The Deregulation Disaster

Spectator

We know the environment and its weather have been temperamental for several years. And we’ve known carbon dioxide released into our atmosphere tends to increase temperatures since the concept was first proposed way back in 1938. The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change was finally published in 1956 by scientists at Johns Hopkins, and we’ve been arguing about it ever since.

The argument is a shame because the science is pretty close to absolute; the gunk we emit to power almost everything traps heat in the atmosphere. The scientific agreement on this has reached about 99 percent but has not reached our current group of administrative decision makers.

The rest of the world, or most of it, is on board trying to at least cut back on the emission of greenhouse gasses while encouraging the expansion of renewable energy sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and even biofuels, basically the burning of garbage and landscaping waste. Electric and hybrid vehicles are gaining in popularity almost everywhere but here.

The current administration, under what passes for leadership from Donald Trump, is most decidedly not on board with even the basic idea of climate change, calling it a hoax perpetrated by the “radical left.” (As an aside, for a group that has never been in power, the “radical left” sure seems to control much.)

No, Trump and his cronies would like to return us to the smoke-belching, pollution-spewing days of the 1950s when oil and steel were kings and the environment was just a place to dump poison.

The Environmental Protection Agency, which has as its one and only job the protection of the environment, is bragging about their destruction of environmental regulations touting it as the “biggest deregulatory action in US history.”

We dumped the Paris Climate Accords during the first Trump administration, but we were just warming up. In the second bite at the apple, the EPA has overturned the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment finding that declared those gasses were a threat to our future. Nope, they are now magically gone unless a judge orders them restored.

They’ve also eliminated emission standards for vehicles, reduced emission standards for coal and gas powered plants, and significantly eased standards for the emission of carbon dioxide and methane gas. (According to the MIT Climate Portal, methane is 80 times more potent as a heat trapping greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide but only lasts 10-12 years in the atmosphere, while CO2 can accumulate in the atmosphere for centuries.)

They even rolled back the 2024 restrictions on mercury emissions, a nasty byproduct of the pollution produced by coal- and oil-fired power plants.

The EPA has also closed their offices dedicated to environmental justice because if there is no problem with the environment then there is no environmental injustice. So how does that work out?

Not wanting to be left out of the deregulation bloodbath, the Department of the Interior weakened standards for offshore mining and drilling, including off the coast of New England and off the west coast but, oddly, not off the west coast of Florida that would be visible from Mar-a-Lago. They even tried to open mining exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s 1.5 million acres, but that ruling is now in the courts.

All of this was such fun, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) jumped on the deregulation bandwagon and reduced both the definition of and protections for wetlands. Rules regarding mining in national forests were also rolled back.

The Department of Energy joined in and revoked 47 different standards for energy efficiency in household appliances. They must have assumed Americans want their appliances to be more wasteful and less efficient, goals now achieved.

Altogether, according to the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, more than 100 environmental rules and regulations have been loosened or eliminated altogether.

Meanwhile nearly every dire prediction about our worsening climate is coming to fruition. Severe storms occur more frequently and flooding is becoming commonplace in too many areas—parts of Florida now experience street flooding with every high tide, and indigenous communities in Louisiana and Alaska had to be relocated as sea levels began to devour their island and coastal homes.

Where there aren’t floods there is severe drought impacting agriculture across the Midwest. Wildfires now start earlier, burn hotter, consume more area, and last longer than in the past. More than 25 million people in the western U.S. relying on the Colorado River and its impoundments will face water restrictions in the near future, and the desert Southwest has already seen 10 days of record-breaking triple-digit heat this year.

The environment is becoming a runaway train because of human activity and political inactivity. Crisis mitigation via thoughtful human intervention would help. Instead, our current government is doing nothing to slow the disaster and everything to hurry its arrival.

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