Tag Archives: Pruitt

04.12.18
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Thursday Water News: Drugs in the Water, Messing up the Mississippi Basin, and Pruitt Takes Control

In last week’s water news, we ended on a sort of kind of happy note, raising a moderately-filled glass that Capetown’s Day Zero was pushed back until next year. It was nice to have a sort of kind of happy note! Water is good, and we should be happy when there is happy news!

This week will not have it. This week will end with Scott Pruitt, if that’s any indication.

Let’s get at it!

Drugs in the Water: Not The Good Kind

 

 

Image result for fish from bedknobs and broomsticks

Remember: drugs lead to jazz

 

Last year, I wrote a long piece about antidepressants in the Niagara River. It is one of my favorite posts on this blog, and won praise from a cousin who said “Brian, I love you, but you are pretty depressing.” It’s like a Pulitzer!

Anyway, the point was that antidepressants leeching into our waters were causing fish to not eat, not reproduce and to stop caring about avoiding predators. Really, it made them stop doing the only thing they were good at, which was: continue being fish. I thought the symbolism of it was a little on-the-nose.

 There is is something deeply wrong here. Our society drives people to medications, which can do good or ill, and the waste of our addictions and needs ultimately ends up pissing itself into the water, where it infects other species and drives them toward involuntary suicide.

Well, obviously, an enormous supply of antidepressants isn’t centered entirely around Buffalo, though you’d be forgiven for imagining that to be the case. As The Guardian reported this week, it is a global epidemic.

Continue reading →

09.11.17
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Surprise! Scott Pruitt’s EPA Uses Bad Economics on the Clean Water Rule

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In the Aftertime, when our descendants are fighting over the last scraps of arable land, this fucking Okie hump is going to be one of history’s primary villains.

Scott Pruitt is not an honest man. He has one core belief–that extraction industries (and really any industry) should be able to do whatever they want to maximize profits. His ancillary beliefs–that there should be no regulations, that labor or environmental protections are evil, that climate change is a hoax, that we the poor and undeserving should choke on the ashes of capitalism–all flow from that.

All of his dishonesty and petty idiocy come from this. He’s an industry shill who literally copy-and-pasted comments extraction flacks wrote for him about EPA regulations he was fighting (before he was put in charge of the damn thing). He forces his department to self-censor the truth or lose their jobs (many choose the later). He replaces scientists with industry goons. He’s says it is “insensitive” to talk about climate change being a cause of more powerful and destructive because he knows it is inarguable, and so hides behind a veneer of compassion for environmental victims his whole career proves a lie.

He’s one of the primary disasters of the Trump regime, coming in close behind or ahead of Sessions, depending on where you stand on things. I’ll consider them tied. It flows from the top, of course. Just like in Pruitt’s EPA, dishonesty has begun to affect the noble institution with every one of his idiotic appointments.

We can see that inherent dishonesty in a recent review of the Clean Water Rule of 2015 (this is also known as Waters of the United States Act, or just WOTUS). The administration has been trying to overturn these regulations, which changed what water could be regulated by the federal government. The definition was expanded to include many irrigation channels and small streams.

To many, this was big government intrusion at its worst. And to be fair, I find that argument sympathetic. Irrigation channels often run on private land. The problem, of course, is that they don’t end there. Water seeps into aquifers or it runs rivulets of phosphate into lakes, creating murderous algae blooms, or it is just wasted. But, more regulations could be onerous to farmers, who already eke out a meager existence.

Who was on their side? Well, nearly everyone.

President Donald Trump made repeated campaign promises to repeal WOTUS, which is opposed by a variety of industrial sectors, including agriculture, iron and steel manufacturing, home builders, and mining groups. Industry associations representing those sectors argue it would trigger requirements to obtain costly federal permits to dredge wetlands and streams that they say fall under state and local laws already.

Now, some argue, maybe we should protect wetlands more. It’s a compelling argument these days. So who knows what to do? But no fear! That’s why the EPA commissioned a study. And they found that the economic burden would be super expensive. There’s just, well, one problem. From the Commies at Bloomberg.

The Trump administration was sloppy in how it estimated the economic impact of a proposal to repeal an Obama-era water pollution regulation, relying on data and assumptions that industry previously criticized, according to economists and regulatory analysts interviewed by Bloomberg BNA.

