August 12, 2019: F**k Those Fish - Oil and Mining Lobbyist Heads Interior Department

 

8/12/19: The Trump administration decides to weaken protections for endangered species, including humans. 

 

The Trump Extinction Plan. 

First, immigrants who enter the U.S. legally, but are deemed likely to end up requiring government assistance, will be denied permanent residency. Wealthy immigrants will receive green cards and may stay. So, Russian oligarchs can come and buy Trump Tower apartments and other Trump properties with a combined value of $109 million, in laundered cash. 

If you have Irish ancestors, as an example, be glad this policy was not in place in 1848. Because your people – and this blogger’s people – would have been returned to Ireland to starve.

 

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“The best available science” is out.

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As for other endangered species, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt announces plans to gut the Endangered Species Act. First, it will be easier to remove “endangered species” from the list. (The new list will list them as, “Dead.”) 

Second, protections for “threatened species” will be weakened. 

Third, regulators will be allowed to factor in economic costs when deciding whether any species should be protected. 

In other words, people like Bernhardt, a former oil and mining lobbyist, will decide. Hey, these salmon are swimming in a river near where an oil company wants to drill! F**k those fish. 

Drill, baby, drill! 

Bernhardt is who he is, a shill for the oil and mining interests. If every grizzly and every bald eagle in America died, covered in oil, he wouldn’t mind.

What this place needs is an oil well.

 

Environmental groups explode at news of this bizarre new approach. The Sierra Club is blunt in its characterization: 

The Trump Extinction Plan would gut critical endangered species protections by making it much more difficult to extend protections to threatened species, delaying lifesaving action until a species’ population is potentially impossible to save; making it more difficult to protect polar bears, coral reefs, and other species that are impacted by the effects of climate change; allowing economic factors to be analyzed when deciding if a species should be saved; and making it easier for companies to build roads, pipelines, mines, and other industrial projects in critical habitat areas that are essential to imperiled species’ survival.

 

The Audubon Society condemns the changes, noting that since 1973, decisions to protect endangered or threatened species have been based, legally, on “the best available science.” Now “the best available science” is out. 

“These changes crash a bulldozer through the Endangered Species Act’s lifesaving protections for America’s most vulnerable wildlife,” Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity warns. 

Other groups opposed to the changes include Defenders of Wildlife, the Endangered Species Coalition, Friends of the Earth, Wilderness Watch, The American Bird Conservancy, The National Parks Conservation Association, grey wolves, bison, most fish, monarch butterflies and honeybees.

 

The American Petroleum Institute is thrilled with the new rules.