Month: October 2020

Our Anti-Environmental President

Op-Ed by Jessica Shepherd

President Trump’s claim in September that he is “the number one environmental president since Teddy Roosevelt” is as ironic as it is galling.  In truth, it would be more appropriate to call Trump the number one anti-environmental president of all time for his assault on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the greater environmental community.

Trump has consistently thumbed his nose at environmental protections by withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement, his ongoing attempts to reinterpret touchstone environmental laws like the Migratory Bird Act, and through his appointments of climate-change denier Scott Pruitt, and then coal and oil ally Andrew Wheeler to head the EPA.

Kowtowing to Trump, the EPA, in defiance of their name and mission “to protect human health and the environment”, has steadily given in to industry interests — waving away concerns about pesticides, reducing constraints on toxic emissions in our air and water, scrapping requirements for mining companies to set aside cleanup funds, and loosening stream-side dumping regulations on the coal industry. Moreover, Trump has signed off on watered down EPA regulations intended to limit greenhouse gas emissions by reducing fuel economy standards and doing away with limits on methane flaring for oil and gas production on public lands. And let’s not forget Trump’s push for oil and gas leasing here in Alaska with the opening of the Arctic Coastal Plain to drilling and expansion into previously off-limit areas in the National Petroleum Reserve.

Talking advantage of a dire situation, in March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic diverted our attention, the EPA suspended enforcement of environmental regulations on companies that were deemed unable to comply with emission standards due to the pandemic. At the same time, Trump signed an executive order scaling back the review process for new projects under the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.

Also, in March, the Department of Justice (DOJ) scraped the longstanding use of Supplemental Environmental Projects (SEPs) to fund environmentally beneficial projects. According to the EPA “A SEP is an environmentally beneficial project that a violator voluntarily agrees to undertake in settlement of a civil penalty action, as an option to offset some portion of the monetary penalty. One goal of the SEPs is to improve the environmental health of communities that have been put at risk due to the violation of an environmental law.”  SEPs were frequently used by the EPA to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy. Examples include investments in local wind and solar power generation, retrofitting diesel-powered school buses with pollution control devices, the purchase of hybrid vehicles for a National Park, and funding for energy-efficient building technology for public buildings.

Thanks to the Trump Administration, the air we breathe now contains higher levels of mercury and other toxic particulate matter from vehicles and coal-fired power plants, and CO2 levels, despite a downturn at the start of the pandemic, are once again trending upward toward an ill-fated future. Faced with another four years of Trump, we’ll need to rename the EPA the “Environmental Destruction Agency” (EDA) and rewrite its mission to better reflect its new role in destroying human health and the environment.

Mind you, this is just an overview of Trump’s egregious environmental rollbacks.

If there is any good news, it’s that Trump has not been completely successful in his vendetta against established environmental safeguards. For example, his attempt to water down the Migratory Bird Treaty Act would have resulted in a reinterpretation of the law to apply only to the intentional killing of birds, laying blameless those whose actions cause the “incidental” killing of millions of birds annually through industrial activities like power line electrocutions, toxic tailing ponds, or the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill that killed more than a million birds. A federal court overturned the policy revision in August of this year.

In contrast to Trump’s crusade against the environment, Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan would invest in net-zero emissions while creating new, green energy jobs. His 110-page plan will benefit first those communities who have been most directly affected by environmental violations, especially communities of color and the Native community. The comprehensive plan promises to “take immediate action to reverse the Trump Administration’s dangerous and destructive rollbacks of critical climate and environmental protections.”

 

 

 

Last Stand for the Tongass

The Tongass National Forest, the largest national forest in the United States, is a landscape comprised of old-growth Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and red and yellow cedar. These mighty trees, along with innumerable glacially-fed streams and lakes, give rise to all five species of Pacific salmon, humpback whales, healthy black and brown bear populations, wolves, and omnipresent bald eagles. Located in southeastern Alaska, the 17 million acre Tongass is the size of West Virginia and home to 70,000 people, including the First Nation people of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian, and the city of Juneau, Alaska’s state capital. It is also the largest expanse of roadless wilderness in the national forest system, at least for now.

