The Gulf of Mexico sustains a large fishing and tourism industry. Not for long.
Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, wants to gut environmental protection regulations that prevent the dumping of toxic chemicals into the Gulf.
Pruitt sued the EPA a dozen times when he was attorney general of Oklahoma. Oklahoma now has so much fracking that fracking is blamed for extraordinary earthquakes in the state.
Fracking involves pumping chemicals into the earth to force the release of natural gas. What to do with the chemical waste? Pruitt says, dump it into the Gulf.
If you want to learn about fracking, see a film that was nominated for an zacademy Award called “Gasland.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Toxic Waste Trump
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Cruz voted against Hurricane Sandy relief. But now that it’s Texas, he’s asked for federal aid for his state. Republicans excel at hypocrisy and propaganda and abjectly fail at governance.
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Houston we have a problem.
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The prohibition against dumping of toxic waste in water ways has also been rolled back to accommodate Trumps lie that coal jobs will come back.
Look for a pandemic of poisoning caused by lead and chemicals–variants of the Flint Michigan disaster. Trump and his friends believe in the exploitation of “mother” earth and her children for immediate profits.
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He likes coal because he has a lump of coal for a heart.
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Now that’s a real good one!
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This is unbelievable destruction to an environment that still hasn’t recovered from the BP oil disaster. How bad can this administration get? It’s mind blowing to willfully destroy the Gulf so that corporations don’t have to clean up their own messes. Praise to the almighty worship of $$$$$!! That is narrow-minded short term thinking.
How long will this Orange Fruitcake and his minions continue?
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One word: DISGUSTING. Everything about this administration is DISGUSTING.
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Let’s not pretend that the Gulf of Mexico is some kind of pristine nature preserve or that the previous administration protected it unduly. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-spill-the-scandal-and-the-president-20100608
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I don’t think anyone is pretending, certainly not anyone who has lived in the perimeter of the Gulf. I am among them.
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At least Obama had the guts to admit that he’d made a mistake in believing oil companies are responsible for cleaning up their messes. I don’t see tRump ever admitting that he made a mistake and he certainly hasn’t spoken out about the toxic dump that the Gulf will become.
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“”In case you were wondering who’s responsible,” Obama told the nation, “I take responsibility.” Sounding chastened, he acknowledged that his administration had failed to adequately reform the Minerals Management Service, the scandal-ridden federal agency that for years had essentially allowed the oil industry to self-regulate. “There wasn’t sufficient urgency,” the president said. “Absolutely I take responsibility for that.” He also admitted that he had been too credulous of the oil giants: “I was wrong in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios.” ‘
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I agree Carol and would add that Obama and the Democrats in general, appointed competent people to the environmental protection agencies. Trump has appointed boobs who seek to destroy the agencies they are heading. That’s a difference. Bush the dumber did the same to FEMA.
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So, Dienne, does that mean you favor turning the Gulf into a toxic dump?
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It’s hard for me to contain my rage about this comment, but I’ll try. The first point is callously inappropriate and the second is just plain irrelevant.
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When I was employed as a hydrogeologist, working on hazardous waste sites and devising ways to clean them up, my colleagues and I often reflected on the old way of dealing with hazardous waste – found in the statement “The solution to pollution is dilution.”
While it is absolutely true that any amount of pollution can be diluted down to undetectable levels by a sufficient amount of water, it doesn’t address the moral and ethical issues of taking pollution you made and sharing it with everybody else by dumping it in a shared resource such as the Gulf.
The expedient solution (dilution) seems to be the default answer in the Trump Admin.
Sad.
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Sideshow Don thinks the solution to pollution (and collusion and …) is delusion …
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Even Friedrich Hayek, one of the godfathers of classical liberalism and a passionate advocate of extreme limitations on the size and functions of government says in The Road to Serfdom that one of the legitimate functions of government is to protect people from the poisoning of common resources and gives the example of preventing them from dumping toxic chemicals into public waterways.
