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Trump and the Environment

“Obama era safeguards” ...truly a puerile euphemism.

But whst did he do to protect the lemmings?
 
Apparently not enough, thus they’ve done gone and afflicted us with Trump in the WH.
 
“Obama era safeguards” ...truly a puerile euphemism.

But whst did he do to protect the lemmings?

Actually, he tried to regulate carbon as a pollutant, climate warming in the Arctic has altered typical lemming population boom bust cycles because snow fall cycles are altered. The whole ecosystem and especially migratory bird populations are in an unstable state of flux because lemming population cycles are inconsistent to and unpredictable.
 
I'm buying lakefront property. I figure after the outer banks sink in 20 years or so and the Great Dismal Swamp becomes the new NC "beach", lakefront values will be off the charts.
 
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I’m a Christian, I believe in intelligent design, and I also understand that when we’re talking about oil or fossil fuels, in general, God gave us the ability to discover there are resources known as fossil fuels inside the Earth that we can extract,
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Jesus.

God also gave us the ability to understand how to not fuck up our environment.
 
God gave us the sun well before dinosaurs died to give us fossil fuels.
 
At Pruitt’s E.P.A.: No Studies, No Data, No Rules

Read on the site for embedded links.

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The other day, Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, took yet another step to muzzle the scientific inquiry that for years has informed sound policy at an agency he seems determined to destroy. He told his subordinates that they could no longer make policy on the basis of studies that included data from participants who were guaranteed confidentiality. Over the years, such studies have been crucial to establishing links between mortality and pollution, led to regulations and saved many lives. Limiting policymakers to only those studies with publicly available health data greatly narrows the field of research.

This got us to searching again (we’ve been here before with Mr. Pruitt) for the word that best describes the Trump administration’s hostility to scientific inquiry. “Disdain” jumps to mind. Fourteen months into his term, President Trump has yet to name a director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or any of the four associate directors authorized by Congress — jobs that have provided presidents for decades with unbiased counsel.

There’s another word: Fear. From the top down, the people who run this government seem absolutely terrified of scientific inquiry and the ways in which it could threaten Mr. Trump’s promise to ease regulations on fossil fuel companies and increase their profits, no matter the cost to public health and the planet. Think of it from Mr. Trump’s point of view. Why would he want a science adviser telling him that the link between climate change and the burning of fossil fuels is incontrovertible, that he should stick with the Paris agreement on climate change, that it’s a grave mistake to repudiate every one of President Obama’s efforts to slow the dangerous warming of the earth’s atmosphere?

Far better to stick his head in the sand, ostrichlike; do that, and the need for policies regulating greenhouse gas emissions or dangerous pollutants like soot and mercury magically disappears. Which is certainly Mr. Pruitt’s modus operandi. As Gina McCarthy, a former E.P.A. administrator, and her deputy for air quality, Janet McCabe, said in a recent Times Op-Ed: “Mr. Pruitt’s goal is simple: No studies, no data, no rules.”

Mr. Pruitt has been averse to science and fact from Day 1. Last fall, he announced that scientists who receive or had received federal research grants would be barred from serving on the agency’s nearly two dozen scientific advisory committees. The purpose, he said, was to eliminate conflicts of interest; the real purpose, it soon became clear, was to create vacancies that he could fill with industry experts and state officials pushing for lax regulations — people whose own conflicts of interest would be left unexamined. As Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists noted at the time, Mr. Pruitt’s claim that federal funding should exclude scientists from an E.P.A. advisory board while industry funding should not exclude them was on its face absurd.

Though the E.P.A. is the epicenter of denial, avoiding inconvenient truths is common practice elsewhere in the administration. Last year, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke reassigned Joel Clement, the department’s director of policy analysis and top expert on the impact of climate change in the Arctic, to an accounting job (Mr. Clement resigned in protest). Mr. Zinke also ordered the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine to cancel two studies that conflicted with the administration’s goal of expanding domestic fossil fuel production. One was examining the health risks of people living near surface coal mining sites in Appalachia; the other sought ways of strengthening the department’s oil and gas safety inspection program.

Even the official vocabulary of global warming has changed, as if problems can be made to evaporate simply by describing them in more benign terms. At the Agriculture Department, for instance, staff members are encouraged to use terms like “weather extremes” instead of “climate change.” Web pages about global warning have been removed, edited or buried throughout the government. Last week, lest there be any confusion in the hinterlands, E.P.A. staff members in regional offices received a list of talking points instructing them to tell people that “clear gaps remain including our understanding of the role of human activity” on global warming. This is vintage Pruitt: Sow doubt whenever possible about established science.

Mr. Trump’s economic advisers have reinforced this bias. His latest budget called for big funding cuts and in some cases elimination of programs aimed at protecting human health and building resilience against the effects of climate change — among them the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s coastal research program and the Energy Department’s energy efficiency and advanced technology programs. Congress wisely denied these cuts, thanks to hard work by Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leaders of the Senate and House. Whether their efforts do anything to change the mind-set of Mr. Trump and his lieutenants remains to be seen.

Mr. Pruitt is widely believed to be positioning himself for a run for governor in his home state, Oklahoma; he also seems to covet the attorney general’s office, and, astoundingly, is said to harbor presidential ambitions. But he and Mr. Zinke are unlikely to go anywhere soon, and as long as they have the support of the denier in chief, we can expect more disrespect for science and its practitioners.
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