The EPA

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A top Environmental Protection Agency official resigned Tuesday in protest of the direction the EPA has taken under President Trump. Elizabeth "Betsy" Southerland ended her 30-year run at the agency with a scathing exit letter in which she claimed that “the environmental field is suffering from the temporary triumph of myth over truth.” She last worked as the director of science and technology in the Office of Water.

“The truth is there is NO war on coal, there is NO economic crisis caused by environmental protection, and climate change IS caused by man’s activities,” Southerland wrote, directly rejecting many of Trump’s claims. Southerland said that since EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt took over the agency, dozens of regulations designed to protect the environment had been repealed, and Trump’s proposed budget cuts to the agency would devastate its ability to enforce existing protections and create new ones.

She took aim in particular at Trump's demand that two federal regulations be struck from the books for every new one added. “Should EPA repeal two existing rules protecting infants from neurotoxins in order to promulgate a new rule protecting adults from a newly discovered liver toxin?” she wrote. “Faced with such painful choices, the best possible outcome for the American people would be regulatory paralysis where no new rules are released so that existing protections remain in place.” She added that in the past the EPA had been a “guiding light to make the ‘right thing’ happen for the greater good,” but that the Trump administration has hurt the agency’s ability to protect the planet.

Top EPA official resigns over direction of agency under Trump | TheHill

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Courts now have to order Trump's EPA to do the right thing..

A federal appeals court ruled late Monday that the Environmental Protection Agency must enforce Obama-era restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas industry. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down the EPA’s attempt to suspend methane restrictions for the sector, formally vacating the agency’s 90-day stay of key provisions of New Source Performance Standards.

The rule is now in effect. The leak detection and repair provisions of the 2016 rule were set to take effect — and “begin delivering significant benefits”— on June 3. But on June 5, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt “unlawfully stayed these and other requirements of the rule retroactively from June 2 until August 31, 2017,” the court said. Pruitt and his industry allies “have not offered any support for the proposition that compliance” with the 2016 rule “would cause significant hardship to regulated entities that had a year’s lead time to prepare,” the court argued.

At the same time, the EPA’s stay of the rule “is causing substantial additional methane, ozone-forming [volatile organic compounds], and hazardous air pollutants such as benzene and formaldehyde to be released into the air of communities near these wells,” the court explained in its Monday order.

Court tells Trump’s EPA to enforce methane rule for oil and gas drillers

Yea, methane is actually a much more potent greenhouse gas compared to CO2, and benzene is a well known cancer risk, keep Americans safe!

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Of course we don't need to clean up after environmental disasters.. Keep Americans safe!

On August 1, the Waste Management and Regulatory Oversight Subcommittee held a hearing to discuss the fate of Superfund, a program of the Environmental Protection Agency. The meeting came one week after the Superfund task force, which was created by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt in May, released its first report with recommendations for cleanups of sites. But the fate of the program may be threatened by budget cuts proposed to the EPA and the Superfund program, which will shrink by 30 percent if President Donald Trump’s budget is passed. Although Trump’s proposed cut to the EPA was expected, the deep cut to Superfund was not. Pruitt has previously said he does not support cutting the Superfund program and instead promised to prioritize it. “Unfortunately, many of these sites have been listed as Superfund sites for decades, some for as many as 30 years,” Pruitt wrote in an announcement of a Superfund Task Force in May. “This is not acceptable. We can—and should—do better.”

Donald Trump Is Proposing Massive Funding Cuts for Toxic Waste Cleanup – Mother Jones

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While the legislative agenda does indeed appear stalled, a lot of what those interest groups want doesn’t require legislation, and is anything but stalled. This is especially true for environmental policy, where decisions about how to interpret and enforce laws ... can have a huge impact. So Trump’s true legacy may well be defined not by the laws he does or more likely doesn’t pass, but by his decision to put Scott Pruitt in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency. As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt effectively acted as a servant, not of the public, but of polluting industries. That’s not an accusation; it’s confirmed by his own email trail. ... 

Pruitt can do a lot of harm without changing the law. He can, for example, reverse the ban on a pesticide that the E.P.A.’s own scientists say may damage children’s nervous systems. Or he can move to scrap a rule that would limit heavy-metal contamination from power-plant wastewater. And he can cripple enforcement of the rules he doesn’t undo simply by working with Trump to starve his own agency of personnel and funds. The Trump budget released in May ... was an indication of priorities — and it called for cutting funding for the E.P.A. by 31 percent, more than any other agency. Individually, no one of these actions is likely to be treated as front-page news... Cumulatively, however, they will kill or cripple large numbers of Americans — for that is what pollution does, even if the damage is gradual and sometimes invisible. 

By the way, if you’re wondering whether an anti-environmental agenda will at least be good for job creation, the answer is no... This agenda will, however, be worth billions to certain campaign donors. So don’t say that the administration’s agenda is stalled. Some parts are, but other parts are moving right along. When it comes to environmental policy, Trump will definitely change America — and his legacy will literally be toxic.

Economist's View: Paul Krugman: Trump and Pruitt, Making America Polluted Again

Indeed..

