#Mandy Gunasekara

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Andra Watkins at How Project 2025 Will Ruin YOUR Life:

Here’s a list of every listed Project 2025 author who worked in 45’s administration. 26 of 36 total authors. (72%) Jonathan Berry - US Department of Justice Adam Candeub - Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Deputy Associate Attorney General Brendan Carr - Senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission Benjamin S. Carson, Sr., MD - Secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development Ken Cuccinelli - Acting Director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services; Acting Deputy Secretary for the US Department of Homeland Security

Rick Dearborn - Deputy Chief of Staff Diana Furchtgott-Roth - Deputy Assistant Secretary at the US Department of Transportation Thomas F. Gilman - Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Chief Financial Officer at the US Department of Commerce Mandy M. Gunasekara - Chief of Staff at the Environmental Protection Agency Gene Hamilton - Counselor to the Attorney General at the US Department of Justice Jennifer Hazelton - senior strategic consultant for the Department of Defense Dennis Dean Kirk - senior positions at the Office of Personnel Management

Christopher Miller - several positions during the 45 administration in areas of defense Mora Namdar - Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Peter Navarro - Director of 45’s Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy; also went to jail William Perry Pendley - led the Bureau of Land Management for 45** Max Primorac - acting Chief Operating Officer and Assistant to the Administrator, Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, US Agency for International Development Roger Severino - Director of Civil Rights at the US Department of Health and Human Services Kiron K. Skinner - Director of Policy Planning and Senior Advisor at the US Department of State

Brooks D Tucker - Assistant Secretary for Congressional and Legislative Affairs and Acting Chief of Staff Hans A von Spakovsky - former member of 45’s Advisory Committee on Election Integrity Russ Vought - Director of the Office of Management and Budget William L. Walton - member of 45’s transition team Paul Winfree - member of 45’s transition team Paul Dans - Chief of Staff at the US Office of Personnel Management and senior advisor at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development Steven Groves - Assistant Special Counsel, the Mueller investigation If 25 of the 36 listed authors of Project 2025 worked in my former administration, there’s NO WAY I wouldn’t know about it.

Andra Watkins has a list of the Project 2025 authors who worked for Donald Trump.

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

"Everything You Need to Know About Project 2025's Plan for the EPA"

"That woman watching James Inhofe hold a snowball on the floor of Congress to “disprove” global warming?

That’s the lead author of #Project2025’s section on destroying the EPA.

Great catch by @amywestervelt . Read more here"

--- Jamie Henn @jamieclimate Director, Fossil Free Media

[rjzimmerman]

Who Is Lee Zeldin? (Sierra Club:

Excerpt from this story from the Sierra Club:

President-elect Donald Trump’s selection to lead the Environmental Protection Agency is, in a word, unexpected. The appointment announced on November 11—in which the Trump transition team erroneously referred to the EPA as the “Environmental Protective Agency”—was not an energy industry lobbyist like Andrew Wheeler or a MAGA insider like Mandy Gunasekara, who authored the EPA chapter of Project 2025. Instead, Trump chose Lee Zeldin, a little-known former Republican congressman from Long Island, New York, whose background on environment and energy issues is relatively skimpy. 

So, then: Who is this person who will be in charge of the federal agency tasked with protecting the environment and public health?  

Zeldin is a politician and military officer who grew up in New York’s Suffolk County. From 2015 to 2023, he represented New York’s First District (eastern Long Island) in Congress, where he sat on the House Foreign Affairs and Financial Services Committees. Before that, he served for four years in the New York state senate. In 2022, he ran for governor of New York against Democrat Kathy Hochul, a race that he lost by six points. 

He’s a booster of fossil fuels and promises to unleash “energy dominance.”

In his run for governor of New York, Zeldin campaigned on expanding fossil fuel extraction. He called for allowing “the safe extraction of natural resources in the southern tier” of the state, approving new pipelines, and repealing the gasoline tax. He also was a staunch opponent of New York’s ban on fracking and ran on ending it. “[Zeldin] has a record of being pro-fracking, and that’s a record I think he’s going to clearly carry forward into the Trump administration,” Eric Weltman, a senior organizer in Food and Water Watch’s New York office, told Sierra. 

Zeldin has mentioned pursuing “energy dominance” as one of three top priorities in heading up the EPA. “It is an honor to join President Trump’s cabinet as EPA administrator. We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI,�� Zeldin said in a statement on X.

