Bad, politicized science was the excuse for worse government regulation.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] ... but could spell global disaster
The Trump Administration may soon do away with a major scientific finding that has been the basis for hundreds of billions in government spending on climate change.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin is reportedly lobbying for the White House to strike down the 'endangerment finding,' a 2009 scientific conclusion which found that gases leading to global warming pose a threat to public health and welfare. The finding has served as the justification for government regulations limiting the emission of greenhouse gases since the Obama presidency.
According to three anonymous sources who spoke with the Washington Post, Zeldin has recommended that President Trump repeal the endangerment finding - clearing the way for the undoing of countless climate regulations now in place throughout America.
Both the Obama and Biden Administrations used this 2009 ruling to impose new limits on the emissions produced by cars, factories, and power plants.
However, government spending watchdogs have detailed how much money this has cost taxpayers, with lawmakers imposing costly new rules on American companies while also handing out billions in grants and subsidies to climate-focused initiatives.
In the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 alone, nearly $400 billion over the next decade was ticketed for slashing carbon emissions. Just two years later, the American Action Forum calculated that the EPA's newest tailpipe emissions rule would cost $870 billion over a two decade period.
Conservatives have argued that the government's strict regulations aimed at combating climate change have harmed the country financially, burdening both consumers and manufacturers with higher costs to meet federal emissions standards. Tom Pyle, president of the oil and gas advocacy group American Energy Alliance, told the Washington Post, 'They unfortunately didn't do this in the first term, so I'm pleased to see that they're working on this in the second term.'
Conversely, supporters of the reforms have cited the benefits of stronger regulations, including improvements to public health and contributing the worldwide effort of slowing climate change.
Vickie Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, argued, 'Americans are already suffering devastating impacts from the climate pollution that is fueling worsening disasters like heat waves and floods, more intense fires and hurricanes, and dangerous smog levels.'
'Such an effort would be reckless, unlawful, and ignore EPA's fundamental responsibility to protect Americans from destructive climate pollution. We will vigorously oppose it,' she added in a statement.
The seemingly impending rollback on US climate regulations has been in the works for over a month.
On President Trump's first day of his second term, he signed an executive order authorizing Zeldin to review the 'legality and continuing applicability of' the endangerment finding.
It was part of the administration's 'Unleashing American Energy' directive which tasked the federal government with finding and eliminating obstacles to the production of oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, and nuclear energy.
EPA spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou did not comment on the report, but did say that the agency was complying with the January 20 executive order.
Earlier this month, the Trump Administration notified more than 1,100 EPA employees that they could be dismissed 'immediately' at any time.
That group included scientists and experts who research and enforce policies related to air pollution, hazardous waste cleanup, and environmental emergency response.
Members of two influential EPA advisory committees which provide scientific guidance to the head of the agency were ousted in January.
This month, the administration reportedly refused to allow federal scientists and diplomats to attend a major climate change conference in China scheduled for March.
David Uhlmann, who led EPA enforcement during the Biden presidency, said that 'when viewed alongside everything else taking place, [the changes] are yet another unfortunate attack on public servants who have dedicated their careers to public health and environmental protection.'
Myron Ebell, the leader of Trump's EPA transition team during the president's first term, noted that striking down the endangerment finding would likely make overturning Joe Biden's climate policies a smoother process.
'If you want to go back and redo one of these rules, you're going to have a very spirited court battle if you ignore the endangerment finding,' Ebell said. 'So I think they really need to do this.'
However, Sean Donahue, an attorney for environmental groups which support the endangerment finding, believes any effort to repeal the 2009 scientific finding would be struck down in court.
The Environmental Defense Fund sent a 10-page letter to Zeldin last week noting that the endangerment finding has already survived multiple court cases over the years.
In 2007, the US Supreme Court ruled that the EPA has the authority to regulate carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
One thing I’ll say for our side of the political equation. We seem to have become slightly more immune to psy-ops, or perhaps less willing to go along with anything the left tries to prod us into doing.
These days, it looks like when they need a patsy they have to actually recruit and pay them, which they’ve apparently been doing to get people to "talk back" to Republican representatives at townhalls, or use bots. Now the AI bots are getting better, but you can still tell if the person you’re arguing with on FB has an account made yesterday and no followers. (Okay, normally made after the election, but still.)
And despite the dire warnings — really? — that the government would "collapse" in six weeks (awfully precise there chum. Kash, are you monitoring these?) that was suddenly everywhere after Carville flapped his lips, and which seemed to imagine that US governments like British can "fall" before elections. (Was this ops run by a Britisher? Did Carville have a senile moment? Was he fed the wrong line? Or does it indicate something far more sinister? Again Kash, are you monitoring this?) even the most squishy of squish blogs on the right has not run with panic.