Protected by the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule (signed into effect by President Bill Clinton), 55% of the Tongass, or 9.2 million acres, is off limits to road construction and timber sales.  But, in January 2018, under Governor Bill Walker’s administration and with the backing of the Trump Administration, the State of Alaska petitioned the Secretary of Agriculture to consider exempting the Tongass from the Roadless Rule.

Under the federal National Environmental Policy Act, any consideration to exempt the Tongass from the Roadless Rule requires a 60-day public comment period and a scientific analysis of environmental impacts to the Tongas. The 60-day public comment period, conducted this summer, fell well short of its obligation according to tribal members who received last-minute notice of public meetings. In their opinion, the comment period “exemplifies the federal government’s long-running failure to adequately work with tribes.” In response, eleven southeast Alaskan tribes vested in the outcome of the upcoming ruling, filed a petition in July, requesting the USDA consult with tribes “on a government-to-government basis.” Earlier attempts by area tribes to engage in the two-year process were derailed because “the USDA repeatedly ignored their input and requests for in-person meetings; fast-traced seemingly arbitrary deadlines; and proceeded as usual despite a pandemic that has disproportionally hurt Native communities.”

The Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), was released on September 24, 2020 and analyzes six alternatives, including a no-action alternative. Trump-appointed USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue prefers Alternative 6 which “provides maximum additional timber harvest opportunities,” removing “all 9.37 million inventoried roadless acres on the Tongass from roadless designation.” Moreover, “Alternative 6 would revert a net total of 168,000 old growth-acres and 20,000 young-growth acres, previously identified as unsuitable timber lands, to suitable timber lands”. The Tongas will “continue to be managed by the Forest Plan and in accordance with applicable statutory instructions.” There is a 30-day waiting period following the release of the EIS prior to implementation to allow for review.

If you want to weigh in against opening up the Tongas, please see the following websites.

https://addup.sierraclub.org/campaigns/keep-alaskas-tongass-national-forest-roadless

https://act.nrdc.org/letter/tongass-forest-181004

Your voice matters.

Public Lands Management Under Trump Descends into Chaoss

 

President Donald Trump’s appointment of William Perry Pendley as Director of the Bureau of Land Management who is openly hostile to environmental regulations, has turned into yet another legal debacle typical of the current administration. Pendley’s inflammatory statements and open opposition to social justice and diversity including for native and African American communities, statements that public lands should be privatized, conflicts of interest, unethical conduct, support of anti-government extremists and efforts to dismantle the BLM, have outraged conservation and tribal organizations throughout the western U.S. It, therefore, quickly became obvious to Interior Secretary David Bernhardt that because of Pendley’s record, there would be no way he would obtain confirmation from congress if the administration did what was legally required and nominate him for that purpose. In fact, in a procedure that the U.S. Supreme Court calls a “critical structural safeguard” of democracy, the Appointments Clause of the Constitution requires that the heads of prominent federal agencies be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate” a standard that is also found in the federal Vacancies Reform Act.

Especially when it comes to dismantling environmental regulatory standards, however, the Trump administration has never  been that concerned with federal law or, for that matter the U.S. Constitution and Bernhardt resolved the issue of Pendley’s radical anti-public land views, racism and support of extremists simply by repeatedly extending Pendley’s appointment as Director of the agency for the past 13 months.

As a result, in July 2020, the state of Montana and several conservation organizations filed a lawsuit to enjoin Bernhardt from continuing to extend Pendley’s status as Acting Director of BLM. This prompted Trump to finally put Pendley’s name before congress as required only to almost immediately remove it because of concerns of several republican senators in key states who are up for election about the audacity of the appointment. However, rather than remove Pendley as acting Director in accordance with with the law, Secretary Bernhardt announced that Pendley will “stay on leading BLM” as the bureau’s deputy director of policy and programs, who is also “exercising the authority of director.”