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Thank you, rockhound, for your experienced, informed commentary on this.
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Oil/gas billionaires responsible for climate change!
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Billions upon billions of humans responsible for climate change!
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Of course climate change is a Chinese hoax. Trump said so and he never lies, does he????
Katrina, Sandy, Irene and now Harvey are just figments of our imagination AND why would we trust the words of the world’s best scientific minds who have spent their professional lives in studying climate change and we KNOW that they make tons of money by stating their findings. That is in complete contrast to the carbon companies who have to have government subsidies and pay no income tax to keep afloat.
Why not make the planet a toxic wasteland? Our children and posterity are not important. The goal is to transmute natural wealth into perceived wealth and when money is more important than people perhaps someday we will have a huge pile of money with no people. obviously that should be our end goal.
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I don’t remember what wag it was who said that a developer is someone who names his or her project after whatever was destroyed and replaced by it–Whispering Pines, Sunny Acres, Belle Creek, Seminole Heights.
Soon enough, the whole of the country will look like the dump in Calcutta, with isolated gold-plated towers rising above it.
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I was thinking the same thing as I drove through Detroit a short while ago. A state-of-the-art, beautiful baseball stadium surrounded by unbelievable urban decay. Surreal.
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Seminole Heights. Yes. That is the name of the elementary school I attended, in Florida of course.
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I’m guessing a Seminole Height is about 10 feet above sea level? 😊
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Until recently, Laura, I lived in that neighborhood. Small world. No Seminoles in Seminole Heights these days.
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In Florida, yes, GregB. The highest elevation in the state is the Miami dump. LOL.
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I’m not surprised. Up until now, the caustic chemicals used in fracking have been pumped back into the earth for storage turning our underground aquifers into underground oceans of poison.
Many of the underground water sources are now toxic and the fracking industry is running out of places to hide this poison so now in the name of profits, they want to pump this poison into the oceans.
Here’s a list of the chemicals used in fracking in the U.S.
“In the US, about 750 compounds have been listed as additives for hydraulic fracturing, also known as ingredients of pressurized fracking fluid,[9] in an industry report to the US Congress in 2011 after originally being kept secret for “commercial reasons”.[10][11] The following is a partial list of the chemical constituents in additives that are used or have been used in fracturing operations, as based on the report of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, some are known to be carcinogenic.[12]”
If you want to sleep tonight, DO NOT click the link and read the list of chemicals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_additives_for_hydraulic_fracturing#United_States
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This just came out in an email from the WH. Gingrich apparently believes that tRump is going to show future successes. (Freedom of choice: Gag or Barf.)
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At Fox News, Newt Gingrich writes that the mainstream media’s reporting on President Trump’s approval ratings are misrepresentative, citing the quick changes in the approval rating of President Reagan in the early 1980s as evidence that “ratings at this point in time are not indicative of a president’s future success.”
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As I recall, Reagan never attacked or belittled other Republicans. He said the 11th Commandment was: don’t criticize members of your own party.
Trump doesn’t know that one or the other 10
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If Trump actually were to deliver a massive infrastructure program that put many millions of blue-collar people to work–something the Democrats didn’t do after the 2007 crash when they had the opportunity to do so–then such a turnaround would, in fact, probably happen. But Mr. Trump has found that it’s one thing to make YUUGE promises on the campaign trail and quite another to deliver on them. His trillion-dollar infrastructure program has now become a few million in incentives to private industry–nothing like the massive WPA-style program he hinted at throughout the campaign and made the key component of his brief remarks at his Inauguration. Of course, it’s that that his supporters among blue-collar workers voted for. Of course, his own party wouldn’t give that to him, even if he continued to want to put such a thing in place.
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That’s what Hitler did, of course, shortly after assuming power. He borrowed very, very heavily and made enormous investments that put a lot of people to work building roads and factories and the like–and then he had to pay for all of that, and the only way to do that was through war and territorial expansion.
