Every President and every
Congress in my lifetime has tried to improve our physical environment: make it
cleaner, better-smelling, and less likely to make people sick and die. After
nearly a century of industrial poisoning of our air, waters, and land,
accomplished with a heedless disregard for long-term consequences, Americans
realized what we had lost and the need to get it back. At every stage,
industrial polluters fought new regulations, slowing down but never stopping
the gradual clean-up of the environment and the increasing protection of our
natural resources. Republicans as a Party may have been less enthusiastic about
this work than Democrats, but the concern for environmental and human health was
bipartisan.
The election of Donald Trump
appears to have suddenly reversed decades of progress, but the reversal began
earlier within the ranks of Republican elected officials. As soon as they
controlled the key federal agencies in early 2017, a new 21st-century
Republican policy has taken over, attacking environmental protection instead of
environmental polluters.
The NY Times has again done
the world a service by collecting every environmental regulation that the Trump
administration is reversing. Environmental regulations, which consider a future
decades away, may seem less important in this time of immediate existential
crisis. I think Trump’s single-minded reduction of environmental protections
also explains his seemingly confused coronavirus policies, and the larger
ideology of the elected Republican Party, which stands, or perhaps hides,
behind him.
The Times article
is not a story, but a list, an accounting of every intervention the Trump
administration has made and is trying to make on the environment. There is a
link to a story on each of 98 separate efforts to reverse direction. Those
stories begin repeatedly with words like “Revoked”, “Withdrew”, “Replaced”,
“Cancelled”, “Weakened”. The new rules fall into basic categories: air
pollution and emissions; drilling and extraction; infrastructure and planning;
animals; toxic substances and safety; and water pollution. It’s an encyclopedia
of disdain for human life.
The deep motivations of
contemporary Republicanism can be found in three exemplary efforts by the Trump
White House, with full support by Republicans in Congress.
The agency most vigilant
about threats to the health of American workers, the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration, OSHA,
alerted by doctors and scientists across the world, long ago recognized a novel
workplace danger. Since the 1990s, the popular trend toward using manufactured
stone for countertops greatly increased the number of American workers who
inhaled silica dust on the job. More and more of the men who do the cutting and
polishing, often Hispanic men, had developed silicosis. OSHA had been created by the Democratic Congress in 1970 and singed
into law by Republican President Richard Nixon. Within months, OSHA issued a rule limiting the permissible amount of silica dust in the air at
workplaces. Because the dangers have recently increased, OSHA issued a “warning”
in 2015 about the dangers of silica dust and a new rule in 2016, reducing by
half the permissible levels of dust in the air at workplaces. The Trump
administration cancelled this special emphasis on silica dust, ending the
ability of OSHA to inspect countertop fabrication plants.
Congress had been concerned
about reducing deadly chemical accidents since 1990, and established a new Chemical Safety Board to oversee the industry. The Environmental Protection
Agency, EPA, was also created by President Nixon in 1970. It first promulgated
regulations to prevent industrial chemical accidents in 1996. In 2013, the
whole country heard of the explosion of a fertilizer factory in West, Texas,
that killed twelve first responders and two members of the public, and injured
180 workers. As one of its final acts under President Obama, the EPA mandated less risky practices at chemical factories, to go into effect in March 2017. The new Trump EPA
immediately delayed the new “Chemical Disaster Rule” so they could reconsider
it, and many states sued the EPA. In court, Trump’s EPA cited costs as
justification, “the rule’s substantial compliance and implementation resource
burden”. But the US Court of Appeals ruled decisively against further delay. In
its 2018 opinion, the Court wrote about the history of environmental protection
as a “cooperative effort by federal, state, and local governments” to “protect
and enhance the quality of the Nation’s air resources so as to promote the
public health and welfare.” The justices ruled that the EPA delay was
“arbitrary and capricious”, “makes a mockery of the statute”, and “has delayed life-saving
protections.” Taking another tack, Trump’s EPA wrote a revised rule in 2019
that rolled back most of the new requirements of the 2017 rule.
The crisis of lead in the
water pipes in Flint, Michigan, shocked the nation and may have damaged a generation
of children there. The rule about removing lead from water pipes had been
written in 1991, requiring that a water system that exceeds maximum allowable
lead levels must replace 7% of its faulty pipes every year until the level is
reached. The Trump EPA has proposed a new rule reducing the repair to 3% per year, greatly extending the time that ordinary citizens
would be exposed to unsafe lead levels.
I had to dive deeply into a
chain of internet sources to put together those brief summaries of actions by
Republicans in our government. They typify the other 95 narratives: quick
reversals of decades of life-saving regulations after Trump took office, led by
industry representatives, who had long been arguing about rolling back
regulation, that he then put in charge of environmental positions in his
administration.
In each case, the long
history of bipartisan agreement about promoting the health and safety of
Americans is being repudiated. Instead, the relative weights of saving lives
and the “substantial compliance and implementation resource burden” have been
shifted. Industrial finances now trump human life, a decision perhaps made
easier by the disproportionate burden that industrial poisons put on the poor
and the non-white.
The news these days about
Trump, Republicans in Congress, and many Republican governors hastening to
restart the economy before the most basic protections against spread of the coronavirus
are in place is simply a continuation of this calculation. A week ago, Trump
explained the Republican balancing act: “Will some people be affected, yes, will some people
be affected badly, yes, but we have to get our country open and we have to get
it open soon.”
The Party that preaches
“right to life” has fully embraced an ideology that puts economic considerations
in front of the lives of Americans. Our lives have been systematically devalued
since 2017. I have not seen all of Trump’s televised briefings, but I have seen
many and read about others. Completely missing is any sign of sympathy for
those who have died, are dying, and will die. Today the official number of
deaths is over 83,000, and the Party of Death is in charge.
Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
May 12, 2020
No comments:
Post a Comment