Former EPA Chief Gina McCarthy didn’t mince words this week when she explained that the proposed cuts to the EPA by the Trump administration are going to harm “normal human beings.” Basically, if you aren’t a fossil fuel CEO or corporate shareholder, you have absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose from the cuts that Trump and his team want to make. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript of the above video:
Donald Trump has made is absolutely clear that he is going to pick apart the Environmental Protection Agency, do away with regulations that protect the health of American citizens and he’s even put a guy in charge of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, who doesn’t believe that climate change is real and he believes that the EPA shouldn’t even exist. In spite of all this, I shouldn’t say in spite, because of all this we have a former head of the EPA, Gina McCarthy, who told Rachel Maddow earlier this week that these regulations that Trump and Scott Pruitt are trying to do away with, do you know who they benefit? Normal human beings. Those were her words. They benefit normal human beings.
That is absolutely true. I’ve said this before, and I’m going to keep repeating this, the only people in this country who benefit from a repealing of environmental regulations are fossil fuel industry CEOs and people who happen to be shareholders at any of those fossil fuel companies. A couple hundred people in this country maybe, maybe a couple hundred who benefit from relaxing environmental safety standards from saying it’s okay if you go ahead and pump a little more CO2 in the atmosphere, pump a little more mercury into the water, put a little more arsenic into the soil. It’s okay, we’ll let you get away with that.
Those people who make money off of that are the only ones who benefit. Meanwhile, as Gina McCarthy pointed out, over 300 million other people in the United States are going to suffer as a result of it. In some instances things like water pollution and soil pollution don’t affect the wealthy as much as they affect lower income Americans. In terms of air pollution, you see that one doesn’t discriminate. That one isn’t localized in one community. That one isn’t separated by gated walls between the rich and the have nots. Air pollution affects every single person in this country equally buddy, and that’s what Donald Trump and Scott Pruitt and all of the other anti regulation republicans in Washington don’t seem to understand.
They too will suffer as a result of repealing these regulations that they’ve talked about repealing, like Obama’s clean air plan, like the clean water act, clean air act. They want to do away with those, or at least significantly weaken them because they feel like they’re immortal, or more importantly, they feel like the money that they get from the fossil fuel industry is worth the cancer that they might develop, or the COPD, or any of the other countless illnesses that arise from exposure to industrial pollutants.
Our lives, their lives, are not worth as much as that money. I understand they don’t want to value our lives very much. They’ve never seen us. They’ve never met us. They don’t know us. We don’t vote for them, so why would they value our life? We’re useless to them. The fact that they’re putting the money that they get from fossil fuel companies over the lives of, well their own lives, over the lives of their spouses, over the lives of their children and grandchildren, that to me is even more disgusting. We’re all in this together.
I know sometimes it’s right versus left, everybody in it for themselves, huge divisions in this country, but it’s really not when you get down to it. We’re all the same and we’re all made of the same material, the same material that is susceptible to illness and disease from these corporate pollutants. They don’t care, hell most of the public doesn’t even care. They think we got bigger things to worry about. We’ve got to worry about the economy. They’re worried about terrorism and immigrants. No, trust me when I tell you that environmental issues, not only do they connect to every other kind of issue, but this is the one that we can’t fix later. This is a now or never situation. Scientists have been warning us for decades.
We haven’t been listening, but now, maybe now that we have a president in place and a head of the EPA taking an ax to regulations, we’ve had scientists stand up, we’ve had them march, we’ve had advocates march, maybe now people are starting to understand that we can’t wait. We can’t put this off, and we don’t have somewhere else we can go until the pollution goes away. We are all in this together and it’s time that we start acting like it.
