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Month: March 2025

Published on Leave a comment on EPA irresponsibly weakens safeguards against toxic pollution at enormous risk to the public

Under the false claim of improving government efficiency, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently disbanded its Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. But in reality, this was part of a broader effort to weaken federal regulation of contaminating industries, enabling polluters to gain greater profit at the public’s expense.

The cutbacks parallel Trump’s executive order targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, which his administration unjustly portrays as ‘economically disruptive’ – along with environmental justice efforts.

The callous elimination of EPA’s environmental justice and civil rights program has especially troubling significance in Glynn County, Georgia, but there are hundreds of other communities in the U.S. dangerously threatened by this reckless EPA action due to ongoing health problems caused by hazardous industrial contamination. As reported in 2023 by First Coast News, “Decades of industrial pollution flowing from factories in Brunswick, Georgia has ended up in the bloodstreams of longtime residents.” They reported that studies by Emory University found elevated levels of numerous hazardous chemicals, which in at least ten cases analyzed were in the top 5% of the most chemically contaminated Americans.

People at highest risk from such toxins are low-income residents – predominantly racial minority groups – living within or close to the hazard zones surrounding polluted industrial sites, who therefore suffer the greatest environmental injustices which now being eliminated from EPA’s agenda. But there are long-term medical hazards caused by pollutants that enter water supplies, either through pipeline discharges, contaminants dumped on land leaching chemicals into groundwater and/or carried into waterways as stormwater runoff.

Since there are some 1,340 known industrially contaminated sites in America that are federally designated on the "National Priorities List," many of them within close proximity to neighborhoods containing homes, commercial areas, and jobs, such findings - though deeply disturbing - are not surprising. The contaminants found in blood analysis are known to cause cancer and debilitating damage to human reproductive health, digestive organs, and nervous systems. According to the Center for Public Integrity, nearly 100 million people in America are at risk due to exposure to industrial pollution, including many who are using industrially contaminated water supplies.

A federal court has ruled that recent EPA mass-firings were unlawful and at least some employees were temporarily reinstated, though their job security remains uncertain. Public demonstrations opposing these and other cutbacks undermining science in public policy are escalating across the nation.

Published on Leave a comment on EPA Rollbacks Falsely Justified, Will Harm Americans

Both environmental threats and anti-science propaganda were spread by the EPA administrator when he recently announced reckless cutbacks in critical public safeguards. [See: AP Article. ]

“Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families ...” said EPA Administrator Zeldin.

Aside from the negligence of eliminating restrictions on heat-trapping emissions that cause rising temperatures, Zeldin attacks well-established science by depicting concerns about climate change as a religion. Moreover, he falsely asserts that dismantling these protections will benefit the public, hiding the actual truth that EPA cutbacks will help polluters – foremost the fossil-fuel industry – not American families.

Some trillion dollars in damage has been caused by extreme weather events since 1980 and a third of these have occurred just in the past five years. That means the public will be paying far more through the loss of EPA protections and suffering worsening hardships in the years ahead because of eliminating additional EPA climate actions already budgeted.

In his deceptive claims, EPA’s Zeldin omits billions of dollars in added medical care, insurance costs, and property damage that will burden Americans as a direct result of these irresponsible reductions. Removing EPA protections will leave millions of households and businesses financially stranded because of costly hazards to health and property, plus loss of income caused by flooding, wildfires, and poorly regulated pollution.

Furthermore, these reductions are unlawful.

  • Legal experts say it's a marked departure from the agency’s historic purpose to protect human health and the environment. “It's an all out assault on climate regulation and environmental and public health protections,” says Michael Burger, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
  • However, the announcement does not mean that the EPA has legal authority to institute the proposed rollbacks, experts say. “It is not within the authority of an agency to take action or to push through decisions that are directly and diametrically opposed to its mandate and the reason it was created,” says Nikki Reisch, director of Climate and Energy at the Center for International Environmental Law.
  • While each administration has flexibility in how they enforce agency regulations, the process of outright repealing regulations is more complicated, Reisch notes. “Merely making these pronouncements from up high does not change the law,” she says. “It doesn't change the statutes that exist to protect clean air and clean water, and to protect the health of people throughout this country.”

