nahmus
Refugee from syrup
yea I know why.
The One Incredibly Green Thing Donald Trump Has Done
This is a long article so i will just pick some paragraphs that give the jist of the article. Can't believe it's from politico
https://www.politico.com/news/magazi...nden-wv-400921
Still, no one denied that the aging Superfund program was in trouble. The billion-dollar cleanup program, birthed by the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, gives the EPA enormous power to compel polluters to clean up their own messes. Early in its life, it was touted as the most potent environmental rule anywhere.But decades of systemic underfunding and neglect have slowly neutered Superfund. In the late 90s, during President Bill Clinton’s second term, the EPA averaged 87 completed cleanups per year; over the first six years of the George W. Bush administration, the number dipped to 40; Obama’s first year in office saw 20 completed clean ups and in 2014 the number dived to a piddly eight. By the tail-end of the Obama years there were still 1,300-plus sites on the Superfund National Priorities List—the worst of the worst—and some 53 million people living within three miles of one. The program “was neglected in the Obama administration,” Brett Hartl, the Center for Biological Diversity’s government affairs director, told me. “Not maliciously, but neglected.”
Top officials took a personal interest in dozens of sites across the country. Stalled cleanup efforts were addressed in double time. Critics argued, rightly, that much of the work had progressed under Obama, and the EPA under Trump was just taking credit by finishing up the final stages of years of hard work, but the progress continued apace the next year. And, as some activists pointed out, if it was true that EPA was only wrapping up sites that had been mostly cleaned up in earlier years, what had kept the Obama administration from expediting the process and finishing the job?
Under Trump, officials deleted seven sites from the Superfund list in 2017, 22 in 2018 and 27 in 2019—the highest single-year total since 2001.Stagnated projects like Butte, Montana’s noxious Berkeley Pit have been reinvigorated and schedules have been accelerated, like at Indiana’s USS Lead site, a former lead ore refinery, and the West Lake Landfill in Missouri.
And more importantly, the polluters—which are required to pick up the tab for remediation but often employ teams of lawyers to contest the fees—weren’t let off the hook, either: Pruitt’s EPA went after polluters quickly and with an aggression that hadn’t been seen in years.
EDIT: There is still a lot of work to do on other sites. Hopefully trump gets elected again and this continues, hell even if biden wins I'd like to see this more of a priority than climate change.
The One Incredibly Green Thing Donald Trump Has Done
This is a long article so i will just pick some paragraphs that give the jist of the article. Can't believe it's from politico
https://www.politico.com/news/magazi...nden-wv-400921
Still, no one denied that the aging Superfund program was in trouble. The billion-dollar cleanup program, birthed by the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, gives the EPA enormous power to compel polluters to clean up their own messes. Early in its life, it was touted as the most potent environmental rule anywhere.But decades of systemic underfunding and neglect have slowly neutered Superfund. In the late 90s, during President Bill Clinton’s second term, the EPA averaged 87 completed cleanups per year; over the first six years of the George W. Bush administration, the number dipped to 40; Obama’s first year in office saw 20 completed clean ups and in 2014 the number dived to a piddly eight. By the tail-end of the Obama years there were still 1,300-plus sites on the Superfund National Priorities List—the worst of the worst—and some 53 million people living within three miles of one. The program “was neglected in the Obama administration,” Brett Hartl, the Center for Biological Diversity’s government affairs director, told me. “Not maliciously, but neglected.”
Top officials took a personal interest in dozens of sites across the country. Stalled cleanup efforts were addressed in double time. Critics argued, rightly, that much of the work had progressed under Obama, and the EPA under Trump was just taking credit by finishing up the final stages of years of hard work, but the progress continued apace the next year. And, as some activists pointed out, if it was true that EPA was only wrapping up sites that had been mostly cleaned up in earlier years, what had kept the Obama administration from expediting the process and finishing the job?
Under Trump, officials deleted seven sites from the Superfund list in 2017, 22 in 2018 and 27 in 2019—the highest single-year total since 2001.Stagnated projects like Butte, Montana’s noxious Berkeley Pit have been reinvigorated and schedules have been accelerated, like at Indiana’s USS Lead site, a former lead ore refinery, and the West Lake Landfill in Missouri.
And more importantly, the polluters—which are required to pick up the tab for remediation but often employ teams of lawyers to contest the fees—weren’t let off the hook, either: Pruitt’s EPA went after polluters quickly and with an aggression that hadn’t been seen in years.
EDIT: There is still a lot of work to do on other sites. Hopefully trump gets elected again and this continues, hell even if biden wins I'd like to see this more of a priority than climate change.
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