Hey,
Donald Trump has taken advantage of Americans’ focus on the pandemic and its coverage -- using the opportunity to make quick work of destroying the protections President Obama put in place to safeguard the health of the environment and the American people.
Trump gave oil and gas companies a license to pollute in national parks, streamlined approval for stripping America’s forests, and relaxed protections around more than half of the country’s wetlands -- and while they’re at work there, big polluters will no longer have to report their methane emissions to the government.
And Americans have never been more directly exposed to the consequences of pollution, with the Trump administration removing flood protections passed under Obama meant to guard against sea level rise and rolling back regulations meant to stop chemical plants from putting toxic chemicals into the air we breathe.
There’s one bright spot: according to Hana V. Vizcarra, a staff attorney at Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, some of the Trump administration’s rules “may be vulnerable to reversal under the Congressional Review Act if Democrats are able to retake Congress and the White House in November.” With so little time left before these new protections for polluters become set in stone, we need to know:
