Killing the Environmental Protection Agency
epublican plans for the EPA are so terrifying. First, there is H.J. Res 46, which ...
… seeks to repeal updates to the National Park Service’s “9B” rules. The rules require detailed planning and set safety standards for oil and gas drilling inside the more than 40 national parks that have “split estate” ownership, where the federal government owns the surface but not the subsurface mineral rights.
Want to protect the Yellowstone River from an oil spill? Sorry about that. Because H.J. Res 46 would allow ...
… drilling [to] occur in national parks with little more than bare-minimum state regulations. The Park Service will have essentially no authority over oil and gas development proposed inside national parks. Leaks and spills could go unpunished without NPS authority to enforce safety standards.
But wait—there’s more.
Congress is set to repeal President Obama’s stream rule, which prevents the coal industry from polluting water sources near mines.
You can read the entire rule here. In short, it is there to make sure we have clean drinking water—a pretty important thing in just about anyone’s eyes. It’s up there with clean air, as far as necessities go. The reason Congress wants to repeal the stream rule?
Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) called it “one of the most onerous regulations that has come out of the Obama administration.”
“Tomorrow, we’re turning the page on Obama’s war on coal,” said Rep. Evan Jenkins (R-W.Va.).
“There is nothing about ‘protection’ in this rule,” he added. “This was the death mill to coal. It came from an ideologically driven administration. It didn’t care about streams. It wanted to do one thing: kill coal.”
It should be noted that
Rep. Johnson’s No. 3 campaign donor is Murray Energy,
which bills itself as the “Largest Underground Coal Mining Company in America.”
If the name sounds familiar, maybe it’s because Murray Energy has been fined—a lot—for labor violations,
for campaign finance violations, and
for environmental violations.
The truth is that regulations are not killing coal, and coal mining jobs will never come back.
he current administration wants to cut the EPA by two-thirds.
[Myron] Ebell has suggested
cutting the EPA workforce to 5,000, about a two-thirds reduction, over the next four years.
The agency’s budget of $8.1 billion would be sliced in half under his prescription, which he emphasized is his own and not necessarily Trump’s.
“My own personal view is that the EPA would be better served if it were a much leaner organization that had substantial cuts,” he said in an interview.
Ebell is director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Compe ive Enterprise Ins ute, a small-government think tank where he pushes the notion of “global warming alarmism” and against the science that says it’s a crisis.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/0...28Daily+Kos%29