He has taken more than $410,000 from the oil and gas industry, and he questions the scientific consensus on climate change.

According to Climate Power, Zeldin has received over $410,000 from the oil and gas industry in his election campaigns, including over $260,000 while running for Congress and more than $150,000 in his gubernatorial run. He has taken more than $60,000 from Koch Industries over the course of his political career, according to Open Secrets data. 

His voting record in Congress is mostly anti-environment, with an LCV lifetime score of just 14 percent.

Zeldin unsurprisingly has an overall poor voting track record, as scored by the League of Conservation Voters. “Trump made his anti–climate action, anti-environment agenda very clear during his first term and again during his 2024 campaign. During the confirmation process, we would challenge Lee Zeldin to show how he would be better than Trump’s campaign promises or his own failing 14 percent environmental score if he wants to be charged with protecting the air we breathe, the water we drink, and finding solutions to climate change,” Tiernan Sittenfeld, LCV’s senior vice president for government affairs, said in a statement. 

He supported a few conservation efforts for his district.

While in Congress, Zeldin backed several conservation initiatives for his district in Long Island. According to the campaign website for his gubernatorial run, he helped save Plum Island—a tiny island off the eastern tip of Long Island—by securing repeal of a 2008 law requiring it to be sold to the highest bidder. He also worked with the Army Corps of Engineers to “protect our coastlines, advancing the ambitious Fire Island to Montauk Point project,” a climate resiliency coastal risk reduction project to help safeguard Long Island’s prized beaches. 

He appears to be against clean energy funding and tried to gut public transit funding in New York.

In addition to voting against the IRA and its massive clean energy investments, Zeldin early on in his political career attempted to divert funding away from clean energy programs in New York and undermine the New York City area’s transit system, according to Environmental Advocates NY. The New York environmental organization bestowed its “Oil Slick” award in 2011 on Zeldin, a rookie state senator at the time who led an effort to try to weaken public transit. He sponsored a bill that would have defunded the MTA, resulted in service cuts and fare increases, and discouraged public transit use. The bill would have also diverted $100 million away from clean energy programs to “plug holes in MTA’s finances.”

[beardedmrbean]

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) didn't report a staggering $7 billion in award-level obligations and outlays during fiscal year 2022, according to an inspector general audit released this week.

The EPA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) determined that the agency underreported its award-level outlays by $5.8 billion, or 99.9%, and its award-level obligations by $1.2 billion, or 12.9% during FY22, the period between October 2021 and September 2022. The agency further failed to report any of its Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act outlays and under-reported its coronavirus pandemic-related outlays.

"The lack of complete and accurate reporting also led to taxpayers being initially misinformed about the EPA’s spending, and policy-makers who relied on the data may not have been able to effectively track federal spending," the OIG report concluded.

In response to the audit, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., blasted the EPA and called for increased transparency into its activities. 

"It’s outrageous and unacceptable that the EPA cannot keep track of its spending or inform Congress — and the American people — of how it is using taxpayer dollars," McMorris Rodgers said in a statement Thursday. "This eye-opening report only further highlights the need for more transparency at the EPA."

"It also raises questions about whether the agency is incapable of managing its record-high budget or if the agency is attempting to hide the amount of taxpayer dollars it is spending to advance the administration’s radical rush-to-green agenda," she added. "The Energy and Commerce Committee will continue holding this administration accountable for its actions that are driving up costs across the board and hurting Americans."

MICHIGAN DEMOCRAT SIGNED NDA INVOLVING CCP-TIED COMPANY, DOCUMENTS SHOW, CONTRADICTING HER PAST CLAIMS

The EPA ultimately corrected its FY22 figures in May 2023 as a result of the OIG audit while making configuration changes a month later. Overall, the inspector general made five recommendations which it said the agency agreed to make.

The report, meanwhile, comes as the EPA both manages a massive green energy fund and continues to request a larger budget. The Inflation Reduction, Democrats' massive climate and tax bill passed in 2022, created the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which in turn establishes a national green bank to fund green projects nationwide.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS OPEN PROBE INTO BIDEN ADMIN FOR OPENING PUBLIC LANDS TO FOREIGN OWNERSHIP

And the White House is requesting that Congress approve a FY24 EPA budget of more than $12 billion, a record level. Republicans have aimed to reduce the EPA budget to about $6 billion, which would be the agency's smallest budget since the early 1990s.

