The war on the environment

[stpioc]

President Donald Trump may be losing support in at least one county that he won during the 2016 presidential election — and it’s all because of his administration’s anti-environmental agenda.

Dozens of parents of children in Indiana’s Johnson County called for a federal investigation into why a toxic plume of trichloroethylene, or TCE, continues to exist underground due to an old industrial site in the county seat of Franklin and is allowed to contaminate residents’ homes, according to The New York Times. This is in spite of the fact that Trump has long emphasized his disdain for the Environmental Protection Agency, a policy that he emphasized when he hired anti-environmentalists Scott Pruitt and Andrew Wheeler to lead the organization. Trump’s slashing of environmental regulations has even prompted many career EPA employees to resign in protest, with one former employee claiming that to Trump “kids are disposable,” and Trump has suppressed work like his own administration’s climate change report when it contradicts his pro-business agenda.

While the TCE problems in Johnson County precede the Trump administration itself, its anti-environmentalist approach to pollution has stood in the way of matters being effectively addressed. The New York Times report offered a harrowing description of the human consequences of that type of anti-environmentalism:

The children fell ill, one by one, with cancers that few families in this suburban Indianapolis community had ever heard of. An avid swimmer struck down by glioblastoma, which grew a tumor in her brain. Four children with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer. Fifteen children with acute lymphocytic leukemia, including three casesdiagnosed in the past year.

The piece also elaborated on the difference between Trump’s EPA and the agency’s approach to this issue under his predecessor, President Barack Obama.

Declaring TCE “carcinogenic to humans by all routes of exposure,” the Obama administration had sought to restrict two of its riskiest uses, as a stain remover and as a degreaser, and had marked it for further review, potentially to ban the chemical altogether. It had also moved to strengthen cleanup rules for hundreds of sites nationwide believed to be contaminated.

But at the urging of industry groups, the Trump administration has stalled some of those moves. In 2017 it indefinitely postponed the proposed bans on risky uses, leaving as many as 178,000 workers potentially exposed. It also scaled back a broad review of TCE and other chemicals so that it would exclude from its calculations possible exposure from groundwater and other forms of contamination — the problems present in Franklin.

‘It’s infuriating’: Trump-voting parents turn on the president over lax EPA rules – Alternet.org