Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency drafting plan to destroy environment, boost emissions, aid polluters – We Got This Covered

The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 after widespread concern about pollution and its effects on human and animal life. For a half-century, they’ve been focused on fighting corporations on behalf of regular people, with their accomplishments including eliminating lead from gasoline, the recovery of the ozone layer, and a ban on harmful pesticide DDT.

But, sadly, those days are well and truly over. This shouldn’t be a surprise, as under Donald Trump, a government organization telling private corporations what they can and can’t do cannot be tolerated.

Trump began his attack on the EPA soon after returning to the presidency, cutting its budget by 65% and vowing to fire most of its staff. Under its Trump-appointed administrator and real-life Captain Planet villain Lee Zeldin, the agency’s new focus is to obliterate environmental protections and advise polluting corporations on how best they can bypass existing restrictions.

Now they’re on the verge of announcing their new philosophy: that greenhouse gas emissions are actually super awesome and nobody should be at all concerned about global warming. Hey, sure it’s getting really hot and stuff, but don’t freak out, just crank up the A/C some more!

Hope you like it hot

More specifically, they’re currently drafting a plan to rescind the 2009 legal opinion known as the “endangerment finding”, which concluded that greenhouse gas emissions present a serious risk to public health. That opinion underpins regulations like the Clean Air Act, which attempt to control emissions. For Zeldin, this will be a red-letter day. In March, he said:

“The Trump Administration will not sacrifice national prosperity, energy security, and the freedom of our people for an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas.”

Now he’s living up to those words. Other officials are horrified. David Doniger, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, didn’t mince his words: “They’re trying to completely defang the Clean Air Act by saying, ‘Well, this stuff’s just not dangerous. That claim is just mind-bogglingly contrary to the evidence.”

Most of you reading these words will have to live in the nightmare future Trump and Zeldin are building for us. The simple fact that Earth’s climate is irreversibly broken and we face a miserable lifetime of baking to death as much of the world becomes uninhabitable is just one of those things you try not to think about too much, or you’ll go mad.

Even if the most drastic carbon emissions regulations were strictly and immediately imposed, there’s no stopping the misery that’s coming for us. And, as you’ll see above, the exact opposite is happening – Trump and Zeldin are effectively shoving us into an oven so that energy companies can squeeze a few more bucks out of our pain.

But wait, there’s a silver lining! Trump is 78, so will be long dead by the time the full consequences of the environmental chaos he’s wrought become apparent. But Zeldin is only 45, so there’s every chance we’ll get the pleasure of watching him bake inside his leathery skin as he realizes he helped kill the world. You have to take your pleasures where you can find them, I guess.