Chief among their complaints was that the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used recession-era economic data and failed to account for some of the benefits of leaving the 2015 Clean Water Rule in place. Their economic analysis even drew criticism from David Sunding, a University of California-Berkeley agricultural economist who was hired by industry groups to counter theanalysis the Obama administration used to back its regulation.

“I am not normally this dismissive, but this is the worst regulatory analysis I have ever seen,” Sunding told Bloomberg BNA in telephone interview.

It’s worth repeating that Sunding had been hired by industry groups, in large part because he criticized the conclusions of the Obama administration, saying they had used faulty data to overstate the benefits. But then the Trump admin under Pruitt used the same numbers to come up with even worse results.

When the program was first proposed, it was under one set of economic conditions (coming out of the recession). That skewed the benefits, because it started from an artificially low baseline. But Pruitt’s EPA used that same baseline, and ignored any benefits. Bloomberg can explain.

The Trump administration used the 2013 estimates as a starting point, assuming that the costs of that regulation would be avoided by a repeal and the benefits of the regulation would be foregone. The proposed repeal was estimated to result in $162 million to $476 million in avoided costs, while the estimated foregone benefits range from $34 million to $73 million per year.

In the 2013 analysis, the EPA estimated the annual costs of implementing the water jurisdiction rule to range from $133.7 million to $277 million, but those costs were outweighed by annual projected benefits of between $300.7 million and $397.6 million.

The EPA’s 2017 approach drew the ire of economists because no recent permitting data was used to estimate the economic impact of the proposed repeal. Instead, the analysis used data from fiscal years 2009 and 2010, a time when U.S. economic activity was at its lowest since World War II, particularly in the manufacturing, residential, and commercial development sectors.

Basically, the Obama estimates might have been wrong, but the Trump ones were almost deliberately misleading. Or, knowing them, not almost.

I err on the side of WOTUS, clearly. But it is worth looking into. We do need to know the impact of everything we do. Scott Pruitt sort of agrees. He thinks we should know the negative impact of any regulation. He doesn’t really care to know any of the benefits, or care about the long-and-short term destruction of our environment. That sort of impact doesn’t matter.

The only impact that matters is if business is happy. For some reason they don’t, or won’t, see the ground crumbling beneath their feet. They don’t see the flames licking up the sides of the house. They feel the lash of the storm, but assume it is passing, or pretend their boat can get out of the way. Theya re depserate and greedy murderers, and Scott Pruitt is their chief enabler.

If we’re lucky enough to have history in 100 years, his name will be cursed.

05.31.17
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Trump and the Paris Climate Agreement: The Earth-Changing Weight of the Catastrophic Presidency

By all indications, our catastrophe of a President is poised to go fully global.

President Trump is expected to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement, three officials with knowledge of the decision said, making good on a campaign pledge but severely weakening the landmark 2015 climate change accord that committed nearly every nation to take action to curb the warming of the planet.

There’s really no way to oversell the terrible nature of this decision. Let’s just take, in what is amazingly the least terrible aspect of this, how much Trump is sticking his stubby thumb in the eyes of our allies. After returning from a disastrous and petty trip to the elected leaders of Europe (on the heels of a fawning stay with Saudi monarchists), Trump immediately continued an offensive against Germany, and the liberal order in general.

This rift between him and Merkel is self-inflicted, but entirely in nature with his character. One, Merkel is a woman who isn’t his hot daughter, so he doesn’t care much for her. Two, she stands up to his arrant bullshit, and is clearly 100 times smarter and more capable than he is. This drives him particularly crazy (see: Elizabeth Warren).

It isn’t just personal, of course. The Trump plan, inasmuch as there is one, has been to undermine the liberal order so that America would be unconstrained. This has long been the goal of the right, and it fits with Trump’s self-image. He (and they) think the US should do whatever they want, and cut deals without concern for anyone else, or how it impacts the world. And he thinks he’s the only one smart enough to do, despite a lifetime of experience that should scream otherwise.

So that’s part of the reason for this rift, and honestly, part of the reason why Trump is going to be pulling out. He hates the Paris Accords because he didn’t negotiate it (never mind that he knows as much about climate policy or science as he does anything else, which is: nothing). He hates that it constrains the US (never mind what it actually does). He hates that it is multilateral. In the latter two, at least, the far-right is there with him.

