While I don't think it's any sort of secret that Trump and the larger Pork Reich are no friends to our environment or the struggle against climate crisis, a little over a week ago Downmarket Mussolini signed an almost certainly illegal executive order that speaks to the scope of his plans to burn the planet to ash for profit as quickly as possible.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-and-the-environment
'This Executive Order is Illegal': Trump Attacks Half-Century of Environmental Protections in One Fell Swoop
"Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said it was "beyond delusional" for Trump to attempt to repeal "every environmental safeguard enacted over the past 50 years with an executive order."
"Trump's farcical directive aims to kill measures that protect endangered whales, prevent oil spills, and reduce the risk of a nuclear accident," said Hartl. "This chaotic administration is obviously desperate to smash through every environmental guardrail that protects people or preserves wildlife, but steps like this will be laughed out of court."
You absolutely just read that quote correctly; with the stroke of a pen Trump literally tried to wipe out five decades worth of laws like the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987, and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, by essentially demanding various departments of the government "sunset" environmental protection regulations and cease enforcing them by September 30th, 2025. Furthermore while absolutely none of this is legal, the government is once again asserting a rarely used procedural authority to try and expand its power to act unilaterally and in direct violation of the law.
"In a memo, the White House wrote that "in effectuating repeals of facially unlawful regulations, agency heads shall finalize rules without notice and comment, where doing so is consistent with the 'good cause' exception in the Administrative Procedure Act."
"That exception allows agencies to dispense with notice-and-comment rulemaking when that process would be 'impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest,'" said the White House."
As the article notes, it is shockingly disingenuous and absurd for the Trump regime to argue that regulations on air quality, fossil fuel production, environmental pollution control, and nuclear fucking waste are "contrary to the public interest." Unfortunately that really doesn't matter because once again it's clear that the public interest was never the point. The crass level of corruption and self-serving exercise of power the Klepto Kaiser regularly partakes in makes it obvious that this is all just a way to reward his capitalist donors without having to tolerate pushback from a public that cares very much about clean air to breath, clean water to drink, and a world on fire. Fascist is as fascist does I guess.
Will he get away with it? Well let's hope not; but at the intersection of Trump's emergency powers granted by invoking made up crises and the unorthodox weaponization of procedural rules towards purposes they were never intended for that we've seen the regime already employ, Der Leader has gotten away with an awful lot of fascist bullshit I for one thought was strictly illegal. Given that, I can't say I'm sleeping confidently at night over this.