"The Biden administration is using EPA as a pass through for taxpayer dollars to fund left-wing groups that aim to get Democrats elected, not improve the environment," Mandy Gunasekara, a Heritage Foundation visiting fellow who served as the EPA's chief of staff during the Trump administration, told Fox News Digital.

"A failure to report $7 billion is absurd and unacceptable, but also symbolic of how Team Biden operates: prioritizing their political goals over the needs of the American people," she continued. "I’m glad Chair Rodgers is monitoring this and hope the committee brings forth the agency’s Chief Financial Officer to account for this serious oversight."

The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

Okay things are going a little too fast right now with a response is about project 2025,

First about Biden I saw this post that was saying that project 2025 is already here and Biden is already moving those goals and you did criticized Biden for being an enemy to LGBT+ by radicalizing him and I kind of got the impression that he shouldn't explicitly support the movement.

https://www.tumblr.com/decolonize-the-left/745588100726734848/i-saw-your-post-about-the-leopards-eating-faces

Secondly I kind of felt the same way with it not being talked about anywhere. Not even like popular people that like covers politics at times don't even bring it up like not even as like an offhanded comment.

3rd verify this a little bit more there are people that kind of sounds like they support it and is that that people from Trump's administration like Jonathan Berry; Ben Carson; Ken Cuccinelli; Rick Dearborn; Thomas Gilman; Mandy Gunasekara; Gene Hamilton; Christopher Miller; Bernard McNamee; Stephen Moore; Mora Namdar; Peter Navarro; William Perry Pendley; Diana Furchtgott-Roth; Kiron Skinner; Roger Severino; Hans von Spakovsky; Brooks Tucker; Russell Vought; and Paul Winfree support it.

Yeaaaaah a racist they/them with a cashapp link in their bio is exactly the kind of outrage hustler I'd expect to be propping up something like Project 2025. That's exactly why it's bullshit. Nobody but these people are talking about it. They're the QAnon of the left.

So I'm going to roll your previous question about Biden (now that I know what you meant) in with your question about Trump, since my answer is the same in both cases. So here we go. Project 2025 is a very detailed proposal that touches on literally every single aspect of politics. Just by the law of averages, you're going to find politicians in every party doing something outlined on the Project 2025 website solely because there's so much there. And similarly, you're going to find a lot of good ideas and a lot of bad ideas solely because there are so many ideas and proposals presented. There are hundreds of pages of PDFs on that site. I have not read them all, not even close. But I did randomly skim to get an idea of what they're putting out there, and there's a lot of common sense stuff in there. Like shrinking the bureaucracy and dismantling Homeland Security entirely. There's stuff about eliminating security flaws in certain government offices and ending the department of education and putting the states back in charge of their own schools. Most of these things I'm reading with my random skim are pretty mainstream modern conservative/libertarian positions. Again, I'm not reading the whole thing, and I won't because I'm not insane, but I'm not seeing anything in what I'm reading, or in the headlines of each different chapter, that warrants the kind of pearl clutching panic the fringe left seems to have for this thing.

As for the endorsements, the site has a list of 100 organizations that they claim support the Project, but they link to no statements or even to the organizations themselves, so I have no idea how legit the endorsements are or where you're getting your info about the people you listed above. I'm going to guess it's from a left wing website unless you personally went out and found statements from these people supporting the Project, and I'm gonna tell you right now, if you did get it from a far left website I'm just going to assume they're lying, just like I'm going to assume they're lying about everything they're saying about Project 2025 since that's what sites like that tend to do. Lie to keep people scared, keep the clicks coming, and keep those cashapp transfers going strong.

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

By Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman

President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Monday that he will nominate former Rep. Lee Zeldin, Republican of New York, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, a position that is expected to be central to Mr. Trump’s plans to dismantle landmark climate regulations.

Mr. Trump campaigned on pledges to “kill” and “cancel” E.P.A. rules and regulations to combat global warming by restricting fossil fuel pollution from vehicle tailpipes, power plant smokestacks and oil and gas wells.

In particular, Mr. Trump wants to erase the Biden administration’s most significant climate rule, which is designed to speed a transition away from gasoline-powered cars and toward electric vehicles.

A former congressman from Long Island who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022, Mr. Zeldin, 44, is an avid Trump supporter who voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election.

“It is an honor to join President Trump’s Cabinet as EPA Administrator,” Mr. Zeldin wrote on X. “We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI. We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.”