As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Scott Pruitt, now the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, closely coordinated with major oil and gas producers, electric utilities and political groups with ties to the libertarian billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch to roll back environmental regulations, according to over 6,000 pages of emails made public on Wednesday.

The publication of the correspondence comes just days after Mr. Pruitt was sworn in to run the E.P.A., which is charged with reining in pollution and regulating public health. Senate Democrats tried last week to postpone a final vote until the emails could be made public, but Republicans beat back the delay and approved his confirmation on Friday largely along party lines.

The Pruitt Emails: E.P.A. Chief Was Arm in Arm With Industry - The New York Times

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It would not be an overstatement to say that President Donald Trump has placed the environment at the bottom of priority list. While his administration aggressively pursues its rollback of environmental protections and climate action, other key aspects of federal environmental policy have been completely ignored. Seven months into his presidency, Trump has yet to appoint a single member to the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), despite the fact that he is required by law to appoint a council to create and recommend policies to improve of the quality of the environment.

After noticing that its website showed no council members, ThinkProgress reached out to the council to ask for a list of current members. Told that this information was not available, ThinkProgress filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the current list of names. On Friday, the council’s FOIA public liaison responded to the request by noting that there were “no documents responsive to [the] request.” He explained that this is because there are currently no members of the council at all. The National Environmental Policy Act, passed by Congress in 1969 and signed into law by Republican President Richard Nixon, established the council as part of the executive office of the president.

Trump’s Council on Environmental Quality has no members at all – ThinkProgress

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Such is the stealth attack on climate science on an hostile EPA that they are retrained to prevent potentially embarrassing leaks in the fight against climate science:

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees are undergoing mandatory classes as part of a Trump administration effort to stop unauthorized disclosures to the press. “Enemies of the United States are relentless in their pursuit of information which they can exploit to harm U.S. interests,” according to a three-page fact sheet given to workers. Materials given to some of the employees, which were obtained by The Hill, use stark terms to warn about the consequences of leaking information. Few EPA employees handle classified information, but agency leadership is also trying to ensure that workers do not disclose “controlled unclassified information.”

EPA teaching employees how to avoid leaking information | TheHill

Amazing stuff..

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Keeping America safe!

The Trump administration plans to kill the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration's main initiative to fight climate change by lowering emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency's administrator, Scott Pruitt, said Monday. The Clean Power Plan aimed to help the US reach the goals set in the Paris climate agreement by curbing emissions from power plants. Pruitt has reportedly spent much of his term meeting with executives and lobbyists from companies and industries regulated by the EPA. Many reports also suggest that Pruitt's primary aim is to eliminate environmental protections and dismantle much of the regulatory agency. 

Under Pruitt, the EPA has already reversed a ban on a pesticide that can harm children's brains and moved to rescind the Clean Water Rule, which clarified the Clean Water Act to prohibit industries from dumping pollutants into streams and wetlands. The agency has also reportedly begun an initiative to challenge climate science, among other rollbacks. Some of these moves have been challenged in court, but others are already in effect. If Pruitt succeeds in rolling back a significant portion of the rules meant to protect air and water quality, we'd return to the state the US was in before these things were regulated. 

The EPA was founded in 1970 and soon after began a photo project called Documerica that captured more than 81,000 images showing what the US looked like from 1971 to 1977. More than 20,000 photos were archived, and at least 15,000 have been digitized by the National Archives. Here's a selection of those photos, many of which show what the US looked like without the air and water protections that exist today.

EPA photos show what US looked like before pollution regulation - Business Insider

You should see the photo's, they are staggering, it shows you what America pre-environmental policy looked like. Basically a third world country.

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This is bad in so many ways..

This year, 56 million sockeye salmon swam hundreds of miles from the ocean toward the rivers and streams of the Bristol Bay watershed in southwest Alaska. Many that escaped fishermen and bears leapt over waterfalls and used a mysterious combination of the Earth's magnetic field and their own sensory memories to locate the exact streams where they were born -- and then spawned, made gravel nests for their young, and died. "It seems like a heroic -- and perhaps tragic -- life cycle," said Thomas Quinn, a professor at the University of Washington who has been studying fish in Bristol Bay for 30 years.

The salmon's incredible migration also sustains people: Nearly half of the world's sockeye catch comes from this one region, which is one of the last, great salmon fisheries on Earth. The returning salmon and other ecological resources create some 14,000 full- and part-time jobs, generate about $480 million annually -- and support 4,000-year-old Alaska Native cultures. Now, however, Quinn and others fear this cycle could be strained if not broken. 

For more than 15 years, Northern Dynasty Minerals, a Canadian mining company, has sought to build a gold and copper mine in Bristol Bay. And this spring, the Trump administration took swift action to make that prospect more likely. Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt met on May 1 with the CEO of the Pebble Limited Partnership, a subsidiary of the mining company, CNN reported on September 22 based on interviews and government emails. Little more than an hour later, according to internal emails, the administrator directed his staff to reverse Obama-era protections for Bristol Bay, which had been created after years of scientific review. Based on that work, the previous administration had aimed to pre-emptively veto certain mining activities in the ecologically important region.