And, of course, he is a terribly small and petty man who thinks that lashing out like a spoiled baby is a sign of toughness. So he’ll gleefully pull out of the Paris Accord, saying “a very bad and very unfair and also bad, bad deal” at least 100 times. He’ll do it just because people told him it was a bad idea. He’ll do it because he wants to stick it to Merkel.

It’s jaw-dropping how politically and internationally short-sighted this is. The Paris Accords were the product of years of negotiation, bringing aboard major polluters like China and India. Remember, for years we couldn’t act on climate change because China and India wouldn’t. That excuse is gone.

This is a terrifying abdication of global responsibility. This is causing one of the biggest rifts in the post-war world order. And while “world order” might terrify the black helicopter crowd, it is an apt phrase when taken literally. After the civilizational nightmare of WWII, these institutions were painstakingly created to create peace. It didn’t happen overnight, but it became solid enough that the idea of war between the western powers became unthinkable, instead of, as it was within living memory, accepted as an inevitable part of life. That’s enormous.

I’m not saying Trump is going to lead us to war with Germany. But I am saying that the ramifications of deliberately undermining that order are unpredictable, and absolutely none of the possible outcomes are good. At best, it will muddle along with gritted teeth until we replace this bozo.

But of course, this isn’t an argument over Iraw or Bosnia. It isn’t an argument over trade. What Trump is doing will make it increasingly hard for the human race to muddle along.  We’re at a very crucial point in our history. Dig this graph from AP News.

The world without U.S. efforts would have a far more difficult time avoiding a dangerous threshold: keeping the planet from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

The world has already warmed by just over half that amount — with about one-fifth of the past heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions coming from the United States, usually from the burning of coal, oil and gas.

So the efforts are really about preventing another 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius) from now.

“Developed nations — particularly the U.S. and Europe — are responsible for the lion’s share of past emissions, with China now playing a major role,” said Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis. “This means Americans have caused a large fraction of the warming.”

Even with the U.S. doing what it promised under the Paris agreement, the world is likely to pass that 2 degree mark, many scientists said.

But the fractions of additional degrees that the U.S. would contribute could mean passing the threshold faster, which could in turn mean “ecosystems being out of whack with the climate, trouble farming current crops and increasing shortages of food and water,” said the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Kevin Trenberth

The best case scenario is more war, more instability, more starvation, and more disease. We’ll have more forced migration, refugee crises, and violence. The worst case is that the coastal cities flood, plants wither away, and human life becomes untenable on the planet in the next few hundred years. That isn’t the most likely scenario, but it is, in fact, a possibility.

This isn’t happening just because of Trump. It’s obviously a global problem, caused largely by capitalism, but with many other factors as well. And right now, the problem isn’t just Trump, but the entire Republican Party, which sees climate change as liberal snowflake nonsense, or a deep conspiracy to erode sovereignty.

It’s part of this madness that sees the earth only as land to be exploited, and sees reckless and selfish greed as a virtue. It’s the entire Republican Party. I don’t know if Jeb would have pulled out of Paris (though Cruz would have), but he would have appointed someone like Scott Pruitt to run the EPA. Maybe not as venal and corrupt, but someone who would have overturned regulations that protect us and the environment (pro tip: as animals, we’re part of the environment, which is something that we don’t really seem to understand). There is a small chance, I guess, that Trump will stay in, but he’ll do so in a way that still breaks every promise.

So that’s where we are. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so terrifying. There’s only one major political party in the world that doesn’t believe in climate science, and that is US Republicans. They don’t believe in it because they are faith-struck and fear-ridden and resentment-driven and paranoia-riven. They have no basis in the real world, and therefore don’t care what happens to the real world.

And they are a minority party in the US. And the US is only 4.4% of the world’s population. So a small, mostly-regional party in a country with a fraction of the world’s population is not only ripping apart the greatest force for peace the world has ever known, but literally setting the human race on a path toward possible wreckage, and even possible extinction.