In a statement, Mr. Trump said Mr. Zeldin would “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet.”

Mr. Trump added that Mr. Zeldin would “set new standards on environmental review and maintenance that will allow the United States to grow in a healthy and well-structured way.”

Perhaps more than many other federal agencies, the E.P.A. has been a particular target for Mr. Trump, who blames environmental regulations for hampering a variety of industries, including construction and oil and gas drilling. During his first term, Mr. Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental policies and regulations. President Biden restored many of them and strengthened several.

Some people on Mr. Trump’s transition team say the agency needs a wholesale makeover and are even discussing moving the E.P.A. headquarters and its 7,000 workers out of Washington, D.C., according to multiple people involved in the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the transition.

Michael McKenna, who worked in the first Trump administration on energy issues, said that as two New Yorkers, Mr. Trump and Mr. Zeldin “speak the same language.” He also said Mr. Zeldin’s experience as an Army reservist would make him adept at navigating bureaucracies.

“Lee Zeldin is a great pick,” said Mandy Gunasekara, who served as chief of staff at the E.P.A. under the first Trump administration. She wrote a section on the E.P.A. for Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for re-engineering the federal government. In it, she recommends slashing the E.P.A.’s budget, ousting career staff, eliminating scientific advisers that review the agency’s work and closing programs that focus on minority communities with heavily polluted air and water.

Others, including some close to the Trump transition team, were baffled by the choice. Mr. Zeldin has not been known for showing a particular interest in the E.P.A. And Mr. Trump has tended to select agency heads from regulated industries; he put Andrew Wheeler, a coal lobbyist, in charge of the E.P.A. during his first term.

Mr. Zeldin’s record on climate policy appears to be mixed, especially during his years representing a swath of the East End of Long Island that includes hundreds of miles of coastline and a bipartisan tradition of environmental conservation.

He was a member of the House’s Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus and earned a 14 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental group. It is a low mark from the environmental advocacy group, but it was nevertheless higher than nearly any other Republican.

Tiernan Sittenfeld, the senior vice president of government affairs for the League of Conservation Voters, wrote in an email that Mr. Zeldin’s score “is obviously not what you would hope to see from the person who could be in charge of protecting the air we breathe, the water we drink and combating the climate crisis.”

Although he boasted about securing federal funds for the E.P.A.’s Long Island Sound program, Mr. Zeldin voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 climate law that has pumped at least $370 billion into clean energy and electric vehicles.

When Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York criticized Mr. Zeldin for opposing the climate law, he responded on social media, saying “I just voted NO because the bill sucks.”

“Being that it raises taxes, adds 87,000 new IRS agents, & spends hundreds of billions of dollars our country doesn’t have on far-left policies our country can’t afford, I’m not surprised you’d blindly endorse it,” he wrote.

During Mr. Zeldin’s tenure in the House, he voted against clean water legislation at least a dozen times, and clean air legislation at least half a dozen times, according to the League of Conservation Voters scorecard.

His record includes a vote against an amendment to a defense bill that would have created a climate resilience office inside the White House; for legislation that would have withdrawn the United States from the treaty enabling global climate negotiations; and for an amendment that would have blocked the federal government from considering the economic damage of climate change when it makes policies.

Mr. Zeldin has also taken some votes that the group supported, including prohibiting oil and gas drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. He also voted in favor of a landmark conservation bill that passed with bipartisan support and was signed by Mr. Trump. It guarantees maximum annual funding for a federal program to acquire and preserve land for public use.

He voted for a bill that would require the E.P.A. to set limits on PFAS, which are a family of man-made chemicals that are persistent in the environment and the human body. The E.P.A. under the Biden administration has set strict limits on the chemicals in drinking water. In 2020, he voted against legislation that would have slashed E.P.A.’s budget.

During his run for governor, Mr. Zeldin pledged to reverse New York’s 2015 ban on hydraulic fracturing, a technique for recovering gas and oil from shale rock that environmental advocates say can contaminate groundwater. He also called for construction of more gas pipelines and a suspension of the state gas tax.

He has not spoken at length about whether he accepts the established science of climate change. But in a 2014 interview with the Newsday editorial board he expressed doubts about the severity of the problem.

“It would be productive if we could get to what is real and what is not real,” he said. “I’m not sold yet on the whole argument that we have as serious a problem as other people are.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/11/climate/trump-chooses-lee-zeldin-to-run-epa.html

[darkmaga-returns]

Americans can expect a wiser Trump to take on the United Nations and climate change hysteria, says Mandy Gunasekara, who crafted the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accords.