Bristol Bay: 'Most valuable salmon fishery in the world' - CNNPolitics

• Draining the swamp: We have the EPA head Scott Pruitt meeting with an industry captain lobbying, resulting in Reversing a decision that was years in the making in minutes, without any due process..
  
• Right-wingers against science: ignoring years of scientific impact studies that show that the proposed mine will destroy jobs and the ecology and the greatest salmon fishery in the world and this far outweighs any possible benefit from the proposed mine (see article for details).
  
• The EPA dismantling itself: The EPA should be the one organization sticking up for the environment, now it's being turned into a corporate lobby conduit.
  

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Drain the swamp?? Dirtying it, more like it..

Completely sabotaging the EPA and making it subservient to industry

Scott Pruitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is taking unprecedented steps to push scientists out of his office. Earlier this month, we learned via the Washington Post that Pruitt may soon be removing science advisers on advisory boards who have received grants from the EPA. “If we have individuals who are on those boards, sometimes receiving money from the agency … that to me causes questions on the independence and the veracity and the transparency of those recommendations that are coming our way,” he said at a Heritage Foundation meeting.

The move would be another step in Pruitt’s efforts to drastically whittle down EPA’s work as an environmental regulator, as Vox’s David Roberts outlined this summer. Pruitt has met almost exclusively with fossil fuel interests while freezing out his agency’s own scientists from reviewing regulatory rollbacks. He’s also started laying the groundwork to challenge EPA’s own legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases. Pruitt has described this as a “Back-to-Basics Agenda,” but environmental advocates read it as a process to undermine basic air and water protections for the benefit of industry.

And EPA is doing most of this in secret, with Pruitt going as far as to build a $25,000 secret phone booth at the agency’s headquarters (a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, in government-speak).

EPA to its scientists: go away or be quiet - Vox

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Deregulate all these nonsense environmental regulations, it kills freedom and destroys jobs and economic growth!

Destroy the EPA (from within, like Pruitt is doing), it's just a bunch of bureaucrats knowing nothing... 

The Immediate Global Costs of Pollution

It often feels to me that a disproportionate share of the discussion talk about environmental issues involves arguments over the risks of climate change, which in turn are built on models of how climate, economic, and political forces will evolve over the next century. But the environmental movement has had its biggest effect when the harms were immediate.

An example I have quoted to students involves the air pollution in the city of Chattanooga in the late 1960s--at a time when it was neck-and-neck with Los Angeles for worst air pollution of any US city--before the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970. Twenty years later, in 1990, William Oscar Johnson described what air pollution had been like in Chattanooga in an article in Sports Illustrated ("BACK ON TRACK," subtitled "Earth Day success story: The Chattanooga choo-choo no longer spews foul air," April 30, 1990):

"So Earth Day 1970 was just one of many dark and dirty days in Chattanooga, a city in which the mid-'60s death rate from tuberculosis was double that of the rest of Tennessee and triple that of the rest of the U.S., a city in which the filth in the air was so bad it melted nylon stockings off women's legs, in which executives kept supplies of clean white shirts in their offices so they could change when a shirt became too gray to be presentable, in which headlights were turned on at high noon because the sun was eclipsed by the gunk in the sky. Some citizens could actually identify different sections of town by nose alone—a stink of rotten eggs in one place, acrid metal in another, coal smoke in another, the pungent smell (and orangish haze) of nitrogen dioxide near the VAAP [Volunteer Army Ammunition Plant]. One part of town, site of a city dump, was known simply as Onion Bottom.

People joked, "We like to look at what we're breathing before we inhale it." A billboard appeared bearing this alarming question: DEEP DOWN INSIDE...WOULDN'T YOU RATHER BREATHE CLEAN AIR? Anyone who has lived in Chattanooga for a while has memories of what the old air did. Linda Harris, local chairman of Earth Day 1990 and acting director of the Chattanooga Nature Center, recalls her childhood: "Our eyes stung, and our noses itched. The milkman left milk in bottles at dawn, and when we brought them in a couple of hours later, we could write our names in the dirt that had collected in the moisture on the bottles." Wayne Cropp, director of the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Air Pollution Control Bureau, says, "You could always tell which way the ammo plant was by looking at the bushes in that part of town: The side away from the plant grew green, and the side toward it was brown." Fry recalls, "As a boy, I had a morning paper route. I delivered before daybreak. If I had a cold, my nose would be running black by the time I got home."

Remember, this isn't a description of coal smoke back in Victorian England in the mid-1800s. It's a US city less than a half-century ago.

But around the world, pollution continues to be a severe problem. The British medical journal The Lancet put together a Commission on Pollution and Health with about four dozen members. Its report, published October 19, 2017, reports near the beginning:

"Diseases caused by pollution were responsible for an estimated 9 million premature deaths in 2015—16% of all deaths worldwide—three times more deaths than from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined and 15 times more than from all wars and other forms of violence. In the most severely affected countries, pollution-related disease is responsible for more than one death in four.