News

NEWS 10/16/24 to 10/31/24

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What will Trump’s Project 2025 do to the environment/ Earth Justice

The policy playbook known as Project 2025 is 900 pages, and 150 of them are about how to destroy the environment. This deregulatory agenda written by former government officials and Heritage Foundation staff would strip away our rights to clean air, clean water, and a healthy planet. It would trade these basic freedoms to help polluters profit.

What Project 2025 says:

§  Gut the Endangered Species Act (ESA): Project 2025 would rewrite the most successful legal tool we have for protecting wildlife in ways that would harm imperiled species. It specifically calls for removing protections from gray wolves and Yellowstone grizzlies.

§  No need for national monuments: Another proposal would repeal the Antiquities Act, which would strip the president of the ability to protect priceless public lands and waters as national monuments.

§  Weaken the Clean Air Act: Project 2025 would nix the part of the law that requires the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set health-based air quality standards.

§  Less say for communities in environmental decisions: The plan would undermine key portions of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which ensures you have a voice in major projects built near you.

§  Prioritize oil and gas: Project 2025 tells the agencies that manage federal lands and waters to maximize corporate oil and gas extraction. It calls for approving more pipelines like Keystone XL and Dakota Access.

§  Willow? Make it bigger: The agenda explicitly aims to expand the Willow Project, which is already the largest proposed oil and gas undertaking on U.S. public lands.

§  Target iconic landscapes: The project also calls for drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and mining in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters wilderness, among other irreplaceable natural treasures.

§  Trust the chemical companies: Project 2025 tells the EPA to be more open to industry science and to stop funding major research into toxic chemical exposure.

§  Make it harder to regulate chemicals: The plan calls for the EPA to meet an absurdly high standard of proof that a chemical is hazardous before deciding to regulate it. This would give chemical companies greater freedom to put toxic substances into our air, water, and products.

§  Forever chemicals are fine: Project 2025 would walk back the determination that PFAS — the “forever chemicals” linked to reproductive harms, developmental delays, and increased risk of cancer— are a hazardous substance.

§  The plan’s authors are climate skeptics: The document refers pointedly to “the perceived threat of climate change.”

§  Climate solutions? Don’t need ‘em: Project 2025 calls for undoing many of the clean energy investments in the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate solutions bill in history. It also supports Congressional efforts to repeal the law entirely.

§  Shut down climate research: The plan would get rid of more than a dozen government offices and agencies that study climate change.

§  Environmental justice is not the government’s problem: Project 2025 questions whether the government should address the ways that communities of color and low-income communities are disproportionately exposed to dangerous pollution.

§  Get rid of staff who work on these issues: The plan calls for disbanding offices with the Department of Justice and the EPA that focus on environmental justice.

§  Why we’re prepared:

§  Defending endangered species: The Trump administration went after both Yellowstone grizzlies and the Endangered Species Act itself. Both times, Earthjustice went straight to court. One of our cases spared the grizzlies from planned trophy hunts, and the Biden administration subsequently reversed some damaging changes to the ESA.

§  Defending national monuments: When the Trump administration gutted Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah, Earthjustice immediately sued. Protections for the monuments have now been restored. We also helped defend the monuments from a later legal challenge by the state of Utah that attacked the Antiquities Act itself.

§  Defending NEPA: This summer, when 21 state attorneys-general sued to block important updates to NEPA, we intervened to fight back. The updates will ensure that critical infrastructure needed for the clean energy transition is built quickly and equitably and is resilient to climate change.

§  Fighting on all fronts: Under the Trump administration, Earthjustice challenged an aggressive extractive agenda at every turn. Our victories included winning protections for 128 million acres of ocean and hundreds of thousands of acres of sage-grouse habitat threatened by oil and gas development.