And the whole "people are mad at DOGE" also isn’t taking.
The screaming that if the right touches Medicaid it’s done, that this worked before is the left drinking their own ink and/or trying to panic the right. It is important to remember that no, it didn’t work before. What worked in 2018 and 2020 was FRAUD. Massive, industrial quantities of fraud, served from a firehose. I can’t be the only one who remembers polls held open for two weeks after the election in 2018. What, are all of you more ADD than I? How do you remember to dress in the morning?
If we solve the fraud — Mr. President, more needs to be done — then curtailing Medicaid is certainly not going to bring the government "down" (even if that were possible.)
Frankly, this whole "Medicaid can’t be touched, or people will turn" is nonsense. As with social security, medicare, etc, the vast majority of people my age and younger (and I’m sixty two, rapidly approaching the point at which MOST people are younger than I) never counted on any of the social net programs. Since the eighties, we expected there would be nothing for us when we qualified.
AND thinking people are super invested in "government paid health care" ignores how much more cynical we got about health care in general in the last five years. I desperately need to go see a dentist, but have been putting it off, because I remember dentists closing because they couldn’t figure out a way to make us wear masks during procedures. And the other doctors? the last time I got asked to wear a mask was two months ago at my PCP. And the receptionist said the doctor might refuse to see me if I wouldn’t wear it. (I know the doctor. She ALSO wasn’t wearing a mask. Because she’s not crazy.) Then there was the crazy time mid 21 when a doctor tried to convince my husband they could do his physical over the phone as thoroughly as in the office.
Look, it’s not happy making, because it’s one of the things we still need, but the medical profession has lost a ton of confidence and prestige over this insanity. And people are way more hesitant to seek "care." (Which might prevent iatrogenic issues, but hey. Better or worse than the fact people are putting off needed care? I don’t know.) So, saying "We’ll take away your free medical care" is not as scary as it used to be. On top of which, frankly, we now know how much medicaid was being used to look after illegal immigrants who just came in and got top of the line care. And if that’s cut, there’s probably still enough for every citizen and legal resident.
The fact is that the left is mostly trying to panic our politicians and make them buckle. I urge those cooked-spaghetti kneed idiots to stand firm. Borrow someone else’s spine if you need to. Because you have no idea how bad things will get if you cave now, and therefore Trump can’t clean up the mess y’all have been creating for a century or so. You don’t want to know. Trump is the VERY POLITE REQUEST.
Despite my moments of blind, red-veil rage, I do NOT want the tumbrils to roll. Once you start feeding madame Guillotine, you can’t stop for a long time, and you’ll be fed to it yourself.
As for the right wing bloggers even the squishy, gooey-center ones, who are for now holding firm. I need you to continue holding firm. Remember they’ve got nothing. The only way they controlled us before was by use of an absolutely coordinated propaganda machine that went from the news to actual fiction books, all publishing the same narrative at the same time.
They tried that in 2020 and it failed, even with the panic created by the "pandemic." It failed to the point they needed to fraud openly and in front of G-d and everyone. (And if you refused to see it or talk about it, shame on you. Also sign up for remedial math. Because it really was obvious.) They tried it again in 2024 with everything at their disposal, trying to create "inevitability" for Kamala. They convinced the Europeans and every "reputable" source in the US. And yet they failed, spectacularly.
Because people have tuned them out. They’ve seen them in action. They’ve seen the masks off for eight years now, and once the mask if off you can’t put it back on.
If you’re scared, if you’re a squishy gooey "right" wing person, if you’re afraid, if you feel like panicking, I want you to stand in front of your mirror every morning and practice saying "I really don’t are, Margaret." Or come here and I’ll give you the needed righteous kicking. I have a lot of aggression to work off, anyway, thank you for volunteering.
The truth is that Medicaid, aye, and social security too, are going to go away. They are unsustainable. They could have worked if the left hadn’t forgotten they needed every-larger generations to sustain it. Instead they wanted to plunder the young and at the same time reduce population and at the same time sideline legal workers in favor of illegals who don’t contribute (no, really) to any of these social programs, but do take from them.
The left is dying at its own hands, drowning in a pool of incoherence and self hatred. We understand the self hatred. Heck, I even understand the incoherence since they were fed a lot of contradictory bullshit and forbidden to think about any of it.
But I really don’t care [Margaret.]
As when you’re faced with a pet who is going to die in a few days, in pain, your choice is to give it one clean shot, or let it linger and die ugly. And at that, I don’t think the plan is even to kill these "social net" dinosaurs outright, but to put them on palliative care: saving them just enough for those who desperately need it, until they die a gentle death as those few who counted on them pass.
