Washington Watch: Pipelines and Gag Orders
Pipelines, gag orders, rule cancellations, grant suspensions, big budget cuts: the Trump presidency is starting out every bit as disastrously for the environment as environmental advocates expected and feared.
Let’s take a quick look at the early low points of the anti-environment president. First, four of Trump’s first nine executive orders deal either in whole or in part with promoting the construction of oil and gas pipelines.
Two of the four orders are specific to the highest-profile pipeline controversies in America today: the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline. Trump wants both finished yesterday. His orders direct expedited resolution of the Dakota issues, and invite the sponsors of the Keystone pipeline to re-apply for the construction permit denied by the Obama Administration.
CIB notes that what a president wants, a president does not always get. We expect to see the same take-no-prisoners litigation onslaught against Trump’s unwanted pipelines as faced the Obama Administration’s more environment-friendly actions.
A third one of these executive orders deals more generally with expediting “high-priority infrastructure projects” including pipelines.
Trump’s list of such “high priority” projects includes the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) which would impact eastern North Carolina. We note that there are three public input opportunities on the ACP scheduled February 13-15 in Fayetteville, Wilson, and Roanoke Rapids.
Another of Trump’s first-week executive actions—in fact, the second one he signed—froze all pending but unfinalized regulations. In short, anything which still required some executive action, no matter how routine, was to be put on hold until his representatives reviewed and checked off on moving forward. Unfortunately, among those rules caught in this snare are four very nearly completed energy efficiency rules from the Department of Energy.
Among the other highest-profile of the Trump transition team’s executive actions during his first week in office were the various “gag orders” and website changes handed out at the White House and various agencies. Here’s another place where the instructions of an inexperienced executive ran into the realities of a large and diverse federal agency network and workforce. Told at first not to tweet, post, or talk with media without permission, an array of offices and employees found ways to get unscrubbed information out to the public.
Media and the public howled about information and scientific data suddenly vanishing from public government web pages. Fearing such an event, some agency staff also had saved separately the information for distribution even after it was disappeared from the public pages. As a result, one instruction to EPA staff last Tuesday to remove climate change information from its website was reversed the next day.
More, and even worse, attacks on the environment are expected soon from the Trump administration. Among those anticipated is a proposed $800 million cut to the EPA’s budget, which would slash both its in-house staff and its capacity to make grants to other levels of government for environmental research and cleanup work.
Both of these cuts would hurt North Carolina directly in its economy, and more broadly in the EPA’s ability to police polluters. (The latter, of course, is an intended effect and not a by-product.)
Conservation advocates are working to keep the public informed of the attacks by the new administration on efforts to protect human health and the environment. The more our friends and family know about the threats, the more likely they are to get involved in resisting them. Help spread the word.
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