4/15/18: If Trump is draining the swamp it isn’t staying drained long. E.P.A. chief and Swamp Creature Scott Pruitt is currently accused of receiving a sweetheart deal on an apartment rental in D.C. for himself, and his daughter, from the wife of a lobbyist for the natural gas industry.
I think we can all agree that nothing says, “I care more about the environment” than getting a sweetheart deal from a lobbyist in the fossil fuel industry.
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We have
a science moron in the White House.
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We also know Pruitt has put together a 20-person security
team to protect himself – perhaps from people who want to save endangered fish.
Cost of that detail and all the flying Pruitt and his guards and friends are
“required” to do, in just one year in office: an estimated $3,000,000.
What else do we know about Pruitt? He spent $43,000 for a soundproof booth for his office, so his communications would be secure, even though the E.P.A. already had a booth. All Pruitt had to do was ride the elevator down a couple of floors; but he didn’t feel like it. We know he demoted or fired several people who questioned his spending. We know he liked to have his government-paid drivers turn on sirens and flashers when he was on the way to a restaurant or a Washington Nationals ball game. We know he requested a $100,000 per month private jet club membership – and asked to be provided a bulletproof limousine. (Those last two requests were denied.)
We know Pruitt asked if he could raise the salaries of two
top aides, Sarah Greenwalt and Millan Hupp. Greenwalt would go from $107,435 to
$164,200 yearly, Hupp from $86,460 to $114,590. Those requests were denied.
Someone at the agency then used a little-known trick and raised their pay
regardless, although Pruitt says he had no idea how this happened. Maybe
poltergeists?
Finally, Pruitt spent $40,000 to fly to Morocco for a meeting about…well, try to guess! Clean air? Saving endangered fisheries? Discussions on climate change? Nope! Pruitt flew all that way, with Samantha Dravis (see: 4/6/18) at his side, accompanied by his phalanx of guards, because he wanted to talk to Moroccan officials about why their nation should burn more liquefied natural gas.
In the meantime, Pruitt is planning to “protect” the environment by slashing truck and automobile tailpipe emission and mileage regulations. “This is certainly a big deal. The result,” Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard program on environmental economics, warns, “will be more gas-guzzling vehicles on the road, greater total gasoline consumption, and a significant increase in carbon dioxide emissions.”
Because, you know what America really needs?
More smog!
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Call the blogger a cynic - he has a hunch why Pruitt took Dravis (right) to Morocco. |
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LET’S STOP AND PONDER clean air and water for a moment, or a world lacking in the same.
We now have in the Oval Office a science moron. Trump does not read. Trump watches television. Lots of television. He watches Fox News. Because the president is intellectually lazy, and because he gets his news from other science morons, he believes climate change is a hoax.
Trump will never grasp essential facts.
Because Trump is singularly unaware, it is unlikely he will ever grasp essential historical facts. Human beings are really good at ruining the environment. Head for the outskirts of any large U.S. city and what do you see? Trash Mountain. It’s the city dump, increasing annually in height and breadth. Think humanity can’t destroy its habitat? We have a field of plastic debris swirling in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A combination of currents has trapped an estimated 80,000 metric tons in what scientists now call “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”
It’s twice the size of Texas.
That’s not an aberration. Did you know farm runoff (pesticides and fertilizers) enters the Mississippi River and flows into the Gulf of Mexico? Did you know this runoff creates a “dead zone” at the mouth of the river, where oxygen in the water is depleted and sea life cannot survive? That zone is the size of New Jersey – including former Governor Chris Christie.
Try to find the Aral Sea on a world map. If you’re like Trump, you can’t. But look fast. Once the fourth largest lake in the world, decades of water diversion for cotton farming destroyed the Aral Sea.
By 2014 most of the lake had dried up.
You can go back in history and find plentiful examples of civilizations that wrecked the environment and collapsed. The Fertile Crescent of ancient times is today mostly desert. The Biblical “cedars of Lebanon” vanished. The Kushites who ruled the Upper Nile and once conquered Egypt took it on the environmental chin and watched their world collapse. The Khmer people who built Angkor Wat suffered a similar fate. The Mayan civilization in Central America rose to great heights and crashed.
You could go back forty years to a time when the world awakened to the danger from chlorofluorocarbons in products like aerosol hairspray. Trump, for whom hair spray is as essential as cheeseburgers, has denied this was ever a problem. Yet, four decades ago, humanity came close to ruining the earth’s ozone layer.