And the face of that is Donald Trump. The sheer cruelty and stupidity of this, that Donald Trump, this vulgar dummy who in a decent world would never have been more than a cheap used car salesman, is consigning the planet to hell, is enough to send one to gibbering laughter. It’s the echoing laughter of the doomed, gone mad in a ghostship slowly drifting across a deadened sea.

05.15.17
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Pebble Gold Mine in Bristol Bay A Real Goldmine, Unless You Like Food Or Water

 

Image result for bristol bay alaska

“You know what this could use? Open-pit mining.” -Scott Pruitt

 

May 12 U.S. environmental regulators have cleared the path for a stalled copper and gold mine in Alaska by agreeing to settle current lawsuits and other issues over the project, which had drawn environmental concerns over its potential impact on the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in a statement on Friday, said the settlement does not guarantee the proposed Pebble mine project in southwest Alaska’s Bristol Bay region would ultimately win approval, but that its review would now be carried out “in a fair, transparent, deliberate, and regular way.”

Bristol Bay is one of the world’s most productive salmon breeding grounds. But there is a lot of gold and copper near it, so some companies want to create an open-pit copper mine, even though mining runoff will certainly pollute the waters, and possibly decimate the fishing economy.

But, you know, so what? This is Scott Pruitt’s EPA, in which the “E” and the “P” are strictly optional. It sure is an Agency, though. And they are giving the fishermen the human agency to go pound sand. The extraction industry wants something, right now, and there isn’t a single Republican with any desire not to give it to them.

These people have everything they want for the moment, and are in a mad to sell off public land, reverse any environmental regulations, create open door policies for the extraction industry, punish the poor, and maybe get around to a little light earth-salting before President Cuckoo Clock from Hell fires Reince Priebus and replaces him with a 50-ft high self-portrait.

It seriously seems like they had a contest where users could submit ideas with the theme of “What’s the Worst Thing We Could Do?” and they picked everyone’s entry.  Everyone’s a winner! Well, not the 85% of fishermen who think this could destroy their livlinhood, or the Natives opposed to turning the unspoiled and sacred beauty of the land into something a little more spoiled, and really not anyone who doesn’t own stock in Pebble Limited Partnership, which went up 500% when Trump was elected. But hey: there will be more gold in the world. Who could be opposed to that?

05.08.17
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EPA Replaces Scientists With Industry; Embraces Cartoon Villainy

 

Image result for polluted river america

“Yeah, but those regulations were super onerous…”

 

The phrase “you can’t make this up” is overused, since these days, all you have to do is imagine the worst possible idea being enacted by the worst possible people, and you have a pretty close approximation of reality. Right, NY Times?

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency has dismissed at least five members of a major scientific review board, the latest signal of what critics call a campaign by the Trump administration to shrink the agency’s regulatory reach by reducing the role of academic research.

A spokesman for the E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, said he would consider replacing the academic scientists with representatives from industries whose pollution the agency is supposed to regulate, as part of the wide net it plans to cast. “The administrator believes we should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community,” said the spokesman, J. P. Freire.

What’s interesting here is how they don’t even pretend to be talking about citizens anymore. Normally, they say things like “those egghead bureaucrat scientists in Washington DC don’t understand the kind of water that we enjoy here in Mudville. Our citizens are just fine with a little bit of cadmium in their soup.” But that’s not even what J.P. Freire is saying. He’s talking about the “regulated community”, i.e., the businesses themselves. It might be a different definition of “community” than you or I understand, but remember, my friend: corporations are people.

There’s not even anything to unpack here; there’s not even the tribute vice pays to virtue. They are straight-up saying that any regulations will be vetted by the people whose profits are impacted by regulations, and how that is the only concern.

It’s a pretty clear baseline. What matters is the impact regulations have on the bottom line of the company. The baseline isn’t what deregulated pollutions has on the humans who lives around the company. That is, at best, secondary. That’s not the impact that matters.

So it doesn’t matter, just to take a quick jaunt around recent headlines, that:

None of that matters (the attack on indigenous rights might actually be a bonus for these jackals). What we need are fewer regulations, and they should be vetted by the industries themselves.

It’s easy to see the counterarguments. More regulations are job-killing, and these plants and factories and industries are the lifeblood of the community, and if those science pinheads continue to ram their globalist climate-hysteric ideologies down our throats, we’ll be forced to close shop and go pollute Mexico. And why should the Mexicans get all our good pollution?

