Steve Frey
We are very fortunate to be living in the New River Valley. The rivers, mountains and clean air make life pretty incredible in this neck of the woods.
It would be a shame to lose it (there’s the Mountain Valley Pipeline issue, but that will be another whole column).
Other parts of the country have not always been so fortunate. Many young people have no memory of city skies filled with smog so thick there were designated danger levels announced each day.
Most don’t recall the Cuyahoga River catching fire near Cleveland. They’re unaware of the cancer-producing chemical cesspool that was Love Canal near Buffalo.
They don’t even remember acid rain and millions of acres of trees destroyed in the Northeast by smoke-belching factories in the Midwest. They have forgotten DDT and “Silent Spring.”
They have no memory of this because the U.S. committed to cleaning the environment and setting standards that helped to eliminate much of our national environmental disgrace.
They may not remember, but the adults in charge of the government should. However, those folks have chosen to make a fast buck and ignore the long-term impact on the only environment we have.
Since the new administration came into office in Washington, the Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department have systematically worked to eliminate regulations put in place to protect us.
The latest example is modifying the mileage standards for automobiles. This would have helped use less oil and produce less choking exhaust.
Most Americans aren’t paying attention to the slow dismantling of environmental safety regulations. Here’s a sampling of changes.
The administration reduced the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument area by 46 percent and the Bear Ears area by 85 percent. This action will open them up to mineral/fossil fuel extraction. For people living there, it’s like closing down the New River Trail and Claytor Lake State Park to frack for natural gas.
The administration also changed some of the rules protecting endangered and threatened species that could eliminate various animals.
Brett Hartl with the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement: “If these regulations had been in place in the 1970s, the bald eagle and the gray whale would be extinct today.” This is discouraging for those who care about the elimination of species.
EPA administrator Scott Pruitt halted a previous government request that fossil-fuel producers monitor methane emissions and overruled EPA scientists pleading to ban the insecticide chlorpyrifos.
Pruitt postponed the Clean Power Plan, the effort to regulate power-plant emissions; delayed the “Waters of the United States” rule for two years; and wanted to revise downwardly the “social cost of carbon,” a critical statistic used to measure the costs versus benefits of fighting climate change.
The administration ended NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System, a $10-million-per-year project to fund pilot programs intended to monitor global carbon emissions.
In March, NPR reported that the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) dropped “climate change” and associated descriptions from its strategic plan after one of the most expensive years of natural disasters in U.S. history.
The administration proposed budget cuts to the Clean Energy Program, environmental services such as the EPA’s “Report on the Environment,” and the agency’s Human Health Risk Assessment program.
In January, the administration dropped an EPA policy intended to solidify reductions of hazardous air pollution from industrial sources.
Also in January, a report found that the administration systematically altered government websites to eliminate mentions of climate change. If you remove the term, it doesn’t exist, right?
The Interior Department declared that bird deaths caused by environmental accidents are legal. After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, the largest in U.S. history, approximately 600,000 to 800,000 birds were killed in the Gulf of Mexico, and this action will eliminate fines for companies like BP, which was responsible for that spill.
The administration announced that climate change is no longer a national security threat.
However, according to National Geographic, extreme weather events such as droughts, wildfires, heatwaves, and torrential rains may become more frequent and intense because of climate change, posing threats to both military installations and civilian populations.
As weather patterns change, some disease-bearing creatures such as mosquitoes and ticks will have longer active seasons over more extensive areas.
Melting ice means that the generally ice-jammed Arctic could be converted into a major shipping route, altering geopolitics.
Warmer, more acidic waters will kill off many coral reefs, which supply food and income to millions.
And as sea levels rise, flooding will relocate coastal communities like Tangier Island and threaten military installations such as the U.S. Navy base in Norfolk.
In October 2017, the Interior Department proposed auctioning off oil and gas leases for 77 million acres of Federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico.
This came just days after an oil pipeline off the coast of Louisiana spilled around 672,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, which was the most massive oil leak in the Gulf since the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
The administration proposed eliminating the Clean Power Plan. Along with potential climate hazards, experts criticized the CPP’s repeal for public health reasons.
Coal-fired power plants spew carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and fine particulate matter—all powerful irritants to the respiratory system.
Last August, the Trump administration suspended a study of health risks to residents who live near mountaintop-removal coal mine sites in Appalachia. This one hits close to home.
The President signed an executive order revoking federal flood-risk standards that incorporated rising sea levels predicted by climate science.
The President pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement, disengaging from 194 other countries committed to curbing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
The President signed a resolution revoking the Interior Department’s “Stream Protection Rule,” which placed strict restrictions on dumping mining waste into waterways. This also hits very close to home.
Of course, this list is only a small sampling of the actions taken by the administration regarding standards and regulations designed to preserve a clean environment for your children and their families.
Keep this all in mind when you decide whom to vote for in November. This is no exaggeration: it could be a life and death decision.
Steve Frey is a writer and CEO of Ascendant Educational Services based in Radford.