This is the GENTLE option. If we do nothing, if we don’t investigate, if we don’t cut back, it’s going to collapse suddenly and explosively and leave a lot of people in desperate straits.
Same for the government, all of it, honestly. Yes, I know a couple of people who were doing needed functions for the government and who are right now in limbo. But the whole thing was so bloated, convoluted, overfed and over-wasteful it was going to collapse anyway.
It should never have been created, is the problem, and btw, my friends who are in limbo say the same "it sucks, but it’s needed to save the country. And in the long run my job is less important than saving the country."
Yes, it’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt a lot.
Thing is, people are already hurting. Badly hurting. I don’t know the real numbers, but I know what I see around me. My sons’ generation and younger is drowning, particularly the males. They either have no jobs; have jobs in seriously exploitative situations; are being treated as inherently bad for being born with a penis. Girls aren’t much better off, though academia and make-work have absorbed a bunch of them.
People are starting to see that what they thought was the economy is a painted floor and they’ve been running midair a long time.
There’s a feeling of subdued panic everywhere. None of us are being told the truth, but seriously, do an inventory of the young — 35 and younger — people you know. How many are solidly established as a proportion? Yeah, yeah, they’re young, but by 35 people were firming up, even in my generation, and boy we thought we were late.
As for the older... my generation was hit hard by layoffs every few years, which kept people from any real savings for retirement. And the H1B thing has been brutal to those in tech jobs.
We’re now hitting retirement age, and most of us know we’re going to have to work until we drop in our traces, if only we can continue finding work.
You can’t make it worse by cutting the illusion of security. In a way it’s a relief when the truth is finally told.
Which is why all the left’s demands we panic, and their whispers that "the government will fall" are finding no purchase. Yes, what DOGE is finding is horrifying, but we’ve suspected it so long, we’re just relieved someone is talking about it at last.
Don’t give the left an opening. What they want is impossible. We can’t go back to sleep. We can’t go back to the pre-2020 world, no matter how much nicer it seemed. That world isn’t there anymore, and we too have changed in ways they forced us to.
If we let them propaganda us into destroying the current cutbacks and clean up — chainsaw go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrt — we’ll only be put on the sure path to hell to heads on pikes.
Even if most of those heads would be lefty ones, it won’t be all of them. In the end that kind of collapse always claims more lives than you can imagine, and more indiscriminately than you think: it always ends up door to door and intimately personal.
The only way to spare us that horror is to stay the course. To hunch one shoulder and say "I really don’t care, Margaret." And forge on.
It’s the right thing to do, but more importantly, it’s the only thing to do.
Because the alternative is unthinkable.
Posted by: Grom the Affective ||
02/27/2025 06:37 ||
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[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] This time a Southwest plane and a private jet narrowly avoided colliding at Chicago’s Midway Airport on Tuesday afternoon.
It’s a sickening reminder of the American Airlines regional crash with a military helicopter in DC that killed 67 last month – and of a spate of other accidents these past weeks.
And the most terrifying thing about this tragedy and these close calls is that we in the aviation industry saw them coming.
As a former commercial pilot, crash investigator and expert in accident causation, I have seen the safety buffer that took decades to build steadily eroded in recent years.
It started with declining standards at Boeing – turning out planes with defects, such as the Boeing 737 Max, that led to the deaths of 346 people in two crashes in less than six months in October 2018 and March 2019.
Last January, a door-sized panel blew out in a 737 Max mid-flight with near-catastrophic consequences.
But the truth is the experts have been raising the alarm for years.
A key contributing factor to the problems we are experiencing in our airspace system is the chronic shortage of air traffic controllers.
I feel for these controllers. They are over-worked and over-stressed – they know that if they make a mistake someone could die.
But its undeniable that the buffer of safety in which we once felt so secure has been eroded.
Another valid concern is that regional and national airlines are hiring pilots and promoting them through the ranks with less experience than ever before.
I’m not aware of any studies that focus on the impact of limited experience on flight safety, but the truth is that, without positive measures to address the problems in our skies, accidents will keep happening and more frequently.
Make no mistake there is still a pretty good safety buffer in place in our skies but it’s shrinking, and we need to act now if we want to stop it from shrinking further.
Shawn Pruchnicki is an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University in the College of Engineering. He was a Delta connection pilot for 10 years and trained in accident investigation at the NTSB Academy. He has testified to the US Senate on the current Boeing safety culture and manufacturing problems and his research into aviation safety has been published including by NASA and the FAA.
#1
I recall an article stating Racism Against Whites was the cause for the shortage of air traffic controllers b/c they were only hiring DEI and white candidates were not even considered.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
