Apparently Trump doesn't care about clean water.

[southernhybrid]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/climate/trump-clean-water-rollback.html

The Trump administration is expected on Tuesday to unveil a plan that would weaken federal clean water rules designed to protect millions of acres of wetlands and thousands of miles of streams nationwide from pesticide runoff and other pollutants.

Environmentalists say the proposal represents a historic assault on wetlands regulation at a moment when Mr. Trump has repeatedly voiced a commitment to “crystal-clean water.” The proposed new rule would chip away at safeguards put in place a quarter century ago, during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, who implemented a policy designed to ensure that no wetlands lost federal protection.

“They’re definitely rolling things back to the pre-George H.W. Bush era,” said Blan Holman, who works on water regulations with the Southern Environmental Law Center. Wetlands play key roles in filtering surface water and protecting against floods, while also providing wildlife habitat.

President Trump, who made a pledge of weakening a 2015 Obama-era rule one of his central campaign pledges, is expected to tout his plan as ending a federal land grab that impinged on the rights of farmers, rural landowners and real estate developers to use their property as they see fit.

WTF!

 

[Loren Pechtel]

water

 

[Ford]

As someone who grew up next to a protected wetland (and I remember the fight to keep it protected from developers) I can safely say fuck Trump. I'm sure there will be legal challenges to this, and I wish them all the best.

 

[scombrid]

It isn't just Trump. The megasized multinational corporations that run The Heartland Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Americans for Prosperity have hand picked most of the GOP Congress. This has been a wet dream of theirs since they created Limbaugh in the late 1980s as a lead propagandist against any and all new air quality and water quality regulations. They have been very persistent in pushing a narrative that the regulations and regulators are out to destroy your personal freedom. It is YOUR private property they are trying to regulate. You should be able to do whatever you want on YOUR property. People don't seem to understand that owning property in fee simple doesn't make you a sovereign; it just buys you exclusive use rights to the parcel but that parcel is still subject to the laws of the municipality, state, and federal governments. People also fail to grasp that stuff that you do on your property that flows off of it is naturally subject to regulation.

But the main point of winning propaganda for Farm Bureau/ALEC/et al. is that they sell the story as Joe Average landowner versus the Goliath government. If you want to build that little fish pond you should be able to build that little fish pond. But that is not their aim. They are getting the government out of the way so that huge multinationals can operate unrestricted without worrying about the negative externalities being dumped downwind and down stream. If you are a duck hunter in Florida then an energy company or agriculture conglomerate filling in shit loads of wetland up north somewhere is taking a natural resource away from you. If you harvest oysters on the northern Gulf coast, developers having free rein to pave over half of Georgia is probably going to fuck you over.

Oh, but it should be up to the states. Right. Florida DEP lets farmers dump Miami Dade, Broward sewage on sod farms and cow pastures in Osceola County. Phosphorous levels in the St. Johns are sky rocketing. The big corps have already bought most of the states. They are also successfully bankrupting the munis. You want jobs in your state/city? Give us a tax break of $80k per job to locate in your city. Tax breaks sunset and we move to another city. So cities can't afford to upgrade sewage treatment plants, stormwater storage and treatment, etc...

 

[Worldtraveller]

Unless it directly profits the trumpster fire, he's not interested in it. It has to be simple, he doesn't understand long term returns.

 

[Elixir]

Unless it directly profits the trumpster fire, he's not interested in it. It has to be simple, he doesn't understand long term returns.

In fairness, why should he concern himself with long term shit? When you can buy a dilapidated mansion for $45m, do nothing with it and sell it a couple years later for $90m in laundered Russian rubles, long term stuff doesn't make any sense.