Trump To U.S And World Citizens: Drop Dead. Fossil Fuel Billionaires MUST Be Protected

EPA is dropping a 17-year old "endangerment finding"
that forms the basis of fossil fuel regulations in
the United States. Ultimately, it's a stupid and
dangerous move.

The Trump administration on Thursday got rid of a key Environmental Protection Agency rule that forms the basis for virtually all federal regulations related to climate change. 

The change won't just affect the Trump administration. His move will make it harder for future administrations to adopt climate rules and regs. I've seen getting rid of the so-called EPA "endangerment finding" described as removing a load bearing pillar of climate regulations.

Per the Washington Post:

"Nearly 17 years after the the Environment Protection Agency declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten the public's health and welfare, the agency on Thursday rescinded the landmark legal opinion underpinning a wave of federal policies aimed at climate change. 

The agency issued its 'endangerment finding' in 2009, concluding that the government had a sound legal basis to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. In scrapping the policy this week, the EPA will seek to erase limits on emissions from cars power plants, and other industries that release the vast majority of the nations planet-warming pollution".

Trump has repeated declared change a hoax, most likely because it would help fossil fuel oligarchs, who in turn will feel obligated to help him.

"This is a big deal," EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Thursday, which is the only thing I would agree with him on in this saga. 

At first, the main effect today's actions will have is to get rid of greenhouse emission standards on trucks and cars. 

But if the end of the endangerment finding holds up in court, no future EPA will be able to regulate CO2 emissions,  noted the Washington Post article. 

Environmental groups are up in arms, as you might imagine. 

One of the more succinct explanations of the ultimate result of what happened today came from Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological and Diversity's Safe Climate Transport Campaign: 

"American families will suffer long-term harms so that giant auto and oil companies can pocket short-term profits."

Alex Witt of Climate Power was even more blunt: "This decision makes it abundantly clear that Trump is willing to make our families sicker and less safe, all to benefit a few billionaire polluters"

 For his part, Zeldin, the EPA administrator sarcastically called the 17-year old rule he's trying to get rid of the "holy grail of the climate change religion.' 

This decision will cost lives as it will hinder the worldwide battle against climate change. But then, the Trump administration thinks little of lives of people like you and me. 

Trump's administration has cut back on the National Weather Service's ability to forecast and monitor the weather. This at a time when climate change is generally making dangerous weather more complex and harder to predict.  The NWS cutbacks would have been worse if not for rare bipartisan efforts to keep more meteorologists on the job

At the behest of Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi "ICE Barbie" Noem, who also controls the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is doggedly working to cut back on FEMA disaster aid. So when those storms -  often climate related - hit, you're on your own if your house washed or blew away. 

 We haven't heard the last of this issue, though. I guarantee lawsuits that would attempt to restore the endangerment finding. It will probably make its way all the way up to the Supreme Court. The court is staked with Trump stooges, though, so despite an expected long battle, I'm not super optimistic here.

"This is going to be an ongoing struggle between rule of law and a corrupt fossil fuel industry that wants to be unbridled," said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, (D-RI). 

EPA Scrubs Mention Of Human Caused Climate Change From Its Website

The EPA in recent weeks has scrubbed their websites 
of pretty much any information that climate change
is caused by humans. It's denial, and a way to 
help the fossil fuel industry. 

Once again, the Trump administration has wildly concluded that eliminating mention of human-caused climate change will somehow "prove" that it doesn't exist. 

Never mind that anybody with half a brain understands that by far the main driving force behind our warming world is us humans. 

The latest censorship and anti-science move is on an EPA website, on the page that explains the causes of climate change. Though it no longer accurately does that. 

Oh, on this page, climate can change, alright, the EPA admits. But whoever revised it is Mr. or Ms. Excuse coming up with all kinds of reasons the climate changes. Like these:

The Earth's orbit and rotation can change.

There's variations if solar activity.  

The Earth's reflectivity changes.

Volcanoes can blow up and the stuff they belch into the atmosphere changes the climate

There might be natural changes in carbon dioxide concentrations. 

They're so, so, close on that last one. As everybody except the Keystone Kops of the Trump administration know, humans are increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide, and that's making the world warm up. 

There's even a chart, right there, under their reasons for climate change list, that shows atmospheric carbon dioxide rocketing upward like mad since the Industrial Revolution started.   

On the social media site Bluesky, climatologist Daniel Swain wrote how he was able to compare the EPA web site that was up on October 8 with the current iteration. 

Human-caused warming was removed from the causes of climate change page that I described above. Swain also noted that there used to be "indicators of climate change" pages on the EPA website that have been scrubbed entirely. "The pages no longer exist; there are numerous dead links on the current/live EPA site, and no indications they have been moved to a new URL" Swain said. 

Other pages that describe how climate change can affect children's health and low income populations are also now gone, as the Washington Post notes. 

Not only is climate information deleted from the EPA sites, the web pages out and out lie. Earlier versions of the web site say the buildup of greenhouse gases have resulted in "dangerous effects" to humans and the ecosystem. Now, the pages say the greenhouse effect "is natural and necessary to support life."

