Trump Watch: "Final Edition?"

 I. Trump Watch: "Final Edition?" Sierra Magazine  

#The Interior Department says that if will auction leases to drill for oil in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before the end of the year. The Sierra Club's Environmental Law Program provides support to the Gwich'in Steering Committee in opposing the move.

#A federal judge overturns the Interior Department's radical reinterpretation of the Migratory Bird Act, once again making companies liable for the "incidental" killing of birds by oil spills, electrocution, and other industrial activity.

#The EPA rolls back Obama-era regulations on methane, a powerful climate-changing gas.

#The Energy Department proposes weaker water-efficiency standards for showerheads after the president complains that low-flow nozzles make it hard for him to wash his hair.

#President Trump wants to weaken the Endangered Species Act by narrowing the definition of "habitat."

#In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court allows Trump to continue building his border wall while the Court resolves the question of whether the administration can divert $2.5 billion in military pay and pensions to do so.

#The EPA wants to weaken the National Environmental Policy Act to reduce the public's ability to influence or halt environmentally damaging projects like pipelines, highways, and power plants.

#The US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit agrees with the Environmental Law Program on the inadequacy of EPA-approved emissions limits for coal-fired power plants in Pennsylvania, saying they "spawn a pernicious loophole."

II. Some Notable Childcare Percentages

#45% - Percentage of U.S. parents with children under 5 who were paying for childcare in January 2020.

#12% - Share of those parents who were using a home-based childcare center.

#30% - Portion of those centers that remained open during the pandemic, according to parents, the highest of any type of provider. (Source: TIME, Novembr2/November 9, 2020.)

III. Selected Environmental Factoids

#Death Valley hits 130F, the third-hottest temperature on Earth ever recorded.

#The past decade was the hottest in human history. 

#Global fertility rates are crashing. The populations of 23 nations -- including Portugal, South Korea, Spain, and Thailand -- are expected to halve by the end of the century. The human population is forecast to peak in 2064 at 9.73 billion people.

#Africa has eliminated the wild polio virus. 

#Bottle-fed infants ingest 1,580,000 plastic particles each day.

#California's energy storage capacity surpasses Australia's, making it the largest in the world.

#Forty percent of the Amazon rainforest may become savanna over the next few decades, because fires and droughts have limited the ecosystem's ability to produce its own rain.

#Leaked documents from ExxonMobil show a plan to massively increase its emissions to 3 million tons of CO2 per year by 2025.

#Coloado voters approve reintroducing wolves to the state. 

#Sixty percent of US coal-fired power plants are now slated for retirement.

#Eleven Tasmanian devils have been reintroduced to mainland Australia, more than 3,000 years after they died out there.

#At least 14 countries have now given legal rights to rivers and other ecosystems. (Sources: The November/December 2020 and January/February 2021 issues of the 'Sierra' magazine.)

IV. Releasing Cops From Federal Oversight

"The civil unrest that rocked the country in the wake of George Floyd's death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer has many catalysts. Among the more immediate is President Donald Trump's and his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who freed local police departments from federal oversight, and signaled that police brutality was no longer a problem that the federal government had an interest in solving. For police officers and departments with histories of terrorizing people rather than building relationships with communities they are supposed to protect, that message was heard loud and clear.

After the police officers who beat Rodney King in March 1991 in Los Angeles were acquitted, leading to the Los Angeles riots, Congress took action by giving the federal government oversight of local police departments. As 'Mother Jones' reported in 2017, on the 25th anniversary of those riots: 'Since then, the Justice Department has launched 70 investigations into state and local law enforcement agencies and has negotiated 40 reform agreements, half of which are court-enforced consent decrees. The Obama administration was particularly active with this policy, enforcing 14 consent decrees for troubled police agencies, from Ferguson, Missouri, to Baltimore.' " (Source: Pema Levy, "Trump and Sessions Released Cops From Federal Oversight. Now We See the Results," Mother Jones, June 2, 2020.)