Irresponsible de-regulation threatens the public

 

Bill Knight column for 10-5, 6 or 7

 The month of October is when many important environmental-protection breakthroughs have happened, when science showed politicians the need to address problems. This month, however, the Trump administration’s senseless zeal to de-regulate is continuing a wholesale reversal of decades-old progress.

Among October’s environmental milestones were establishing the non-governmental Nature Conservancy (1951), passing the Water Quality Act and the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act (1965), approving the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the National Trails System Act (1968), creating the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (1970), enacting  the Clean Water Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the Coastal Zone Management Act (1972), okaying the Toxic Substances Control Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976), and approving Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know, part of the Superfund Amendments and Reorganization Act (1986).

October 2020, though, faces Trump’s Forest Service issuing plans to open Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the country’s largest, to logging – weeks after Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency re-authorized the use of the herbicide atrazine, which contaminates water and has been outlawed in Europe for years.

Upending established norms, including defying science and law, has become the norm. Dismantling the role of government to protect people from unsafe substances or practices is Trump’s goal, as he said in 2017: “We're going to be cutting regulation massively.”

Besides logging public timber and again endorsing the carcinogenic atrazine, the administration is:

* relaxing 2015 regs to limit toxic wastewater from coal plants “at the expense of more than 20 million Americans who drink water and eat fish from lakes and rivers polluted by coal plant discharges,” the Chicago Tribune reported Sept. 8;

* opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil-drilling when there’s excess oil and crude prices are weak, CNN showed in August; and

* permitting thousands of oil and gas operations to stop monitoring for hazardous emissions and bypass anti-pollution rules, the Associated Press reported, also in August.

This means less monitoring for some Gulf Coast refineries and a Kentucky military complex dismantling warheads containing nerve gas, for the massive amounts of manure and carcasses at Midwestern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), for a Nevada nuclear site, and for other chemical and sewage plants, medical-waste shipments and various industrial smokestacks.

Oddly, such a “rollback of rules regulating methane emissions, automotive fuel-efficiency standards and mercury pollution … were opposed by companies the administration claimed to be helping,” the Washington Post said in September (further noting that heads of nine drug companies found it necessary to promise to make any COVID-19 vaccine safe after Trump implied he’d fast-track its development despite regulations).

Beyond the environment, Trump issued an Executive Order requiring employees in slaughterhouses (one of the country’s most dangerous jobs before the pandemic) to continue working – hours after Tyson exaggerated the possibility of meat shortages, an order essentially excusing employers from liability for exposing workers to COVID-19. Also, his Occupational Safety and Health Administration permitted about 100,000 workplaces to ignore the requirement to submit records on injuries and illnesses, according to an August expose by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

It’s no surprise Americans are crying foul about dangers the administration has created, from routine rejection of public-interest rules to the White House’s dishonest response to the pandemic.

It is surprising, however, to see non-political publications such as the academic journal Science and the magazine Scientific American publicly criticize Trump. Science denounced him for lying and for ignoring health scientists, and Scientific American for the first time in its 175-year history endorsed a presidential candidate (Joe Biden) because “the evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people – because he rejects evidence and science.”

October 2020 may see Trick ’r Treating scaled back due to COVID-19, but real-life horrors threaten us as much as the most nightmarish Halloween tales.