Scott Pruitt, director of the Environmental Protection Agency, has announced that any scientist who receives a grant from the agency may not serve on an advisory panel. He says they have a conflict of interest.
However, representatives of the coal, oil, and gas industries may serve on these panels because they do not get grants to study the environmental effects of their activities.
Pruitt continues as a faithful servant of the industries that pollute the environment.
The madness continues.
Trump names lobbyist for coal industry to be second in command at EPA.
To those who said there was no difference between Trump and Clinton, take note.
And take a deep breath, while you can. Before the air is so polluted that you can’t breathe.
I hope you can open this. It worked for me. It captures the near-apocalyptic moment we are in.
We have heard for years the complaints of red state elected officials about federal aid subsidizing the undeserving. Ted Cruz of Texas and other red state conservatives opposed federal aid to the northeastern states devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Now the same conservatives want the federal taxpayers to help them out in the aftermath of a Hurricane Harvey and Irma.
Garrison Keillor called them out for their hypocrisy in this brilliant article.
He writes:
“The Republic of Texas believes in self-reliance and is suspicious of Washington sticking its big nose in your business. “Government is not the answer. You are not doing anyone a favor by creating dependency, destroying individual responsibility.” So said Sen. Ted Cruz (R), though not last week. Sunday on Fox News, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said Texas would need upward of $150 billion in federal aid for damage inflicted by Harvey. The stories out of Houston have all been about neighborliness and helping hands and people donating to relief funds, but you don’t raise $150 billion by holding bake sales. This is almost as much as the annual budget of the U.S. Army. I’m just saying.
“I’m all in favor of pouring money into Texas, but I am a bleeding-heart liberal who favors single-payer health care. How is being struck by a hurricane so different from being hit by cancer? I’m only asking.
“Houstonians chose to settle on a swampy flood plain barely 50 feet above sea level. The risks of doing so are fairly clear. If you chose to live in a tree and the branch your hammock was attached to fell down, you wouldn’t ask for a government subsidy to hang your hammock in a different tree.
“President Ronald Reagan said that government isn’t the answer, it is the problem, and conservatives have found that line very resonant over the years. In Cruz’s run for president last year, he called for the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service. He did not mention this last week. It would be hard to raise an extra $150 billion without the progressive income tax unless you could persuade Mexico to foot the bill.
“Similarly, if a desert state such as Arizona expects the feds to solve its water shortage, as Sen. Jeff Flake (R) suggested recently, by guaranteeing Arizona first dibs on Lake Mead, this strikes me as a departure from conservative principles. Lake Mead, and Boulder Dam, which created it, were not built by Lake Mead Inc., but by the federal government. The residents of Phoenix decided freely to settle in an arid valley, and they have used federal water supplies to keep their lawns green. Why should we Minnesotans, who chose to live near water, subsidize golf courses on the desert? You like sunshine? Fine. Take responsibility for your decision and work out a deal with Perrier to keep yourselves hydrated.
“Arizona is populated by folks who dread winter and hate having to shovel snow. In Minnesota, we recognize that snow is a form of water and that it’s snowmelt that replenishes the aquifers. So we make a rational decision to live here. A warm, dry winter is a sort of disaster for us, but we don’t apply to Washington for hankies. If we made a decision to live underwater on a coral reef off Hawaii, we wouldn’t expect the feds to provide us with Aqua-Lungs. If we chose to fly to the moon and play among the stars and spend spring on Jupiter and Mars and we got lost out there, we wouldn’t expect NASA to come rescue us. Get my drift here?”
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.”
We are familiar with ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) model legislation to promote charter schools and vouchers, as well as to eliminate teachers’ unions.
The New York Times reported today that ALEC and the Koch brothers are working on behalf of the electric industry to block and reverse support for the rooftop solar power movement. When the public was concerned about over-reliance on fossil fuels, many states offered incentives for homeowners to install rooftop solar panels. Some allow homeowners to sell excess power back to utilities. The power industry wants to get rid of these incentives. And they are succeeding. In the Trump era, there is no form of progress that can’t be rolled back.
