The Shutdown Has Been Further Damaging An Already Damaged EPA

Andrew Wheeler by Nancy Ohanian

Even before the outrageous Trump-McConnell shutdown began, Trump's America-- which is also, don't forget, our America-- was getting more polluted, dangerously polluted. It is, after all, what the Republican Party stands for more than almost anything else: Pollution For Profit. It's no coincidence that the EPA’s enforcement division has lost at least 80 people since Trump entered office.

On Thursday, Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis reported that "Civil penalties for polluters under the Trump administration plummeted during the past fiscal year to the lowest average level since 1994, according to a new analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data. In the two decades before President Trump took office, EPA civil fines averaged more than $500 million a year, when adjusted for inflation. Last year’s total was 85 percent below that amount-- $72 million."

Cynthia Giles, who headed the EPA’s enforcement office in the Obama administration and conducted the analysis, said the inflation-adjusted figures were the lowest since the agency’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance was established.

The decline in civil penalties could undermine the EPA’s ability to deter wrongdoing, some former agency officials said, because they help ensure it is more expensive to violate the law than to comply with it. But Trump administration officials have said they are focusing much of their effort on working with companies ahead of time so they don’t run afoul of the law, rather than punishing them after the fact. That approach, they say, will ensure business operations can thrive without harming the environment.

Giles, now a guest fellow at the Harvard Environmental and Energy Law Program, questioned whether the new approach can achieve what administration officials promise.

“The public expects EPA to protect them from the worst polluters,” she said. “The Trump EPA is not doing that. What worries me is how industry will respond to EPA’s abandonment of tough enforcement.”

During his confirmation hearing last week, EPA acting administrator Andrew Wheeler told lawmakers that there had been “a lot of misleading information” suggesting that the agency had gone easier on polluters under Trump. He cited recent reports from environmental and governance groups that said the EPA’s enforcement had sagged.

...Civil penalties, which the EPA applies for a range of violations, including water contamination and air pollution, aim to recover the financial benefit a company has reaped by breaking the law and to impose additional costs so that firms are deterred from doing it in the future.

The root of the problem is a conservative world view and how the market will fix everything. But Trump's singular ignorance and psychosis has fully weaponized that socially destructive GOP anti-regulatory perspective. At the very end of November, New York Magazine published a report by Adam Raymond, Trump Says He’s Too Intelligent to Believe Climate Change Report, that goes to the heart of the problem normal Americans are facing today when it comes to the environment and to Climate Change. The toxic, swampy Regime's own efforts to delegitimize its own climate change report culminated in Trump doing an interview with Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post. Raymond reprinted a piece of what he called a "rambling, hardly coherent digression." Below is that and more:

DAWSEY: You said yesterday when you were leaving that you were skeptical of a climate change report that the government had done. Can you just explain why you’re skeptical of that report?

TRUMP: One of the problems that a lot of people like myself-- we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including-- just many other places-- the air is incredibly dirty. And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over. I mean, we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific, it flows, and we say where does this come from. And it takes many people to start off with.

Number two, if you go back and if you look at articles, they talked about global freezing, they talked about at some point the planets could have freeze to death, then it’s going to die of heat exhaustion. There is movement in the atmosphere. There’s no question. As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it-- not nearly like it is. Do we want clean water? Absolutely. Do we want clean air to breathe? Absolutely. The fire in California, where I was, if you looked at the floor, the floor of the fire, they have trees that were fallen, they did no forest management, no forest maintenance, and you can light-- you can take a match like this and light a tree trunk when that thing is laying there for more than 14 or 15 months. And it’s a massive problem in California.

DAWSEY: So you’re saying you don’t see the...

TRUMP: Josh, you go to other places where they have denser trees-- it’s more dense, where the trees are more flammable-- they don’t have forest fires like this, because they maintain. And it was very interesting, I was watching the firemen, and they’re raking brush-- you know the tumbleweed and brush, and all this stuff that’s growing underneath. It’s on fire, and they’re raking it, working so hard, and they’re raking all this stuff. If that was raked in the beginning, there’d be nothing to catch on fire. It’s very interesting to see. A lot of the trees, they took tremendous burn at the bottom, but they didn’t catch on fire. The bottom is all burned but they didn’t catch on fire because they sucked the water, they’re wet. You need forest management, and they don’t have it.

One of the first 2020 declared candidates, Audrey Denney, up in very rural northeast California, was incensed by Trump's comments which she said "make it clear that he does not have a grasp on the science of climate change, the complexities of forest ecosystems, or the basics of fire prevention. Last November we were experiencing weather patterns and dryness levels that mirrored peak fire season (July). High winds and these extraordinarily dry conditions led to a creating the most devastating fire in California’s history. Our changing climate will continue to threaten lives and property in Northern California and across our country. Many of California’s forests are overgrown and need to be restored to healthy forested ecosystems. It is complex and important work that must to be done. However, nearly 60% of the forests in California are under federal control-- it is the federal government who has chosen to divert resources away from forest management-- not California. As we look ahead to increased risks for people who live in urban-wildland interface areas, we need to devote resources to proper community planning, emergency preparedness, and innovative solutions for minimizing risks. We need leaders that understand the complexity, nuance, and science surrounding these issues."