Pirate's Cove

For the most part, the Trump administration has been rather quiet on all the progress they’ve made in getting rid of silly climate scam rules and regulations, but, they have occurred, and this had made climate cultists upset

Climate Crisis: Can We Reverse All The Damage Trump Has Done?

When he talks about the Trump administration, David Doniger likes to say: “Imagine where we’d be if they knew what they were doing.” The climate lawyer and senior advisor to the NRDC Action Fund spends his days defending the environment from the U.S. government, and for the past three and a half years, that’s meant a front-row seat to the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on any regulation that’s meant to slow the climate crisis.

But it’s also been a window into the hasty, sloppy, and legally dubious ways that they’ve gone about it. “One of the hallmarks of this administration is how incompetently they’re doing this,” says Doniger. “It shows up in how slowly they’ve been able to work, and how flimsy their legal rationales are.” Almost all of Trump’s attempts at deregulation — some 100 rules that he’s tried to eliminate or weaken — are being challenged in court, and environmentalists are steadily winning. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, the Trump administration has lost 69 of the 83 legal challenges it’s faced in its deregulatory blitz.

Unfortunately, they have cancelled them too quickly at times, and, let’s face it, the left wing judges almost always rule in favor of more Big Government. Trump should have the power turned off in the courthouses, no heat or AC, make the judges live like it’s Climate Cult California.

If Biden wins in November, environmentalists say, his administration would have a slim window of opportunity to get our agencies back on track to meet the enormity of the climate crisis. “It means being aggressive from day one,” says Brett Hartl from the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund. “And not futzing around — knowing what you’re going to do and implementing it immediately.”

Making up for the lost time won’t be easy. Despite his slap-dash approach, Trump still managed to scramble the trajectory of American climate policy, creating a tangle of legal fights that will have to be cleared up for U.S. climate policy to move forward. And he left almost no part of our environmental regulatory structure untouched —  greenlighting fossil fuel infrastructure like the Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipelines, setting us back on emission-reduction goals by reversing the Clean Power Plan and higher fuel-efficiency standards, and gutting the federal agencies that should be at the helm of our climate response.

Of course, the CPP never went into force, as it was caught up in lawsuits from the minute the Obama administration out this massive, nation changing rule into effect. Further, let’s not forget he started the process which pulls the U.S. out of the Paris Climate agreement, which becomes formal right after the election. I would have personally preferred he just say “Obama signed this thing with the wave of a pen, I’m pulling out the same way”, but, he apparently was holding out to renegotiate the agreement for better terms for the U.S.

Using executive power, Biden could declare a national climate emergency. It wouldn’t just send an important message to Americans — and the rest of the world — that we’re taking the climate crisis seriously; it would give the administration the power to mobilize the government on a massive scale, like ordering the Secretary of Defense to redirect military spending toward the rapid development of clean energy.

Biden could also immediately order federal agencies to reverse the climate rollbacks Trump introduced through executive order — like allowing oil and gas companies to side-step state approval — and start issuing his own. Most urgently, Biden would have the power to keep more fossil fuels in the ground: He could direct the Secretary of the Interior to halt oil-and-gas leasing and fracking on federal lands, reinstitute the ban on exporting crude oil, and order all federal agencies to deny permits for new fossil fuel infrastructure, like pipelines, storage facilities, and refineries.

He’d also be able to change the ways that money moves through the energy sector. He could prohibit the U.S. government from financing fossil fuel programs overseas and end all Department of Energy loans for fossil fuels stateside, while also requiring the Federal Reserve to manage climate risks — forcing it to acknowledge the current and future impact of climate change on our economy.

There are lots and lots of recommendations for things Biden could do, most of which will increase your cost of living, ruin your pension, and take away lots of your freedom, liberty, and choice.

And this story comes from Rolling Stone. Remember when RS used to be counter-culture, about sticking it to the man, about government getting out of our faces and off our backs? Freedom, man, freedom!