Trump is continuing his policy of appointing agency heads who are opposed to the basic mission of the agency. His latest may be the most dangerous yet.
He is appointing an oil industry ally to head the EPA. Scott Pruitt, the atty gen of Oklahoma, has made a career of suing the EPA. He is adamantly anti-regulation, and to put the cherry on top, he is a climate science denier.
News article
and editorial
As the editorial notes, all Pruitt has to do to ensure that virtually no environmental regulations are enforced is to drastically cut the staff and budget of the EPA. Then Trump will crow about the budget savings, and polluters will be able to do whatever they want. It may take decades to repair the damage they do, if this country ever regains its sanity.
Anybody who thought Trump was just a buffoon had better wake up. He is the most dangerous man in the world.
Trump doesn’t appear to have any actual opinions of his own; he merely paraphrases whatever the last person he spoke to said, and these are the people he’s surrounding himself with. Our only hope is one of these people advises him to do something blatantly illegal and we can get rid of the lot of them.
Set a thief to commit a theft. By now he may be making these appointments to mock the whole structure of America.
Actually the administration of **Ubu Roi **is unfolding as lunatic farce, finally unleashing the underlying hidden forces of Chaos and Mother Night, just for the lulz.
Seriously? I’m sure Bernie Madoff knows a hell of a lot about trading but I’m sure I don’t want him to be chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Fortunately, lack of EPA enforcement of pollution regulation is not the same as forcing people to pollute.
Or do you think the EPA is going to outlaw Tesla cars for being too clean?? Mandating “rollin’ coal” installations on all new cars and directing people to using them every 5 minutes?
Hard to tell where these exaggerated doom and gloom predictions come from sometimes.
Oooh, good point. Nobody will force companies to pollute. Companies will pollute only if it’s cheaper for them to pollute.
Care to give us any realistic scenarios where it isn’t, if there is no enforcement of environmental regulations?
Not hard at all. You only need to look at what it was like before environmental regulations were enacted. Amazingly enough, large corporations didn’t seem to care how much they polluted. Air was unsafe to breathe in many areas, toxic chemicals were dumped anywhere it was convenient, and rivers caught on fire.
Let’s hope you don’t live downwind of a coal plant after Pruitt takes over the EPA.
Loki would have an actual plan. Mind you, it wouldn’t be a very good plan, but he’d have one. For Marvel villains, Trump is more like Thanos; sitting on his floating golden throne making sweeping claims about, “Bathing the starways in your blood,” and sending out ineffectual and incompetent minions but not actually doing anything himself. Also, Melania kind of looks like Death, so…somebody call Chris Pratt, tell Bradley Cooper to do some more voice acting for an angry CGI raccoon, and cue up a Runaways song.
I’m reminded of the thoughts of the physicist Brian Cox in an interview a few months ago regarding the Fermi paradox and why we haven’t detected any evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations: