Sorry, Scott: Now is the perfect time to talk about climate change
Our U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt says it is “insensitive” to talk about climate change while our citizens are dealing with hurricanes Harvey and Irma.
He obviously subscribes to the National Rifle Association school of thought that “now is not the right time” to talk about what we can do to improve gunsafety laws to prevent little children from being gunned down in school right after little children have just been gunned down in school.
Here’s Pruitt last
“What we need to focus on is access to clean water, addressing these areas of Superfund activities that may cause an attack on water, issues of access to fuel.
“Those are things so important to citizens of Florida right now, and to discuss the cause and effects of these storms, there’s the … place [and time] to do that, it’s not now.”
Oh please. We all know that he means the proper place and time is “never” as far as he and his boss, Donald Trump, are concerned.
But I think the rest of us can all chew gum and Friday: walk at the same time.
We can help the hurricane victims and talk about how climate change contributed to the huge storms simultaneously without tripping over our own feet.
Another Scott, Republican Rick Scott, is the governor of Florida, the state sure to be inundated by rising sea levels this century and just now devastated by Irma.
Like Trump and Pruitt, Scott also denies climate change, to the point of banning the use of the phrases “climate change” and “global warming” by any Florida state departments.
Meanwhile, the state and federal governments are spending a great deal of taxpayer money to raise Miami’s roadways to prevent the constant flooding caused by — guess what, climate change. (See Point 7 below). Regulation-averse worse. The people of that “wild West” state of rugged individualism, white supremacy and oil industry money is now going struggle with repairing of lax or no regulations that contributed heavily to the destructiveness of Hurricane Harvey.
Houston has been paved over because it has no zoning laws and it is perfectly legal to plop a gas storage facility or oil well down next to a development of single-family homes. is Texas to decades
Texas bans chemical companies from telling the public about the quantity and nature of the toxic chemicals they store in case of a catastrophe. Not just doesn’t regulate, bans.
See the Arkema Chemical plant fire in Crosby, Texas, during Harvey or the West Fertilizer plant explosion that killed 15 people and destroyed twothirds of West, Texas, in 2013.
Anybody want to be a volunteer fireman there?
We need to talk about the effects of climate change on our weather, our oceans and the land, particularly the nation’s scorching Southwest where humans may not be able to live within our lifetimes.
We need to figure out why hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, droughts and floods get more frequent and more intense every year and what we can do to mitigate their harm (starting with not rebuilding in their paths and flood plains any more).
Our federal government is going in exactly the opposite direction.
Just last week the EPA announced buyouts and early retirement for 1,200 employees, many of them environmental scientists.
“We’re reducing the size of government, protecting taxpayer dollars and staying true to our core mission of protecting the environment and American jobs,” Pruitt said.
He also has a rusting, lead-painted bridge he wants to sell you.
Pruitt was hired to do one thing — demolish the EPA, and it looks like he is doing a fine job.
But let’s look at what his boss, the president, has been doing (just the highlights):
Dismantled the Waters of the United States Rule, a regulation long in the making to reduce pollutants flowing into American rivers and streams.
Proposed cutting out all funding in the 2018 fiscal year budget for protecting major watersheds in the United States, including the Delaware River and Chesapeake Bay watersheds that provide much of our drinking water.
Became the only country to withdraw from the 190-nation Paris Accords for totally bogus reasons.
Blocked the Clean Power Plan designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and reversed a ban on drilling in the Arctic.
Rolled back auto fuel efficiency standards and ended a rule banning dumping of pollutants from mining into streams.
Ended a government study that was nearing completion on the health effects of mountaintop-removal mining, which contributes to significantly higher rates of birth defects, cancer and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases among people living near those mines.
Rescinded a rule mandating that rising sea level be considered when the federal government builds infrastructure in flood-prone areas (like Houston, Miami and the Florida Keys where we will soon be rebuilding Route 1).
Here’s the thing. I don’t think that environmental regulation was the “broken system” that Trump voters wanted so badly to elect an iconoclast nonpolitician president to fix.
I think it was those 40,000 lobbyists and that do-nothing Congress – controlled by Republicans and bribed by silos full of corporate cash – that Trump voters wanted to see fixed. I see nothing changing there.
All of Trump’s environmental rollbacks are the result of that same corrupt system as he caves to the lobbyists and hands some very dirty industries carte blanche to do whatever they want to our people, our land, our drinking water and the air we breathe.
But, just as King Canute could not hold back the tides, Trump and Pruitt cannot make climate change disappear by not talking about it.
It’ll still be 110 in next week. Albuquerque