Sure. unless you let the greenhouse effect spiral out of control via all us humans belching fossil fuel emissions. 

 Swain, wearing his Captain Obvious hat, had this to say:

"...it is still profoundly alarming that the primary regulatory body for environmental protection and pollution control in this country is not actively ignoring scientific evidence. This will end poorly."

The response at the EPA of these questions raised by Swain, the Washington Post and others is typically juvenile and nonsensical of the Trump administration. 

Hold your nose as you read this missive from EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch. :

"Unlike the previous administration, the Trump EPA is focused on protecting human health and the environment while Powering the Great American Comeback, not left-wing political agendas.... As such. this agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult."

It's always a projection from Trump and MAGA, isn't it?  Our minion Brigit describes solid science as a cult. Meanwhile, MAGA seems to be like the ultimate cult.  

The recent revisions on the EPA site might well be an effort to tee up a move to get rid of something called the endangerment finding. 

That's a legal and scientific foundation for standards and rules put in place back in 2009 that serves as a legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. 

That's because Trump, and by extension EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, want to gift the oil and gas industry with more ways to make money atop their already record profits. 

The EPA, at Trump's behest. also wants to roll back controls enacted in 1990 that limited sulfur dioxide pollution. Sulfur dioxide in the air causes smog and acid rain. 

By the way, I did see little "oopsie" they left in at the top of their "climate change causes' page:

"Natural processes are always influencing the earth's climate and can explain climate changes prior to the Industrial Revolution of the 1700s. However, recent climate changes cannot be explained by natural causes alone."

Looks like one of the climate deniers over the EPA didn't proofread as much as Trump might have hoped.  

To The Trump Team, Climate Change Is "Benefitting" Mankind

Under the Trump administration, the Environmental
Protection Agency isn't protecting anything, 
except maybe the fossil fuel industry. 

 In the Trump world, up is down, down is up and everything is half ass backwards. 

E&E News By Politico has the deets:

"President Trump has long rejected climate science.

Now, his administration is grappling with how to assemble a body of federal climate research to show a warming world is benefitting humanity. The claims would be highly misleading and ignore decades of scientific research that shows climate change will have increasingly dire effects."

As I previously reported, the Trump administration has scrubbed climate information from a variety of web sites and fired numerous climate scientists. 

Also, as I have noted before, the Trumpers want to remove something called an endangerment finding from the EPA.  That document requires the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

As E&E News reports, legal experts think the federal courts would frown on getting rid of that endangerment finding. The Supreme Court has rejected three challenges to the endangerment finding. 

To get around that, Trump and the EPA would just come up with a new document, one that falsely says that climate change is a bunch of hooey,  

They could do that by finding "experts" who falsely claim that climate change is not a biggie.  Or they can pick apart existing U.S. and international climate reports, offering dubious counter arguments to those reports.  

And they could produce a new National Climate Assessment written by unqualified Trump minions and fossil fuel industry hacks. 

Of course, these morons would be up against a continued onslaught of new reports and findings describing why climate change is bad. I mean, every time I turn around, there's some new study that says climate change will worsen X, Y and Z.  

I never hear any serious person say climate change is going to create more joy, happiness, rainbows and puppy dogs.  But, that doesn't matter. All the climate deniers have to do is go before a Trump-appointed "judge" who's a total suck up to Dear Leader. From there, all bets are off. Such a "judge" could well go along with the Trump fantasy narrative. 

That fantasy narrative has already taken shape. 

David Legates, who was briefly a NOAA mucky muck during the first Trump administration, has these revisionist thoughts on greenhouse gases. 

"I'm pretty certain that what we're going to conclude from what we know now is that carbon dioxide is not an evil gas......Rather, it's a gas beneficial to life on Earth. It'll increase temperatures slightly, and warmer temperatures are certainly better than colder temperatures."

Spoken like a dude who's sick of winter where he lives but has no idea how science works.  

So let's do Science 101 for this guy. 

Fine, it's true, we need carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, since as those of you who went through Grade School science know, plants need CO2 to survive. Since us humans need plants to survive, a certain amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is truly a good thing.

Also, it's basic physics that if you increase CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere, you're going to increase the temperature of said atmosphere. 

Teasing apart Legate's words, it appears he also thinks climate change is good because fewer people would die of cold weather. Which might actually be true. But what about all the extra people that keep dying of heat related causes because heat waves keep getting hotter?

I guess they don't count. 

As you'd expect, serious climate scientists are appalled by all this.  E&E News got this quote from the ever-reliable (and smart and relatable) climate scientist Michael Mann:

"What the Trump administration is trying to do amounts to nothing more than trying to pollute the process with ideologically-motivated antiscoience.,....It means the U.S. federal government is now at war with humanity."

We know, of course, despite any criticism, the Trump gang will soldier on. 

While climate change keeps biting us "little people" in the ass, our billionaire overlords can rest easy, protecting in their little cocoons as they keep raking in blood money from the fossil fuel industry.