§  We’ve defended many of the places Project 2025 targets:

§  We have been defending the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from fossil fuel development since the 1980s, and we celebrated last year when the government canceled a set of illegal oil leases

§  Our litigation and advocacy has helped secure a 20-year mining ban in the Boundary Waters.

§  Fighting for the full use of the law: The government has the authority to protect us from harmful chemicals under a critical law called the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA. Earthjustice is fighting to force the Biden administration to use this law more effectively.

§  Pushing for transparency: When the Trump administration EPA understated the risks of deadly chemicals, Earthjustice sued under TSCA.

§  Taking on PFAS: Earthjustice has fought for an array of protections against PFAS. We have helped protect communities from PFAS incineration, defended the public’s right to know about PFAS releases, pushed for stronger state laws regulating PFAS in water, and more.

§  https://earthjustice.org/article/what-project-2025-would-do-to-the-environment-and-how-we-will-respond

and

Subject: trump vows to gut climate rules. Oil lobbyists have a plan ready

An influential oil and gas industry group whose members were aggressively pursued for campaign cash by Donald Trump has drafted detailed plans for dismantling landmark Biden administration climate rules after the presidential election

The plans were drawn up by the American Exploration and Production Council, or AXPC, a group of 30 mostly independent oil and gas producers, including several major oil companies. They reveal a comprehensive industry effort to reverse climate initiatives advanced during nearly four years of Democratic leadership. At the same time, the documents contain confidential data showing that the industry’s voluntary initiatives to cut emissions have fallen short.

They also call for the repeal of more than a half dozen executive orders that are at the center of the Biden administration’s efforts to combat climate change. Taken together, the group’s goals amount to a monumental rollback of some of the most aggressive federal tools to cut emissions.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/17/oil-industry-trump-climate-lobbying/?utm_campaign=wp_politics_am&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_politics&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3f564fb%2F671238342c9a1114a85ef65e%2F5969e8e29bbc0f6d71c7f136%2F14%2F50%2F671238342c9a1114a85ef65e

Despite all the MAGA fear mongering and misinformation/propaganda, things were in fact worse during the Trump years. Here are some actual data points compiled by independent fact-based agencies:

Economy: During the Trump years, the economy grew at 1.45%. In comparison, the economy has grown 3.4% under Biden, and it grew 2.33% during the Obama years. If you adjust for inflation, the U.S. economy has grown about 6% under Biden, versus a 4% growth rate for the same time period under Trump.

Federal deficit: With Trump, the deficit grew to $3.1 trillion (the highest in history). So far, Biden’s deficit has been reduced to $1.7 trillion.

National Debt: Trump added $8.4 trillion in borrowing/debt over a ten-year window, while Biden’s figure is about $4.3 trillion. If you exclude COVID relief spending from the tally, the numbers are $4.8 trillion for Trump and $2.2 trillion for Biden.

Jobs/Unemployment: The United States lost 12.7 million jobs during Trump’s presidency, and unemployment was at 14.8%. By contrast, 15.4 million jobs have been added during Biden’s presidency, and unemployment is currently at about 4%. The U.S. has created almost 7 million more new jobs than it had before the 2020 pandemic.

Wages: Wages and salaries have risen 15% since Biden took office, compared with a 9.4% increase during Trump’s presidency.

Inflation: Inflation is down to 2.4%, the lowest since March 2021. It’s also true that under Trump, inflation was as low as 2.4%.

Investments/Stock Market: On Oct 19, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a record high of 43,275, while the S&P 500 closed at 5,864.

Crime: Murder and aggravated assaults shot up dramatically under Trump, though other less violent crime rates did see a decline. In Trump’s last year in office, murder rates climbed by nearly 30 percent and assault rates by more than 10 percent. Murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault are all down during the Biden years. Overall violent crime was down 15%.

Guns: By the end of Trump’s term, gun sales set a new record of 6.3 million per year… including a 75% spike after the 2020 election and an overall increase of 12.5% from the previous highest year ever.

(Source: Reuters and AP News)

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