...
But it was the right move. I have probably spent at least as much time in serious environmental activism in my life as I have at any other pursuit, and this federal agency has become useless to the environment and extremely useful to politicians, while NOT delivering a safer or cleaner or more luxuriant environment. It has been sucking fantastical fees out of anyone who wants to get anything done, making some resubmit "better" [different] plans to make them seem more environmentally benign, which yields up more fees and does bubkes to protect the environment in almost all cases.
For instance, the EPA allows all the drilling off the Gulf Coast to dump their lethally toxic drilling muds into the Gulf, so long as they parse it out over a wider area than merely letting them pour it straight in at the rig sites... and they have been doing this for something like forty years. So the disastrous "spill" a few years back was just further poisoning of already dead waters, and maybe even now serves as THE excuse for the already toxic "seafood" from there.
And it's NOT that there will be NO environmental protection anymore — like there'd been much before — just that it will not be as good a tool for mindfuckers anymore.
So much as the language here makes me cringe, a lot of it is exactly right... though I doubt seriously that any of the 700 job cuts at the EPA were "officials". That's not how agencies work.
pipe up any time....