Concerned citizens are well-advised to contact their elected officials in Washington and state their unconditional opposition to these destructive, illegal cutbacks.

Most reckless is the Trump Administration’s rejection of science through its denial of climate change – which is accelerating the damages caused by these multi-billion-dollar catastrophes – to defend Big Oil’s continued profiteering.

Published on Leave a comment on Deceptive Policies Worsen Dire Predicaments

Deceptive, opportunistic policies – aided by dogmatic and profitable disinformation – are increasingly reflected in the reckless, interrelated actions of elected officials and corporate leaders. Collectively, these exploitative measures, camouflaged and prolonged by the false rationalizations used to justify them, are worsening long-term environmental and financial predicaments, imposing unjust threats on American citizens, compounded by hastening global ecological instability.

Such deceptions abound in the unprecedented, lawless actions of Elon Musk in his unchecked dismantling of federal programs, disguised as alleged goals of the Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE], done in covertly attempting to compensate for $4.5 trillion in Trump's tax-cuts, which will primarily benefit the wealthy.  Americans are critically dependent on services provided by the programs under attack, including life-sustaining healthcare and medications. Although there is little dispute about the virtues of reducing waste and fraud, the greatest fraud of all is portraying Musk’s brazenly illegal ‘chainsaw massacre’ of agency staffing and operating funds as if it were the precise and accountable surgical approach required for legitimate auditing.

As Congressional representative Betty McCollum has observed, “Elon Musk is a private citizen with massive foreign debts, countless conflicts of interest, and unknown personal motivations that disqualify him from serving in the federal government.” Aside from these exasperating facts, consider that Musk has benefitted from at least $38 billion in federal contracts, grants, and tax credits. Without such massive government support, Musk’s enterprises wouldn’t exist, and his enormous wealth accumulation wouldn’t have been possible. Yet, it is his wealth that has given Musk the highly-disputed, woefully unjust and illegitimate political power enabling him to make drastic, unjustified staffing and budget cuts in federal programs that either threaten his interests or don't favor them. His self-serving motives are widely reported and legal grounds for immediately suspending DOGE incursions until a legitimate investigation of them can be conducted – if that is even possible within institutions so vulnerable to transactional incentives and penalties.

Among programs being dangerously weakened by Musk’s DOGE are those of NOAA and FEMA (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration and Federal Emergency Management Agency). Both agencies provide services essential to many Americans, foremost those living in areas vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding, like coastal Georgia. Without the ability to predict weather, facilitate emergency evacuations, and conduct recovery operations, people harmed by major storms will suffer unjust, life-changing penalties that until now have been minimized by tax-dollars spent on these programs that are now under attack. As evidenced by Hurricane Helene last year, the services of these agencies are now urgently needed far beyond coastal areas, as major storms take unprecedented toll hundreds of miles inland.

DOGE subversion of EPA programs also severely threatens Americans' health and quality of life by attempting to weaken or block enforcement of regulatory requirements protecting air and water quality. Furthermore, efforts to unlawfully eliminate such safeguards are provoking legal actions to oppose them, which are certain to further delay projects that must be environmentally reviewed under existing law. This litigation and related legal policy disputes, combined with the economic turmoil caused by massive cutbacks in federal jobs and critical public services, will create a tsunami of costly and harmful disruptions surging across all sectors.

Most reckless is the Trump Administration’s astoundingly defiant rejection of science through the denial of climate change by proclaiming it as a hoax to defend Big Oil’s continued profiteering. Meanwhile, heat-trapping fossil-fuel emissions are increasingly compounding the property damage and fatalities caused by multi-billion-dollar extreme-weather catastrophes.

Estimated damages related to such events are nearly $3 trillion since 1980, about a third of them within just the past five years due to accelerating climate-disrupting combustion of fossil-fuels. Likewise, the number of major events last year was triple the annual average over that 45-year period. It is no coincidence that because NOAA prepares, evaluates, and publicizes these estimates, the agency is now a prime DOGE target, driven by those who profit from dirty-energy disinformation and public officials who are obligated to them.