Sunday, August 6, 2017

There are polluters, & then there's Trump's EPA chief Scott Pruitt

I received Rolling Stone's latest issue. 
& as I was flipping through the magazine, I was struck by the accurate portrayal in the artwork for EPA chief Scott Pruitt's article: 


http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/scott-pruitt-is-gutting-the-epa-serving-fossil-fuel-industry-w494156

The article, titled "Scott Pruitt's crimes against nature", is actually online (link above). & it's devastating for those of us who care about the environment. 
Here's just a sample:

"Pruitt has already carried out an impressive list of corporate favors: He rejected the advice of EPA scientists and approved the use of millions of pounds of a toxic pesticide that causes neurological damage in children; in a gift to Big Coal, he delayed tougher ozone air-pollution rules; he plotted to kill Obama's signature climate accomplishment, the Clean Power Plan, designed to put America on track to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 32 percent by 2030; he rescinded the Clean Water Rule, allowing countless streams and rivers to be exempted from pollution controls; he undermined regulations on the release of mercury, a potent neurotoxin, from power plants and other sources; and he submitted a budget that would wipe out more than a third of the funding for the agency, including cutting money for scientific research in half."


You might think of Donald Trump as incompetent or a president who can't get anything done. & you might be half-right. However, for big oil, big coal, & various other industries who are also are wealthy Republican donors, Trump is "accomplishing" a lot.

Elections have consequences as I've said before, & I hope everything works out for the best. But I can't help but think nothing positive can result from big polluters given free rein. 
You might not believe it if you've read any entries on this blog (& despite him saying all Mexican immigrants are rapists & criminals), when Trump was first elected, I was willing to give him a chance: I thought; how much worse can it get for working-class people? Turns out: a lot worse. 

I have family who (despite being Mexican immigrants who are now naturalized US citizens) didn't vote for Hillary citing religious beliefs. This came to mind when I came across this paragraph:

'Like many (but not all) evangelical Christians, he sees fossil fuels not as the remains of dead plants and animals, but as God's gift to mankind. "God has blessed us with natural resources," he told Politico recently. "Let's use them to feed the world. Let's use them to power the world. Let's use them to protect the world." As for climate change, that's not something humans are responsible for. "God's still up there," Pruitt's mentor, Sen. Inhofe, has said. "The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."'

But in the same article; there's also this:

"A year after he became attorney general, Pruitt and his family moved to a $1.2 million home in a neighborhood of estates built by oil barons in the 1920s. Pruitt's four-bedroom, five-fireplace brick house in Tulsa, which he still owns and, according to colleagues, returns to most weekends, looks like a British manor house that has been transported out of the Gilded Age and dropped onto the prairie."

Everybody does what they think is best for their family: it is what it is. 
But it appears to me this is not so much about religion. 
This is much more about Pruitt & his ilk willing to make the places where us "little people" live much more polluted as long as they can keep getting big checks from among others: Koch industries, Murray Energy, ExxonMobil, & Devon Energy.  


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