“With today’s prudent rule, we are protecting America’s waterways and providing certainty to hardworking farmers, ranchers, and landowners.” – Rep. Steve Womack
Here is how Womack explains the news at the bottom of his weekly email. “ICYMI: This week, the Trump Administration announced the Navigable Waters Protection Rule replacing the 2015 Waters of the United States Rule. The new directive provides regulatory clarity and ends Obama-era federal overreach.”
Here are the facts: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, our experts on water quality and river navigation, are out of the loop. The Navigable Waters Protection Rule is not about hardworking farmers, it’s an environmental crime eliminating protections for nearly one-fifth of the nation’s streams, and half of wetlands. Why? Trump wants to increase fracking and pipelines to export liquified methane as Freedom Gas at a loss!
Mni Wiconi – Lakota for “water is life”
Water is essential to life on Earth. The water cycle ties the Earth’s climate system – air, clouds, oceans, lakes, vegetation, snow and glaciers – in a continuous flow between the Earth and atmosphere.
The world water crisis was at the top of the Davos agenda. The changing climate has flooded dry areas and spread drought and heatwaves. California is running out of fresh water and is being forced to use wastewater for farming.
Eliminating environmental requirements does not protect American rivers or public health. Protection means preservation or safeguard, used in the new rule to hide danger, destruction, and harm.
On a hot planet, we need more federal environmental regulations to protect our water, not fewer. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew hit North Carolina and flooded more than 140 industrial pig and poultry barns, open liquid hog waste pits, and massive fields saturated with manure. Feces and water don’t mix.
Pig factories are full of pigs kept in small confined enclosures. When pigs got to go, they do. Pig waste falls through the floor ending up in pink lagoons where bacteria have a feast. On paper, these factories seem harmless to the owners, but with heavy rains, open pits flood and pig feces flow downhill.
How do you clean a feces contaminated river?
EPA says nitrogen and phosphorus are significant pollutants of U.S. waters, serious threats to public health, ironically called “nutrients.” Nutrient contamination is a leading cause of polluted lakes, rivers, and streams. Don’t drink the water.
Rise up, we deserve a healthy economy
Let’s choose clean water for everyone and stop the oil madness destroying our economy, environment, and our future. Fracking is a death machine leaving behind debt and destruction. Millions of gallons of fresh water are permanently taken out of the Earth’s water cycle to frack shale oil, then storing radioactive wastewater in injection wells and contaminating drinking water.
A financial report last week “The Great American Fracking Bust” found 402 bankruptcy filings with a total debt of $207 billion since 2015. With billions of barrels of new conventional oil reserves in Iran and Guyana, Trump is betting our money as he did with casinos, and we know how that turned out.
Needless carbon emissions
In the U.S. most of the energy comes from burning fossil fuels. Of the total energy generated 68 percent is lost and 32 percent is used. Most energy losses are hiding in plain sight. Ecologists know everything has to go someplace. Waste creates more waste. Eliminating energy losses decreases energy generation, which reduces carbon emissions.
Case in point: While 1 in 8 U.S. households don’t know where their next meal is coming from, 40 percent of the food produced is discarded. Collecting and disposing food waste in landfills requires additional energy. Bacterial decomposition in landfills creates methane emissions. By eliminating food waste by half, a proportional amount of energy and methane emissions are eliminated.
A circular economy would eliminate wasted resources. A healthy economy requires peace, respect, public health, and widely shared prosperity, with sufficient income and livelihoods for dignified lives. This broad base of prosperity is achievable by creating a diversity of local, independent businesses, rooted in and responsive to local communities, learning to live well within limits.
Mni Wiconi.
Dr. Luis Contreras
The Senate coverup makes water and LNG pipelines more urgent
Trump will ignore the consequences and the law to build pipelines and LNG terminals, increasing the climate risk
Womack’s words have a new meaning today
Trump killed the Clean Water Act protecting wetlands, rivers and life, to build pipelines and export oil and methane — as Freedom Gas, subsidized and sold at a loss!
“The University of Texas at Austin earlier this month warned that the expansion of oil, gas, and petrochemical infrastructure along the Gulf Coast could add half a billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions to America’s total every year by 2030. This, the UT said, was equivalent to 8 percent of the country’s current total in emissions and would come from new refineries, petrochemical plants and, perhaps a little unexpectedly for the layperson, liquefied natural gas plants.
Touted as “freedom gas” by the Donald Trump administration, LNG has quickly turned into a major export commodity for U.S. energy companies. Indeed, LNG as a fuel burns a lot more cleanly—with a lot less emissions—than oil derivatives. But its production turns out to be a different matter.”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Gas-Prices/The-True-Cost-Of-Freedom-Gas.html
Was blocking Qatar part of the plan to export Liquified Natural Gas, methane, as Freedom Gas?
Qatar was left without food – cows were flown to Qatar from several nations
The blockade changed the LNG market and caused great suffering for the people of Qatar, where the U.S. has a strategic US Air Force base!
The blockade continues …
https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-says-his-middle-east-visit-prompted-qatar-crisis/
At Davos, our fearless leader tried to sell liquified methane and clean coal, trumping about “America’s extraordinary prosperity” during his watch. False!
Here is the truth: “The Great American Shale Oil & Gas Bust: Fracking Gushes Bankruptcies, Defaulted Debt, and Worthless Shares”
https://wolfstreet.com/2020/01/22/the-great-american-shale-oil-gas-bust-fracking-gushes-bankruptcies-defaulted-debt-and-worthless-shares/
The idea regulations are simply burdensome is false – look at where the US was before federal regulations:
Firemen on a bridge over the Cuyahoga River as a fire, which started in an oil slick, sweeps the docks at the Great Lakes Towing Company site in Cleveland in November 1952.
https://www.businessinsider.com/vintage-epa-photos-reveal-us-waterways-before-pollution-was-regulated-2019-6
Forever chemicals can’t be ignored
Protecting all water is fundamental, not an option!
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/14/health/what-are-pfas-chemicals/index.html
Virtually all major US drinking water sources likely contaminated with PFAS
PFAS chemicals are known as “forever chemicals,” a family of potentially thousands of synthetic chemicals that are extremely persistent in the environment and in our bodies. PFAS is short for perfluoroalky and polyfluoroalkyl substances and includes chemicals known as PFOS, PFOA and GenX.
WHY would we choose oil over water?
https://truthout.org/articles/virtually-all-major-us-drinking-water-sources-likely-contaminated-with-pfas/