This is an alarming story, prepared by the Center for Public Integrity. . Teaching materials are being distributed by the fossil fuel industry to elementary schools.
It begins:
“Jennifer Merritt’s first-graders at Jefferson Elementary School in Pryor, Oklahoma, were in for a treat. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, the students gathered in late November for story time with two special guests, state Rep. Tom Gann and state Sen. Marty Quinn.
“Dressed in suits, the Republican lawmakers read aloud from “Petro Pete’s Big Bad Dream,” a parable in which a Bob the Builder lookalike awakens to find his toothbrush, hardhat and even the tires on his bike missing. Abandoned by the school bus, Pete walks to Petroville Elementary in his pajamas.
“Petro Pete’s Big Bad Dream” was published in 2016. Oklahoma Energy Resources Board
“It sounds like you are missing all of your petroleum by-products today!” his teacher, Mrs. Rigwell, exclaims, extolling oil’s benefits to Pete and fellow students like Sammy Shale. Before long, Pete decides that “having no petroleum is like a nightmare!”
“The tale is the latest in an illustrated series by the Oklahoma Energy Resources Board, a state agency funded by oil and gas producers. The board has spent upwards of $40 million over the past two decades on K-12 education with a pro-industry bent, including hundreds of pages of curricula, a speaker series and an afterschool program — all at no cost to educators.
“A similar program in Ohio shows teachers how to “frack” Twinkies using straws to pump for cream and advises on the curriculum for a charter school that revolves around shale drilling. A national program whose sponsors include BP and Shell claims it’s too soon to tell if the earth is heating up, but “a little warming might be a good thing.”
“Decades of documents reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity reveal a tightly woven network of organizations that works in concert with the oil and gas industry to paint a rosy picture of fossil fuels in America’s classrooms. Led by advertising and public-relations strategists, the groups have long plied the tools of their trade on impressionable children and teachers desperate for resources.”
As an antidote, science teachers should show “Gasland,” the award-winning documentary that shows how fracking destroys the water supply and kills animals. The most memorable scene: Water running out of a kitchen faucet. The home-owner strikes a match, and the chemical-rich water catches fire.
Debate and discuss.
The American edition of The Guardian, a British newspaper, has https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/05/public-lands-project-description?utm_source=eml&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=&CMP_TU=&CMP_BUNIT=&att5=tarted a series to cover any efforts to sell off our national lands or lease them to oil and gas interests or for mining.
“At a moment of deep political division, few issues draw as much bipartisan support from the American public as the sanctity of our national lands. Yet conservative lawmakers have quietly laid the foundation to give away Americans’ birthright: 640m acres of national land. The move would give private developers and oil, gas and mining interests unprecedented control of our shared resources.
“Today, the Guardian US launches This Land is Your Land, a new series to raise awareness about the threat to our public lands and hold politicians and corporate interests accountable for their environmental policies. The series kicks off with an editorial, The Guardian view on America’s public lands: Stop the Republican threat, and a story about risks to the Grand Canyon, as Arizona officials ask the Trump administration to end a ban on uranium mining. While the urgency of climate change is rightly taking up many of our newsroom resources at the moment, we also want to keep the spotlight on the other environmental crisis facing America.
The inspiration for This Land is Your Land came directly from you, our readers and supporters. When the Guardian US published its first story on public lands earlier this year, after the Republican congressman Jason Chaffetz of Utah introduced a bill to sell off 3.3m acres of national land, the piece became a social media phenomenon, attracting close to a million readers, and generating 61,000 comments on Facebook. We received countless emails asking that we stay on top of the subject.
We heard you, and we are excited to launch the series today on this critical issue that desperately needs more national news coverage. When your read the stories in This Land is Your Land, you might notice the project has an unique $50,000 fundraising campaign built into it. As a supporter of the Guardian, your generosity already helps fund environmental series like this, so we’re not asking for additional contributions from you for this campaign. But since we are constantly exploring new and innovative ways to encourage readers to pay for our journalism, we thought you might be interested to know about the fundraising approaches we’re trialing.
