The graphic above is a rendition by award-winning artist Nancy Ohanian of 7 domestic terrorists in the news lately. Can you identify them? Blue America will send you a rare beautiful print of the 7, autographed by Ms. Ohanian if you can identify each of them in the next 24 hours-- so before 9am (PT) on Wednesday. If more than one person gets it right, I'll beg Nancy for another copy or if too many people get it right, we'll pick a winner randomly. There's nothing to do but send the list of miscreants to downwithtyranny@gmail.com/
I thought this might be a good moment to draw your attention to another kind of domestic terrorism though. Writing for Statista in October, Katharina Buchholz reported that the Trump regime had reversed 100 environmental rules. The've continued doing so right into this week.
She wrote, that in mid-April the Trumpists "cut down an Obama-era rule for coal plants to limit their emissions of mercury and other pollutants. In late March, more Obama-era regulations, this time fuel efficiency standards, were severely altered, allowing carmakers to proceed towards fuel-efficient cars more slowly as well as lowering the overall goal. The current administration has repealed or started to rollback 100 environmental regulations since coming into power in 2017. The administration has throughout branded its initiative as a way to remove obstacles for business, especially the fossil fuel industry."
27 rollbacks were completed or started for regulations dealing with air pollution and emissions, the most of any single environmental regulation category. Notably, the administration is eliminating requirements for oil and gas companies to report methane emissions and calculate the “social cost of carbon,” an Obama-era rule meant to estimate the long-term benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Regulations dealing with drilling and extraction is the second category with the most rollbacks, with 19 completed or in progress. Some significant changes to environmental regulations the Trump administration has accomplished include approving the Dakota Access pipeline, which runs less than a mile from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation; cutting the border of two national monuments in Utah; repealing water pollution regulations for fracking on federal and reservation lands and revoking EPA regulations that would have forced mines to prove they can pay to clean up pollution they are causing.
Good news on Trump's last day in this regard though. Earlier this morning a federal appeals court vacated the Trump regime rules that eased restrictions on greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, potentially making it easier for Biden to reset the nation’s signature rules addressing climate change.
In his farewell to Trump this morning, John Pavolvitz wrote "For four years I’ve openly lamented the poison your presidency has so effortlessly generated. I’ve watched our country imploding on your watch, witnessed our public discourse become polluted in your presence, and seen our political climate grow ever more corrosive with you overseeing it... You’ve emboldened people to be open about things they used to conceal for the sake of decorum, and though it turns my stomach, I know that this is the only way we can move forward; to have that cancerous stuff exposed fully so that it can be dealt with. Our progress as a nation now is predicated on authentic dialogue and honest conversation, no matter how brutal and disheartening those endeavors are. In other words, you’ve let us know what we’re really dealing with here and while it’s been rightly disturbing, it’s also been revelatory. That’s the thing about that kind of harsh light: you’re forced to see everything. Beauty and monstrosity equally illuminated... In being as unrepentantly malevolent and unapologetically ugly as you have been, you’ve unearthed our hidden sickness and shown us who we are: not in the songs or the anthems or the history books, but in reality and in this moment. You brought every awful thing about us out into the open and now we have to deal with it all. And for this-- I thank you. Now, get the hell out of our house and our lives for good."
