The Obamacrats Strike Back

One of the hallmarks of the Trump/Pence regime has been its assault on environmental protection and health safety regulations which will leave the nation and world dirtier and Americans less safe and less healthy.  Part of the motivation is a contempt for average Americans and a desire to allow big business to operated unrestricted.  The other is Trump's obsession with destroying everything Barrack Obama - who occupied the White House for eight years without scandals and criminal convictions of members his administration - accomplished.  The threat to average Americans is real and, as a piece in The Atlantic notes, has caused a number of members of the Obama administration to leave the lucrative private sector and return to politics and activism and advocacy.  Their motivation?  To protect the environment and concern for their children and grandchildren.  Here are article excerpts:

Washington legend has it that bureaucrats and political operatives overwhelmingly stay in issue advocacy or politics after their bosses leave office. But that notion is decades out-of-date. These days, many top officials who leave the D.C. swamp go directly to the private sector—and are paid handsomely to do so.

More of former President Barack Obama’s top aides entered the private sector than from any other administration in the past four decades . . . . Yet as Trump’s aggressive rollback of Obama-administration policies has continued, several former Obama officials who went into academia or took private-sector jobs have since returned to politics or advocacy work.

Take Gina McCarthy, who spent seven chaotic years in Washington, four of them as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency under Obama. McCarthy was happy to pass the first years of the Trump administration in Boston, where she got to ride her bike to work every day as a professor at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

Her Trump-appointed successors at the EPA announced changes to federal standards almost daily. By June 2019, they had done away with the Obama-era regulation to curb carbon emissions from power plants, and set their sights on redrafting a rule to allow cars to discharge more polluting gases—a change that the auto industry itself largely opposed. But late last year, when a rewrite of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard, which limits the levels of mercury emitted from power plants, seemed imminent, McCarthy decided that she was ready to make a change.

So when the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental-advocacy nonprofit that had been searching for a new president, called her last fall, McCarthy said she was in.

McCarthy wasn’t alone: Last June, former Interior Secretary Sally Jewell became the interim head of the Nature Conservancy, the top environmental-lobbying spender, which takes in more money than the American Cancer Society. Tina Tchen, a former chief of staff to first lady Michelle Obama, initially joined a law firm before taking a job leading the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund late last year. And former administration officials such as Elissa Slotkin and Lauren Underwood ran for congressional seats in 2018—and won.

The former officials who decided, instead, to stick it out in (or rejoin) the less remunerative world of politics and activism were likely spurred on by the dramatic operational and regulatory shifts seen in Trump’s White House, Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, told me.

“Many people recognize the existential threat to progressive issues and progressive values [caused] by the Trump administration,” Tanden said. “And it has called a lot of people into the battle.”

McCarthy’s NRDC, which has its own political-action committee, has emerged as one of the most aggressive challengers to the Trump administration’s environmental policies. The group plans to spend more than $5 million on federal-election efforts by June. It has donated more to candidates this election cycle than most other environmental organizations, topping the former Democratic candidate Tom Steyer’s group, NextGen Climate Action. Since Trump took office, the NRDC has sued his administration more than 100 times over a range of deregulatory actions and won more than 90 percent of the cases that have been resolved. Its victories include reinstating a ban on oil drilling in the Arctic and penalties for automakers who violate emissions rules.

The Trump administration’s actions on the mercury rule especially infuriated McCarthy. Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin that can lead to impaired vision, muscle weakness, and changes in mental function. Children and unborn infants are the most vulnerable. As Obama’s last EPA head and a top air-pollution official at the agency before that, McCarthy was intimately involved in drafting the rule, which she said was broadly accepted by all parties.

The EPA finalized changes to the mercury rule on April 16, declaring it not “appropriate and necessary.” Industry groups and environmentalists alike had opposed alterations. There’s “no basis to repeal these important and long-overdue” protections, Exelon, a major utility company, wrote to regulators in a 2019 public comment.

The Trump administration’s squabbling over the rule drove McCarthy “absolutely nuts,” she said. “That’s when I realized what they were doing made no sense from a standard-setting process. It was just to destroy everything that had been done before. It had no explanation otherwise.”