The vast majority of Americans support efforts to preserve our national lands—and the public can influence the debate. Not long after our story on Chaffetz’s bill to sell 3.3m acres ran, the negative backlash had a meaningful impact: Chaffetz was forced to pull support for his own legislation.
You can follow This Land is Your Land here.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/series/this-land-is-your-land
Sincerely,
Jane Spencer
Deputy Editor/Strategy
Guardian US
Keep Watch
Well, we knew this was coming. Scott Pruitt, in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency, has dismissed at least five members of a major scientific review board.
The Environmental Protection Agency has dismissed at least five members of a major scientific review board, the latest signal of what critics call a campaign by the Trump administration to shrink the agency’s regulatory reach by reducing the role of academic research.
A spokesman for the E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, said he would consider replacing the academic scientists with representatives from industries whose pollution the agency is supposed to regulate, as part of the wide net it plans to cast. “The administrator believes we should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community,” said the spokesman, J. P. Freire.
The dismissals on Friday came about six weeks after the House passed a bill aimed at changing the composition of another E.P.A. scientific review board to include more representation from the corporate world.
President Trump has directed Mr. Pruitt to radically remake the E.P.A., pushing for deep cuts in its budget — including a 40 percent reduction for its main scientific branch — and instructing him to roll back major Obama-era regulations on climate change and clean water protection. In recent weeks, the agency has removed some scientific data on climate change from its websites, and Mr. Pruitt has publicly questioned the established science of human-caused climate change.
Nothing in the purview of the federal government is sacred in this administration.
Now Trump is reviewing the national parks and lands declared to be “national monuments.”
Mother Jones reports:
“Sixteen presidents have cemented their legacies by designating new public lands and national monuments, a power granted to them under the 1906 Antiquities Act. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, wants to go in the opposite direction: If he actually follows through on his threat to reverse any monuments created by Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, he’d be the first commander-in-chief to revoke a monument designated by a predecessor. He’d also be stretching the legal authority of his office beyond what Congress ever granted.
“An attack on one monument is an attack on all of them,” says one environmental advocate.
Trump’s latest executive order, which he’ll sign at the Interior on Wednesday, directs the department to review 24 monument designations dating back to January 1996. The oldest monument under review is the 1996 Grand Staircase-Escalante monument; the most recent is Bears Ears, a twin rock formation that was President Obama’s last designation. (Both are southern Utah monuments criticized by local and state officials who oppose federal land control and want to keep the areas open for mining, logging, and grazing.) Everything in between, including Obama’s record 554 million acres of land and ocean set aside, will be up for review until August 24, 120 days from when Trump signs the executive order. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke will then recommend legislative or executive changes to monument designations. Trump’s next actions could include shrinking them or revoking their designation entirely.
“While Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante are expected to top Trump’s list, environmentalists don’t think the review will stop there. “An attack on one monument is an attack on all of them,” says Dan Hartinger, the Wilderness Society’s deputy director for Parks and Public Lands Defense.
“But as Zinke, a self-described Teddy Roosevelt conservationist, admitted on a White House press call on Tuesday night, it’s “untested whether the president can do that.”
“That’s because no president has even tried to revoke a national monument since 1938, when President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to reverse Calvin Coolidge’s designation of the Castle Pinckney National Monument in South Carolina. The attorney general at the time, however, decided that the Act “does not authorize [the President] to abolish [national monuments] after they have been established.” In the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, Congress again affirmed that only it had the power to revoke or modify national monuments, says Mark Squillace, a University of Colorado Law professor and expert on the Antiquities Act.”
Apparently Trump wants oil drilling allowed at these sites.
Will Trump’s legacy be one of pillage?
He seems to be at war with everything achieved by his predecessors.
How will he be remembered?
Diane Ravitch's blog 