No one knew till it was almost too late. We were saved, again, by science, in the form of NASA satellites gathering data.
We got lucky.
Chlorofluorocarbons have been heavily regulated since. The damage remains. Each summer a hole in the ozone the size of North America forms over the Antarctic. Luckily, it doesn’t form over North America. The increase in ultraviolet rays reaching the surface of the earth would increase every man, woman, and child’s chances of developing skin cancer if it did. Now, only penguins and plankton pay a price.
Did you know scientists believe one fourth of the ocean’s reefs are damaged beyond repair? And did you know why?
Rising water temperatures.
Climate change.
Did you know scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported last year that sea ice at both the North Pole and the South Pole had declined to the lowest levels ever recorded? An extra area equal to 790,000 square miles of ocean surface was ice free, equal in size to two Mexico’s.
You can look all this up if you’re not lazy. The ten hottest years ever recorded, globally (according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA), are now, in order: 2016, 2015, 2017, 2014, 2010, 2005, 2013, 2009, 1998 and 2007. You can turn off Fox News, where climate change deniers go to spout, and go to NASA websites and study the facts.
Or you can do what the Big Orange Buffoon does: Watch hours
and hours of television daily and tweet.
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PERHAPS YOU HAVEN’T been paying attention to the people Trump wants to put in charge of guarding the environment. If you haven’t, you should. Pruitt and his business buddies are hell bent on slashing regulations that protect us all and protect the future for our children and our children’s children.
In a recent poll, however, a majority of Americans could not say who Pruitt was.
Consider, then, Andrew R. Wheeler, former lobbyist for Murray Energy, the largest coal-mining company in America. He has been tapped to serve as Pruitt’s deputy at the E.P.A. Wheeler previously worked for Senator “Snowball” Jim Inhofe, who once insisted, because he could pack a snowball in Washington D.C. in January, that climate change could not be real.
And dare we forget Kathleen Hartnett White, a former Texas environmental regulator? (Texas is pretty much famous for not regulating the environment, unless forced to when something blows up.)
Ms. White was originally Trump’s moron pick to head up the Council on Environmental Quality.
This would be akin to asking the president to serve as your marriage counselor.
White once called belief in global warming “a kind of paganism.” As for CO2, White wasn’t worried about it building up in the atmosphere. CO2, she liked to say, was “the gas of life on this planet.”
Choice for Council on Environmental Quality plagiarizes answers.
What went wrong for Ms. White in her appearance before a U.S. Senate committee? First, it turned out most of the written answers she supplied had been cut and pasted, word for word, from answers previously submitted by Swamp Creature Pruitt and another Swamp Creature nominee, during earlier hearings.
Second, once White started talking, you could understand why she tried to cheat her way through.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI.) asked her to estimate how much of the excess heat from climate change was being soaked up by the oceans. It’s an important question. If the oceans are currently absorbing most of the heat, the dangers of climate change are being masked. If the oceans and atmosphere both begin to warm up fast scientists predict catastrophic results.
White replied that she didn’t know, but said there were many opinions and “no right answer.”
This is the preferred fossil fuel industry answer. What it really means, is we don’t care. So, let’s keep burning as much coal and oil as we can.
Whitehouse set a trap. He asked if there was a “serious scientific opinion that it’s below 50 percent.” White said yes.
“Wow,” said Whitehouse.
Actually, NOAA has been clear about this for years:
More than 90 percent of the
warming that has happened on Earth over the past 50 years has occurred in the
ocean….Though the atmosphere has been spared from the full extent of global
warming for now, heat already stored in the ocean will eventually be released,
committing Earth to additional warming in the future.
Whitehouse wasn’t done. He trapped White again. He wondered if she agreed water expands as it warms. It’s a phenomenon that children learn about in sixth grade science.
“I do not have any kind of expertise or even much layman’s study of the ocean dynamics,” White admitted.
She might as well have had a note taped to her back by some prankster that read, “Kick me! I’m an idiot!”
Senator Edward J. Markey (D-MA.) had heard all he could stand. “Your positions are so far out of the mainstream,” he informed White, “they are not just outliers, they are outrageous. You have a fringe voice that denies science, economics and reality.”
White’s nomination was withdrawn when it became clear even
GOP senators would balk at confirmation.
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