This, once again, got the attention of the Montana U.S. District Court which as part of the lawsuit filed by the state and conservationists a couple months before, promptly enjoined Pendley from exercising such authority and Bernhardt from unlawfully delegating the authority of the BLM director to him. In fact, the Court’s declaration that Pendley served unlawfully as the Acting Director of the BLM for well over a year, also meant that many of the decisions he made during that time were similarly illegal, threatening Trump’s strategy to dismantle protections of public lands and open them up to development.

Chief Judge Brian Morris found that “’any function or duty’ of the BLM Director that has been performed by Pendley would have no force and effect and must be set aside as arbitrary and capricious” and instructed DOI to compile any such acts and provide a full report to the Court. Therefore, any of the official actions Pendley took over the 424 preceding the decision including opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the National Petroleum reserve to oil drilling,” or vast acreages of public lands, including areas relied on by Native village communities for subsistence, to mining, are potentially unauthorized.

 

 

 

 

From GOP Power Grab to Trump Super Spreader

The recent passing of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, has given the GOP  the opportunity to make another  power grab, this time, in the form of rush to make a life-time appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court before the 2020 presidential election.  Within days of Ginsberg’s death, Trump announced that he had already begun the search for a replacement and that the replacement would take place within the next 7 weeks before the election.

This is contrary to Senates practice over the past 40 years which has consistently taken almost 3 months to appoint Supreme Court justices including selection by the President, vetting by the Senate Judiciary Committee and then a final vote on the Senate floor. Now that the republican controlled senate eliminated the filibuster in 2017, the party that controls the senate could go through the entire process without a single vote from the minority party.

Based on this process and arguing that appointments to the Supreme Court should not take place in an election year, when Justice Anthony Scalia died in 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, refused to hold a confirmation vote for President Obama’s nominee – Merrick Garland. Similarly, during a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting in opposition to Garland’s appointment, Committee chair, Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, was even more emphatic “use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president (elected) in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.’”

Within hours of Ginsberg’s death, however, Senate republicans seem to have lost their compassion for letting the democratic process run it’s course, when McConnell called for a floor foot on and Graham said he would support anyone President Trump nominated. Even Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski who, after Trump announced the move to rush the nominee through the Senate, and recalling the GOP commitment in 2016,  said she “would not support taking up a potential Supreme Court vacancy this close to the election,” began back tracking just days after making this pronouncement. She now says she could vote in favor of the Trump’s nominee if process is not being rushed to meet “a deadline that is hard and fast.”

However, the Senate Republic and Trump’s latest judicial power grab and an unanticipated backlash after Trump announced  Amy Coney Barrett a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit judge and former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia as his pick to replace Ginsberg, when held his now infamous COVID-19 super spreader meet and great for the new nominee. As a result several of the senators present at the event have since tested positive for the disease and are now attending Judge Barrett’s confirmation hearings which began on Monday October 12. Sen. Graham who was also present at the meet and greet for Judge Barrett has refused to be tested for COVID.

The ill-regard for the health of others and the rushed proceedings has caused consternation among democrats.  Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that this “sham hearing — on a holiday, 22 days from Election Day, during a COVID-19 outbreak in the Judiciary Committee with a likely-exposed Chairman who won’t get tested — shows just how far the GOP will go to steal another Supreme Court seat & hand our courts over to extremists…”

As if to confirm the lopsided and calamitous process, instead of  the usual manner for announcing a Supreme Court Justice confirmation hearing, in which the chairman states that the hearing is for the purpose of “considering the nomination,” instead, Graham pronounced that this is “the hearing to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court…”

Because the vote in the Senate to confirm Judge Barrett could be close, every vote will count. Contact Senator Murkowski and tell her that rush to place another conservative idealogue on the Supreme Court threatens the basis of democracy the country was founded on and that she should  stick to her original commitment to wait until after the election to fill the position.