Boil your water. Don’t breath.
Because it’s not bad enough to have a pandemic killing us, let’s remove any safety nets in place from Big Industry killing us as well? Un-fuck all these fuckers.
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Apparently, and unsurprisingly, the administration is using this as an excuse to dismantle more of the government.
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I get “we can’t enforce all the laws we’d like because we’re on lockdown,” but why TELL the companies that they can break environmental regulations with impunity? It’s not like other law enforcement organizations are sending out announcements stating “You can commit all the crimes you want now! We’re too busy to care!”
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What the actual FUCK.
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I’ve worked in chemical plants before and have seen and heard what companies bitch about in regards to regulations so, this latest trump fuckery is just off the charts insane. Companies will start doing unimaginable things.
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So what now, plant managers are sending people to open the spigots at the bottoms of wastewater storage tanks, all over the country? Let it flow, boys!
JFC
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it’s not a proper apocalypse without some toxic and/or radioactive kaiju stomping around
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I’d go with “continue freely” but then I’m in a bad mood this week. It’s catching.
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And here we are … again.
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What they’re suspending is a set of reporting requirements. I haven’t worked for the EPA for a long time, so the monitoring structure might have changed, but at least in the old days the way it worked was this: USEPA did no regular monitoring themselves, but rather relied on self-reports from factories (possibly coordinating with state environmental agencies), and of course required the factories to maintain a regular self-monitoring system. Occasionally, both on a regular schedule and if there was suspicion of false reports, the EPA would send a team to audit the system by doing their own water and air sampling for a period. They would issue noncompliance orders if (a) the self-reporting was itself incomplete, or (b) the audit revealed that the self-reports were inaccurate.
I believe what is happening here is that the self-reporting requirement is being suspended. This is critical to environmental control, since the EPA does not have the staff to do the monitoring firsthand, and neither do the state agencies (which were often a little suspect themselves). It seems like a relatively small part of the environmental regulation process, but really it is at the heart of everything, this takes us back to pre-EPA days, maybe even before the predecessors of the EPA that were established following the Resources and Conservation Act in 1959.
The good news is that it will take most companies several months to change their protocols to exploit this suspension, the waste being produced by the companies is probably at a lower rate now than usual, and that the regular staff of the EPA (not the political guys at the top) are pretty vehement about pollution regulation and will be pressuring any new administration to reverse this suspension on day 1.
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“Hey Bob, cancel those scrubber orders will 'ya?” “Oh, and nevermind that one tank leaking by the well.”
“Missy, nevermind labeling cancer causing agents anymore.”
“Jim Bob, yeah, just dump that fly ash in the river will 'ya? No, it’s cool now. Go right ahead. Oh, and take off that catalytic converter will 'ya?”
@d_r I hope that you are right about the timing because if there isn’t a new administration next year…
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oh, don’t worry, they’ve got some ideas about which parts of the government they want to expand…
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When the EPA first started getting some teeth many companies were determined to find ways around monitoring, and some of them were pretty creative. I was in a US Steel factory in Loraine, Ohio that had a valve they could turn to temporarily limit the flow of pickle liquor into the Black River when we came to inspect them, one newer Ford engine plant intentionally comingled smoke from the casting process with steam from the power generation processes to make it harder to measure effluent (which in those days was done visually by human “smoke readers”).
I think nowadays the big companies (those that exist, I think every company factory in which I was ever on a survey is now gone) have pretty much accepted this aspect of regulation and have decided to focus their more evil efforts to other parts of the business. All bets are off for new companies that might try to cut corners to get a foothold in the market, and if the big companies actually stop monitoring and scale back those employees then if and when monitoring regulations do resume the actual monitoring might resume with a creaky start.
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They’re using this crisis to dismantle the whole damn government.
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May every last one of these fuckers drown in shit and then burn in hell.
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So then is rolling coal back on the menu ?
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