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babylonsister

(171,104 posts) Mon Jan 13, 2020, 08:22 PM Jan 2020

Trump's Latest Environmental Rollback Is a Middle Finger to Common Sense

January 12, 2020
Trump’s Latest Environmental Rollback Is a Middle Finger to Common Sense
“The oil and gas industry wins. The American people lose.”
Alexander C. Kaufman
Chris D’Angelo
This piece was originally published in HuffPost and appears here as part of our Climate Desk Partnership.

The Trump administration on Thursday unveiled plans to gut one of America’s most important environmental laws—a move experts say is as much of a handout to polluting industries as it is a slap in the face to science and local communities.

The proposed rules would change how the federal government implements the National Environmental Policy Act, a 50-year-old law that protects air, water and land by requiring federal agencies to conduct detailed environmental assessments of major infrastructure projects. Agencies would no longer be required to consider climate change when evaluating the environmental effects of pipelines, power plants, oil and gas drilling, airports, highways and other development.

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“Trump’s gift to the fossil fuel industry and special interests will silence ordinary Americans while giving polluters a free pass to trash the environment, destroy public lands and kill wildlife,” Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement.

If the proposed reforms take effect, taxpayers are likely to end up footing bigger bills for infrastructure damage from climate-linked environmental disasters, as agencies would no longer have to consider the threat that sea-level rise, flooding, wildfires or extreme weather pose to a project.

“We will now be building infrastructure with a blindfold at a time when we know extreme weather is just getting more and more extreme,” Goldfuss said.

In the last decade, the US experienced at least 119 climate and weather disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion each, more than double the number of billion-dollar disasters during the 2000s, according to a federal report released this week. Costs from those disasters over the last 10 years exceeds $800 billion.

more...

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2020/01/trumps-latest-environmental-rollback-is-a-middle-finger-to-common-sense/