It’s a seductive argument, except it is also a completely phony one. The choice isn’t between “pollution and jobs”; it is between “pollution or slightly reduced profits.” It’s always been a lie that a company can’t follow simple environmental regulations. They made the same argument when smokestacks were regulated to reduce deadly smog, and industry didn’t collapse. It’s a choice made by companies to chase greater profits by moving to deregulated countries.

Reducing or eliminating regulations doesn’t actually help anyone. There will always be a place that cares even less about its citizens, that slashes regulations, that lets you dump paint right into the well. That the US is rushing to join these countries isn’t pro-worker; it is showing absolute contempt for the worker. It’s saying “you can keep your job, but only if we can lower wages, kill your collective bargaining rights, and poison you and your family, working you until you die young or are too broken to be of use.”

That’s Scott Pruitt’s vision of the future. It’s another reason why this administration has to be resisted at every step. Everything they do is carcinogenic. That’s unfortunately too often literal.

03.21.17
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Trump’s Great Lakes Policies Are Terrible For His Rust Belt Voters

Republic Steel - Now known as Riverbend (BEFORE)

The people who this hurts aren’t latte-sipping coastal elites

There’s been no doubt that all of Donald Trump’s plans (at least the ones that aren’t designed to hurt Muslims and Mexicans) stick it especially hard to his voting base. Gutting the ACA will throw millions more into uncertainty and poverty. He’s destroying programs that reduce misery in Appalachia (while obviously not doing anything to “restore coal”, because that’s impossible).  He’s gutting Meals on Wheels, which I don’t remember being the province of smug liberals.

He’s doing this because he’s a Republican, of course, and a tremendous liar, both of which facts eluded (and in a way were hidden from) the people that voted for him. But regardless.

One area where this is especially true is in the Great Lakes, home of the Rust Belt, and the symbolic heart of Trump’s victory. On the surface, it is easy to see why. For decades, after the labor/environmental split, which was more a product of a few mistakes and deliberate divide-and-conquer strategies of management rather than an inevitable corporate outcome, “green” policies have been perceived as harmful, and even antithetical, to the white working class.

It’s a buncha eggheads at the EPA and college professors and long-hairs who are stopping us from working, with their regulations. The culture wars mixed with the regulatory battles (and are really part of the same phenomenon), to the point where anything that smacked of environmentalism was seen as un-American. That’s why Trump (like every other Republican) gets applause when he talks about destroying the EPA: he’s attacking BIG GOVERNMENT and he’s ANNOYING LIBERALS.

But the funny thing is that people who are opposed to all this green stuff in the main tend to like it when it is by their homes. That’s why Trump’s Great Lakes policies, in which he is going to gut the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, have proven to be so controversial.

The GLRI is a $3 billion dollar fund started in 2010 by the noted hater of the working man, Barack Obama, to improve water quality, clean up and manage pollution, fight invasive species, and promote responsible waterfront development in the Great Lakes, especially the heavily industrialized areas.

These are Rust Belt areas in which the land was poisoned and the water destroyed. These are areas like Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Detroit, and others. But they aren’t just big blue cities: they are the innumerable small towns that have their own shuttered factories whose legacies are pollution and waste. And, even in those “blue” cities, there are the fabled white working class, whose lives are destroyed, are whose lakes are algal disasters.

The GLRI has been working not just to undo that legacy, but to bring the lakefronts back to life. One of the most remarkable things about Chicago is that, as ruthlessly and dirtily capitalistic as this city was, we never built to the lake, keeping it public and beautiful. As such, the waterfront is the heart of the city, and helps bring in millions of tourists.

Other cities can get in on that. The GLRI has not just been great for the Lakes environmentally, but it has had the effect of letting cities use their waterfronts for recreation, commercial fishing, and gatherings. Look at this image from the Niagara River (which is part of the Great Lakes system).

Outer Harbor

Photo from NPR

I mean, yeah, you can see the rot around it. But that’s the same area from the top  picture! Now it’s an area where people hang out and can have jobs. It’s a tax base. It’s a place where life can be better.

For another great example of this, look at Erie, PA. It’s a town that was dying (and in parts, still is). But the GLRI helped clean the waterfront, bringing it back to life, a process Ohio had started but couldn’t afford on its own. Now there are big hotels, and a happening downtown with good restaurants and bars and stores. That’s economic progress. That’s turnaround.