NRDC certainly has the money to push its agenda. Through the group’s political arm, McCarthy will have millions to put toward endorsing and advertising for candidates in key 2020 races and promoting the ultimate goal: unseating Trump. The fund budgeted $6.2 million for election and lobbying efforts in fiscal 2018, ahead of the midterms. This money, which also supports voter-turnout efforts, can make a significant difference in close House and Senate races.

McCarthy doesn’t think of the rollbacks of her work at the EPA—or even the attacks from her critics—as a personal affront. But she sees her job as deeply personal nonetheless. . . . Everything that I thought I was working towards, which is really protecting my family and other families from damage from pollution, particularly—that was all at risk. And I couldn’t sit on the sidelines anymore.”

The Trump Regime's War on Public Health

Science and fact based policy decisions pose a problem for the Trump/Pence regime in its effort to roll back public health protections and destroy clean air and clean water regulations.  Why?  Because they support the regulations that Trump/Pence seeks to gut to aid big business, especially the fossil fuel industry. What's the solution when one wants to aid polluters and industry dangerous to public health?  One limits the use of science in setting regulatory policies. While the results may line corporate pockets, it will not be a win for the public and long term safety standards.   Between universal health care and an embrace, rather than a rejection of science, are among the reasons Europeans increasingly enjoy longer life spans than Americans, not that any of this matters to Trump and the vulture capitalists he champions.   The latest assault on public health care policy comes in efforts to limit the role of science in the EPA's policy making process.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this aspect of the Trump/Pence regimes effort to restore the worse aspects of the Gilded Age.  Here are excerpts which also suggests that opposing these efforts should be part of the Democrats' 2020 agenda:

There are essentially two fronts in the Trump administration’s long battle to dismantle EPA protections and deregulate industry to allow increased pollution in the pursuit of short-term profit: the rolling back of specific laws that ensure access to clean air and water, and an attack on the science that informs the Environmental Protection Agency’s policy decisions.

On that second front, the White House has undermined individual targets, like the 2017 establishment of veto power over scientific studies produced by the EPA, and the recent massaging of information to suggest pollution from coal plants kill less Americans every year than is the case. But a new draft of an EPA proposal published Monday suggests that the Trump administration is preparing a comprehensive assault on the ability for scientists funded by the agency to suggest policy with accurate data. Under the guise of transparency, the proposal will allow the EPA to reject any academic findings unless all raw data from the study — including confidential medical records — is handed over.

As the New York Times notes, the inclusion of confidential records will severely hinder the ability of researchers to propose new clean air and water legislation, as “many studies detailing the links between pollution and disease rely on personal health information gathered under confidentiality agreements.” The proposal would also apply retroactively, meaning that a practice that has been built into public health research could nullify current policies built off of established studies — including findings proving that mercury discharge from power plants affects brain development, and that lead in paint dust is associated with childhood behavioral disorders. “This means the E.P.A. can justify rolling back rules or failing to update rules based on the best information to protect public health and the environment, which means more dirty air and more premature deaths,” Paul Billings, a senior vice president at the American Lung Association, told the Times. Other advocacy groups to condemn a previous draft of the proposal — which was less exacting than the current one — include the Michael J. Fox Foundation, the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Medical Library Association, the Association of Academic Health Science Libraries, and the National Center for Science Education, which claimed that the policy “would send a deeply misleading message, ignoring the thoughtful processes that scientists use to ensure that all relevant evidence is considered.” [I]t’s strange that 2020 Democrats have yet to push Trump’s failure to ensure Americans’ access to clean air and water — concerns that are broadly supported across the political spectrum. In a recent analysis on the popularity of strong anti-pollution enforcement, New York’s Eric Levitz argued that “it would be in the Democratic Party’s interest to increase the salience of environmental issues even if Trump hadn’t spent the past two years letting Big Coal and Dow Chemical run the EPA.”

Put another way, if Democrats aren’t able to leverage the popularity of environmental protections, Trump could be able to undermine the research underpinning the EPA for close to a decade.

The GOP's "War on Coal" Myth

In coal producing states, including Southwest Virginia, one hears the myth that Obama is destroying the coal industry in his quest to deal with climate change, something the GOP largely refuses to admit is happening in order to pander to its ignorant base and, of course, polluters like the Koch brothers.  The real truth is very different - not that the truth figures very high in the GOP agenda and standard demagoguery.  The coal industry has been in decline for decades and in areas like Southwest Virginia, it has ravaged the country side and kept the population and local economy depressed.  And now, with more plentiful supplies of natural gas in particular, the demand for coal has plummeted.  The GOP wants open, unfettered markets and coal's demise is an out growth of what the GOP otherwise lauds.  A piece in Salon looks at the economic as opposed to political and regulatory forces that are killing the coal industry.  Here are highlights:

[Republicans claim] the EPA has written a death sentence for King Coal, which, without the federal government’s intervention, would be thriving right now. Again, that’s a pretty premature argument, as the rules have yet to take effect. And it’s one that singles out a scapegoat — big ol’ coal-hating Obama — over the much more mundane reality. Yes, U.S. coal is dying: a recent Duke University study found that between 2008 and 2012, the industry lost nearly 50,000 jobs. But the downturn isn’t new. Coal country’s been on the decline for decades, and for reasons that go far beyond politics.

“What’s killing the coal industry is not federal regulation — it’s market forces,” energy analyst and journalist Richard Martin, whose book “Coal Wars“ provides an in-depth look at this decline, told Salon. “The shale gas revolution has erased coal’s traditional position as the low-cost fuel for power generation, and given a choice, utilities today will choose the cleaner option.”

Even Murray Energy acknowledged that the natural gas boom is partially responsible for displacing coal. Technology, too, has played a role in the decline of coal jobs, as new innovations allow companies to achieve the same output with fewer workers. The best coal in Southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky has already been mined out; the region faces increased competition from Western states.
[A]nalysts with the U.S. Energy Information Administration project that the industry is set in its downward path — a conclusion they reached without even taking the anticipated impact of the Clean Power Plan into account.

All of these factors, Martin added, have been accompanied by a broader shift toward renewable energy. A new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, for example, found that as of 2013, the world is adding more energy capacity from renewables than natural gas, oil and coal — combined. According to Martin, “There’s no turning back from that shift.”

It is a shift, unfortunately, from which coal country has yet to benefit. The aforementioned Duke study found that over the same time period in which coal jobs plummeted, nearly four times as many jobs were created by the combined natural gas, solar and wind industries — but that few were added in the regions hit hardest by the loss.

“We are in the midst of a pretty dramatic energy transition in this country that is producing a lot of very good things, from cleaner air to healthier communities to new jobs and new industries,” Jason Walsh, a senior policy adviser at the White House, told the Charleston Gazette. “While policymakers can disagree about the reasons why the coal industry is struggling, all Americans should be able to agree that these workers and communities, who are in some of the most economically distressed parts of the country, deserve help from the federal government.”

“When people like Mitch McConnell stand up in the U.S. Senate and decry the Obama administration’s war on coal,” he said, “they’re not really helping their constituents. Every hour or dollar spent on fighting the war on coal is a resource that doesn’t go to really helping these people in places where the coal industry is not coming back.”

McConnell, of course, has built his entire political platform on this [war on coal] premise. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he remains “absolutely convinced” that coal has a future in the U.S., and has vowed to do “everything I can to try to stop” the EPA from interfering with this imaginary renaissance.

[C]oal’s best days are undeniably behind it. We can fight it, at the expense of clean air and mitigating climate change. Or we can gently, but firmly, help see it out.

One reason the new clean energy jobs tend to NOT locate in coal producing areas is the cultural and social backwardness of the areas.  Embracing racism, homophobia, and extremist religion do NOT make an area attractive to new and progressive businesses.  The GOP's God, guns and gays agenda is helping to kill coal producing areas as much as market forces.  Embracing ignorance and bigotry carries an economic price.