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I find Trump to be very frightening. So far the only time the main stream media has supported him was when he dropped a MOAB bomb. He can’t stand criticism.
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The US government has not been helping those caught in the tragedy of Hurricane Harvey. The state of Texas is also responsible for some of its problems.
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The U.S. government is asking ordinary people to fund rescue and recovery operations following Hurricane Harvey.
Terribly bad federal planning has exacerbated the tragedy this week:
FEMA did not get a new director until late June.
The National Hurricane Center has been without a head since May.
Shoddy planning by the Trump administration has badly failed to mitigate the harm from this forecasted monster hurricane.
The federal government has subsidized fossil fuels.
Trump has issued an executive order curbing enforcement of climate regulations.
Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Paris climate agreement.
Trump has disbanded the Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment.
In recent decades, wetlands and green space have been swallowed up by massive so-called development including roads, roads, and more roads in Houston and other areas impacted by rainfall.
Building code in Texas is voluntary unless a municipality adopts a code and enforces it.
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Something I wrote four years ago today …
What To Do?
You are headed toward a grabitational singularity, and someone offers you a ton of gold. What good is that? Feathers and cannonballs all fall the same, I’m told. If you have a way to convert the mass to energy and fire it in the right direction — Does feeding the beast make it worse for you? Then maybe a bit tangentially, I dunno — you might have a ghost of a chance of saving your ectoplasm for another day. Meanwhile aliens — they might as well be aliens for all they understand of humanity — are terraforming your planet into something only an alien could love. What to do? What to do? Indeed …
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A nice piece of writing, that.
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When planet Earth is no longer inhabitable, all the greedy, sociopathic oligarchs will escape on Elon Musk’s rockets and colonize Mars.
At least, that’s their dream.
The rest of us can, and will, go to hell on the uninhabitable earth, for all they care.
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That is why the Pixar movie “WALL-E” was so prescient…
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The UN has chastised tRump on the example he set for the rest of the world. I hope our ‘great leader’ hears about this condemnation.
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UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination – August 18 by Marina Fang
WASHINGTON ― A United Nations panel forcefully chastised President Donald Trump’sresponse to this month’s violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, writing that it was “disturbed by the failure at the highest political level of the United States of America to unequivocally reject and condemn the racist violent events and demonstrations.”
In an unusual decision released Wednesday but dated Aug. 18, the U.N.’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination warned of “the example this failure could set for the rest of the world.”
Without mentioning Trump by name but assailing “the Government of the United States of America, including the high-level politicians and public officials,” the committee members urged the U.S. “not only to unequivocally and unconditionally reject and condemn racist hate speech and racist crimes in Charlottesville and throughout the country, but also to actively contribute to the promotion of understanding, tolerance, and diversity between ethnic groups, and acknowledge their contribution to the history and diversity of the United States of America.”
The committee wrote the strong condemnation under its “early warning and urgent action procedures.” Such a step is relatively rare and has been taken only six other times in the past decade — sometimes in the cases of large-scale ethnic or religious violence….
https://www.scribd.com/book/357017026/UN-Committee-on-the-Elimination-of-Racial-Discrimination-August-18-decision Scribd gives you monthly access to books, audiobooks, and more – for less than the cost of a paperback. Join today and read free for 30 days. Find out more at: http://www.scribd.com/
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WALL•Ⓔ is a good depiction but Soldier (1998) is more realistic —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2TQkTRj8e0
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This comment just came in from the email put out by the WH:
The editorial board for Louisiana’s The Advocate writes that “in traveling to Texas on Tuesday to show solidarity with victims of Hurricane Harvey, the president demonstrated that he knows the value of responding quickly when America is touched by disaster.”
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He wants to cut funding for the agencies that are responsible for giving help. Great way to demonstrate how compassionate he is to a disaster. (Who writes this stuff?)
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