barack Obama’s first E.P.A. director and about one-quarter fewer than under President George W. Bush’s over the same time period.

“In addition, the agency sought civil penalties of about $50.4 million from polluters for cases initiated under Mr. Trump. Adjusted for inflation, that is about 39 percent of what the Obama administration sought and about 70 percent of what the Bush administration sought over the same time period.

“The E.P.A., turning to one of its most powerful enforcement tools, also can force companies to retrofit their factories to cut pollution. Under Mr. Trump, those demands have dropped sharply. The agency has demanded about $1.2 billion worth of such fixes, known as injunctive relief, in cases initiated during the nine-month period, which, adjusted for inflation, is about 12 percent of what was sought under Mr. Obama and 48 percent under Mr. Bush…

“In the last two complete fiscal years of the Obama administration, the E.P.A.’s office in Chicago sent requests for testing that covered an average of 50 facilities per year, or about 4.2 each month. By comparison, after the policy changes, one such request for a single facility was made in the subsequent four-month period. There was a similar decline in the Denver regional office, according to the data.

“The enforcement slowdown has been compounded by the departure of more than 700 employees at the E.P.A. since Mr. Trump’s election, many of them via buyouts intended to reduce the agency’s size, and high-level political vacancies at the E.P.A. and the Justice Department. The agency’s top enforcement officer — Susan Bodine — was confirmed only late last week.

“Separately, Mr. Pruitt’s team has told officials and industry representatives in Missouri, North Dakota and other states that E.P.A. enforcement officers will stand down on some pollution cases, according to agency documents. The retrenchment is said to be part of a nationwide handoff of many enforcement duties to state authorities, an effort Mr. Pruitt calls cooperative federalism but critics say is an industry-friendly way to ease up on polluters.”

“Current and recently departed E.P.A. staff members said the new direction has left many employees feeling frozen in place, and demoralized, particularly in the regional offices, which have investigators who are especially knowledgeable of local pollution threats.” Some of the environmental damage is reversible, some is not and simply compounds from bad to worse to much worse for every day that polluters get a free ride from dumping on the waterways that really belong to the taxpayers of America. Air and water quality matter!!!!

I’m Peter Dekom, and giving away our environment with no costs or consequences to big business polluters is yet another form of Republican redistribution of wealth from most of us to a very few of the richest of us.