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Trump’s War on the Environment Imperils Us
All
Posted
By George Ochenski On January 30, 2020
Halsey, Oregon.
Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
While the eyes of the nation are on the
Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the industry lobbyists he put in
charge of federal environmental regulatory agencies have been busily carrying
out an underhanded war on the environment. Attacking long-standing regulations
on pollution of air, land, water, and endangered species that have, in large
part, served the nation well has been their mission from day one of the Trump
administration. Now, adding to the rogue’s list of rollbacks, the EPA has decided to gut the Clean Water Act,
imperiling us, our children, grandchildren, and generations yet to come.
This development,
which will have very damaging and long-lasting consequences, may have surprised
some because Trump had already repealed the Obama-era Waters of the United
States rule. Suffice it to say his impression that the only way to benefit
businesses is to let them run hog wild with environmental destruction and
consumption of public resources is wildly off-base. Obviously, the Obama rule
was not significantly detrimental to the booming economy Trump inherited. And
clean water is one of our most precious public resources without which,
regardless of political affiliation, we cannot survive.
The mechanism
Trump’s administration used to roll back the regulations is via administrative
rulemaking. While most people rightfully believe making laws is the job of
Congress, the reality is that once Congress passes a bill and it’s signed into
law, the agency responsible for implementing the law must promulgate the highly
complex “rules” to fit the wide variety of situations virtually any law must
cover.
Importantly, once
administrative rules are adopted, they carry the force of law – in effect
giving bureaucracies significant latitude to basically make their own laws.
Legally, the administrative rules are supposed to be bound by the statutory
language of the law they implement. Unfortunately, it often takes a lawsuit to
overturn administrative rules that go beyond the laws they are intended to
implement and they stay in effect until overturned.
So now we are
faced with yet another attempt by the Trump administration to gut long-standing
beneficial environmental laws via administrative rule-making. And like the
gutting of the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act,
and the Clean Air Act, these rules will stand until the EPA is taken to court and
the rules are overturned.
In this case, the
last thing the Environmental Protection Agency is protecting is the
environment. The Waters of the United States rule judiciously regulated the
dumping of industrial pollutants, fertilizers, and pesticides into waterways.
And since water runs downhill, wetlands and intermittent streams were protected
for the very good reason that everyone lives downstream and the only way to
ensure clean surface and groundwater is to protect the uphill sources from
pollutants.
Moreover, wetlands
are one of nature’s true miracle workers. A variety of aquatic plants very
efficiently pull pollutants out of the water as it slowly seeps through. So
allowing developers or farmers to fill in wetlands is one of the absolutely
dumbest things anyone could do if protecting water quality is the goal.
If anyone needs a reminder of what
unregulated water pollution looks like, they need only turn their eyes to
Butte, Anaconda, and the Clark Fork River that comprise the nation’s largest
Superfund site. We learned that lesson 50 years ago, when the Clean Water Act
was enacted by Congress. But now, with a science-denying president and a
corporate-controlled EPA, we are about to repeat the tragic and incredibly
expensive mistakes of the past as Trump’s war on the environment increasingly
imperils us all.
Article printed from CounterPunch.org: https://www.counterpunch.org
URL to article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/30/trumps-war-on-the-environment-imperils-us-all/
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to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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