And now that’s going to be thrown away. How nuts is this? It’s so nuts that even Scott Pruitt promised to keep funding the GLRI. Trump’s budget, the dream of Republicans, is so cruel and insane that even people who truly hate environmentalism are being wrong-footed by it. It’s pure nightmarish ideology.

What’s interesting (and predictable in a cheering, if also cynical way), is that Great Lakes Republican are angry. Scott Walker, Rick Snyder, Rob Portman and others, who always talk about federal waste, think the GLRI should stay. (And remember, Scott Walker is generally fine selling off most of his state to the highest bidder.) And they’re right!

What we see here, of course, is that wasteful overreach is only wasteful overreach when it doesn’t impact you. These GOP governors and Senators know that they need the Lakes, both for drinking water and for their state’s economies. They’d be fine cutting the EPA budget for other areas. But not for the Lakes.

This, finally, is the ultimate in GOP cynicism, and I think paves a way forward for liberal environmentalism to reconnect with labor. After all, the Trump budget was made from his priorities and from those of Washington think tanks who have been wanting to destroy the EPA for decades. They’ve managed to make that seem like a good thing for the working class, but now that they have total power, the truth is known.

They think the working class should live with dead rivers and unusable lakes. They think the ground should be ruined and salted with chemicals. They think that the government has no need to help make up for the wastes of industrialization, in which the white working class gave their lives, only to be left with poverty and poison. Someone else made money off of it. Now you have to live there.

Remember, the people making these decisions don’t live in Detroit. They don’t live in Erie. They sure as shit don’t live in Buffalo. They’re rich people in think tanks who think that the poor and economically anxious should stay that way, and if cancer is the price, well, it’s your choice if you can’t afford health care. Trump, and the people making his budget, aren’t just cruel. They’re snobs. 

03.01.17
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Water Wednesday: Wisconsin’s Walker Woes and Things That Don’t Begin With W. Like Lake Erie

 

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I’m sure there’s a metaphor here somewhere, but my first thought is: whoa! A deer in Lake Erie? What the hell? Image (and explanation) from Cleveland Scene

A quick rundown of some top water stories, which remind us that while we can impact nature, we’re really not in charge. 

I realize that there is a weird-seeming contradiction in saying that we can bring great change to nature, but that we’re still at its mercy. But when we say “great change”, we don’t mean permanent. The earth will eventually repair itself, and time will smooth over our cataclysms. We just won’t be here. But you want the real image? Imagine a 7-yr-old jamming a hatpin into his mother’s ankle. He can do that, and cause great damage, but really, the storm will redound upon him.

So let’s start this week’s “hey, who cares about clean water?” news with Wisconsin.

Continue reading →

02.22.17
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“Please find attached a short white paper with some talking points that you might find useful to cut and paste…”

 

“I’m just thrilled as a bird dog in an aviary to be destroying the environment for my corporate buddies!” 

That line is from an email sent to Scott Pruitt by “Roderick Hastie, a lobbyist at Hunton & Williams, a law firm that represents major utilities, including Southern Company, urging Mr. Pruitt’s office to file comments on a proposed E.P.A. rule related to so-called Startup, Shutdown and Malfunction Emissions.”

I like it because it doesn’t even pretend that Pruitt might want to think independently. It’s not “some thoughts that might inform your thinking” or “a few suggestions on combatting this rule”, but “here’s exactly what you should say.” It’s openly disdainful. And Scott Pruitt loves every moment of it.

That’s the big takeaway from the data dump, the thousands of emails detailing his master/sub relationship to energy. This man is one of the great climate villains of our time, because he’s willing to climb to power specifically to propitiate the short-term profit hunger of the extraction energy. And now he’s the head of the EPA.

(In a way, maybe the delay on the emails is a good thing, since anyone else running the EPA would be nearly as venal, though not as transparently so. Maybe this will blow up and consume his time, and weaken his attempts to weaken the agency. But there is still a lot of damage he can get done, a lot of long-term terrifying damage. Luckily, the working white class doesn’t need clean air or water. They just need liberals to stop being so condescending, and everything will be all right.)