Trump

IT’S A GREAT TIME TO BE A POLLUTER IN AMERICA: Trump’s EPA Refuses to Enforce Environmental Laws, Capping Steep 10-Year Drop in EPA Punishment of Polluters

April 5, 2020 | Shawn Collins

Pollution-global-warming-2370285_1920-1024x682 Late last month, Americans were panicked by COVID-19 claiming the lives of hundreds of people per day (it’s now more than 1,000 per day), and consumed by the fear of sickness, job loss, financial distress and the anxiety caused by our entire way of life being cast into uncertainty. President Trump seized on that very moment of intense national distraction to have his EPA decide to stop enforcing environmental laws altogether. This means that polluters will no longer face penalties for failing to monitor or report their pollution, or for spewing and dumping toxic chemicals into our air and water.

In the nearly 50 year history of the EPA, this is the first time that the agency has ever just flatly refused to do its job.

Trump’s EPA offered only phony reasons for this license to endanger American lives:

THE DEATH TRADE: Trump Says Re-Opening the Economy is Worth Many More American Deaths; Who’s With Him?

March 29, 2020 | Shawn Collins

coronavirus-4944680_1920-2 Today is Sunday, March 29. 125,000 Americans have tested positive for COVID-19. More than 2,200 have died. More than 500 died just yesterday. Infections and deaths are more than doubling every 3 days. 1,000 Americans will die one day this week. Having laid waste to New York, this viral hurricane is hungry for more devastation. The people of Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Dallas are next in line to suffer the anguish of massive infections, death, and the threatened collapse of their hospital systems. Small town, rural America will not be spared, either, because COVID-19 doesn’t give a damn for state or county lines.

How does this end? Quite possibly with hundreds of thousands of Americans dying, according to the Center for Disease Control, and other credible disease modelers. Dr. Anthony Fauci, just today, said 200,000 Americans could die. How many die depends significantly on whether we and our government take this killer virus seriously. Whether we are disciplined social distancers and honor the “stay at home” orders in place in most states, will have a lot to do with it.

President Trump knows all of this. He knows the horror that is bearing down on us. But we see no sign that this matters to him, at least not as much his re-election chances do. And he believes those chances are being badly damaged by the “stay at home” orders because they accept, as the price to be paid for saving perhaps a million or more American lives, a significantly weakened American economy (hopefully over the shorter term).

The Cavalry Is Not Coming: In Trump’s America, We are Unprotected Against Covid-19 and Toxins in our Environment

March 25, 2020 | Shawn Collins

From pandemic under-preparedness to environmental deregulation, Donald Trump’s federal government is out of the business of protecting lives and health.

coronavirus-4957673_1920-1-1024x683 As I write this, more than 55,000 Americans have tested positive for COVID-19. More than 800 of them have died. More than 200 died yesterday. In many parts of the country, the number of detected infections, and death, are doubling every 3 days. By this weekend, more than 100,000 will have tested positive. Likely more than 1,500 will have died. The rampage of this virus is on a frightening trajectory; we are likely to see days in the month of April where 500 or more, perhaps even 1000, Americans die in a single day.

Unmoved by the carnage mounting all around him, Donald Trump now enlists Americans to “pack the churches” for Easter in 18 days, in the craven hope that they will literally risk their lives in massive congregations, all to provide the photo op he believes will bolster his chances at re-election. Most scientists predict that COVID-19 will be at its most savage right about that time.

BLOOMBERG LAW INSIGHT: Trump ‘Secret Science Rule’ Would Set Environmental Law Back Decades

March 3, 2020 | Shawn Collins

trump-2546104_1920-1 The Trump administration’s “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” rule will severely limit the scientific studies used by the federal government to create new regulations. Environmental attorney Shawn Collins says the rule requires data to be publicly available, including confidential medical records and sensitive personal information and will be a major impediment for clean air and water rules. Continue reading…

Trump’s Toxic Swamp

February 12, 2020 | Shawn Collins

nature-3374583_1920-300x199 Not only has President Trump failed to clean up any swamps in Washington or elsewhere, but his new budget—if passed—will ensure that there are toxic swamps all over the country.

Trump’s new budget slashes the EPA’s budget by 26%, at the same time as his toadies at the agency cynically claim that the EPA will focus on its “core mission—providing Americans with clean air, clean water and ensuring chemical safety”. That’s a bald-faced lie. It’s impossible for the EPA to guarantee that with 26% less staff and $2.4 billion less in funding—the cuts proposed by Trump.

The most telling piece of the president’s budget is the cut to the EPA’s Superfund program. Trump’s disdain for people suffering from toxic pollution is evident in his proposed 10% cut of a program that currently has the longest backlog of toxic waste cleanup in 15 years. For lack of enough Superfund money, children are being exposed to the nastiest, most carcinogenic, toxic chemicals in their air and water while waiting for the government to clean up their neighborhoods and towns. If Trump actually cared about people—or clean air and water for that matter– he would beef up this program instead of letting regular folks twist in the wind.

Trump Administration Wreaks Havoc with Environmental Regulation Rollbacks: Will the Environment Ever Recover?

August 13, 2019 | The Collins Law Firm, P.C.

trump-2546104_1920-300x211 Since taking over, the Trump Administration has wreaked havoc on the environment, destroying environmental protections left and right. Trump has targeted rules that he thinks are burdensome to big business, even though environmental protections are generally good for the economy. Closing his eyes to this fact, Trump issued the “Presidential Executive Order on Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth.” This Order directs the heads of agencies, like the EPA, to review all existing regulations “that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources, with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy resources.”

Trump’s Executive Order has certainly been efficient at endangering the earth. As of June 2019, the Trump Administration has rolled back or is in the process of rolling back over 80 environmental rules and regulations. These rollbacks and proposed rollbacks reach every aspect of the environment, from emissions to endangered species. Rollbacks currently in effect include:

Lowering fines for automakers who do not meet average fuel efficiency standards

Amid Environmental Rollbacks, Ex EPA Chiefs Testify to Congress that Trump’s EPA is Putting Country at Risk

June 14, 2019 | Shawn Collins

It started with a letter to Congress.

Seven past EPA chiefs, appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents, wrote to Congress in April. They were concerned about US-EPA-1-300x300 the direction of the current EPA and offered to help Congress use its oversight to put a halt to Trump’s misguided deregulatory push and the dismissal of science in favor of politics at the agency.

The seven EPA leaders signing the letter had served under Obama, Reagan, and both Bushes, so the current administration could not blame the letter on partisan politics.

Polluters Win Big as EPA Loses More Criminal Investigators under Pruitt and Trump

June 22, 2018 | Shawn Collins

According to a recent Washington Post article, the EPA has lost a tenth of its criminal investigators since Trump has been in office.

The reason this is good news to polluters is that the special agents in the EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division are responsible for investigating the most serious criminal violations of the nation’s anti-pollution laws–violations which can result in prison time for those convicted.

The result is fewer investigators and fewer referrals to the Justice Department for prosecution. In 2017, only 206 criminal cases were referred to the Justice Department compared to 228 during the previous 12 month period under President Obama. Not surprisingly, the number of referrals in 2018 is on pace to drop even lower.

Trump Re-Nominates Anti-Science Zealot to Lead the Council on Environmental Quality

January 31, 2018 | Shawn Collins

Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, the latest in a parade of dreadful environmental nominees is back.

In December, the Senate sent the nomination of Kathleen-Hartnett White–for Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality–back to the White House for reconsideration, believing that Trump would submit someone else. Instead, Trump–in an obnoxious and lazy move–has booted her name right back to the Senate. Now it is up to the senators to put aside party politics and reject this disastrous nominee permanently.

Hartnett-White was an unqualified nominee from the start. A controversial Texas environmental regulator who has called carbon dioxide “the gas of life”, and denied that human activity is causing climate change, Hartnett-White’s initial confirmation hearing was a disaster. 1 She struggled to answer even basic scientific questions, prompting one senator to call her testimony “some of the most embarrassing” he’d ever seen, and later stating that she was unqualified and “didn’t understand high-school level scientific principles.” 2

Are We Ready to Take on the Fossil Fuel Industry Over Global Warming?

July 25, 2017 | Shawn Collins

The world is heading for a potential climate catastrophe and a recently released report has unmasked the biggest corporations responsible. The report entitled “Carbon Majors: Accounting for Carbon and Methane Emissions 1854-2010”, by researcher Richard Heede, “offers the most complete picture to date of which institutions extracted the fossil fuels that have been the root cause of global warming since the Industrial Revolution.”

In other words, this report lists which corporations are responsible for the majority of the carbon dioxide emissions that are fueling climate change. It’s obvious that energy corporations would be on this list. What is surprising is how few corporations can be responsible for so much. A full 63% of carbon dioxide emissions since the 1850s can be traced back to only 90 of the largest fossil fuel and cement producers in the world. Predictably, the United States accounts for a large share of these corporate giants. Among the nefarious 90 are the 21 American corporations listed below:

Chevron Texaco