Alex Newman

Oct 15, 2024

In this episode of The Liberty Report, Alex Newman interviews Mandy Gunasekara, who served as President Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to discuss the Deep State’s power and how Trump’s next term can truly drain the swamp. 

Gunasekara, who crafted the Paris Climate Accords withdrawal, articulated that one of the best ways to clean up and clean out the bureaucracy in Washington is to work with Congress to decrease funding for, or fire altogether, government agencies that harm the American people’s freedom.

Looking forward to what seems to be an eminent second term of Donald Trump, Gunasekara shared that the “gloves will absolutely come off” towards to organizations like the United Nations and unconstitutional agreements with globalist entities.

[lboogie1906]

Project 2025 is a collection of conservative and right-wing policy proposals from the Heritage Foundation to reshape the federal government and consolidate executive power should the Republican candidate win the 2024 presidential election. It proposes reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil service workers as political appointees to replace them with those who are willing to enact the wishes of the next Republican president. The president will have absolute power over the executive branch. Critics have characterized it as an authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan to transform the US into an autocracy. It would undermine the rule of law, the separation of powers, the separation of church and state, and civil liberties.

Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Paul Dans, the director, said the project is “systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army, aligned, trained, and weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state.” It proposes deploying the military for domestic law enforcement.

its partners employ over 200 former officials from the Trump administration. Notable authors of the project’s Mandate for Leadership include many officials and advisors from the Trump administration, including Jonathan Berry, Ben Carson, Ken Cuccinelli, Rick Dearborn, Thomas Gilman, Mandy Gunasekara, Gene Hamilton, Christopher Miller, Bernard McNamee, Stephen Moore, Mora Namdar, Peter Navarro, William Perry Pendley, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Kiron Skinner, Roger Severino, Hans von Spakovsky, Brooks Tucker, Russell Vought, and Paul Winfree.

Former president Trump has never publicly endorsed it, and his campaign downplayed it in November 2023 as mere “policy recommendations from external allies.” He disavowed it in July 2024, days after Kevin Roberts’s remarks. Several critics expressed skepticism of his denial.

The leaders began recruiting people for future government posts in the event of a Republican victory. #knowledgeispower #votelikeyourlifedependsonit #trumpsproject2025

[arpov-blog-blog]

..."An alliance of rightwing groups has crafted an extensive presidential proposal to bolster the planet-heating oil and gas industry and hamstring the energy transition, it has emerged.

Against a backdrop of record-breaking heat and floods this year, the $22m endeavor, Project 2025, was convened by the notorious rightwing, climate-denying thinktank the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch.

Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president. Climate experts and advocates criticized planning that would dismantle US climate policy.

The nearly 1,000-page transition guide was written by more than 350 rightwingers and is full of sweeping recommendations to deconstruct all sectors of the federal government– – including environmental policy.

“Heritage is convening the conservative movement behind the policies to ensure that the next president has the right policy and personnel necessary to dismantle the administrative state and restore self-governance to the American people,” the foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, said in an April statement.

The guide’s chapter on the US Department of Energy proposes eliminating three agency offices that are crucial for the energy transition, and also calls to slash funding to the agency’s grid deployment office in an effort to stymie renewable energy deployment, E&E News reported this week.

The plan, which would hugely expand gas infrastructure, was authored by Bernard McNamee, a former official at the agency. McNamee was also a Trump appointee to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He previously led the far-right Texas Public Policy Foundation, which fights environmental regulation, and served as a senior adviser to the Republican senator Ted Cruz.

Another chapter focuses on gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and moving it away from its focus on the climate crisis. It proposes cutting the agency’s environmental justice and public engagement functions, while shrinking it as a whole by terminating new hires in “low-value programs”, E&E News reported. The proposal was written Mandy Gunasekara, who was the former chief of staff at the EPA under Trump.

The guide also features a chapter on the Department of the Interior written by William Perry Pendley, who controversially led the Bureau of Land Management under President Trump and worked to eliminate drilling regulations.

Earlier this month, the Clean Budget Coalition– – composed of more than 250 advocacy groups – warned that Republican representatives were slipping restrictions on climate spending into the government’s annual spending bills, bills that must be passed before current funding expires on 30 September to avoid a government shutdown. This week, the coalition found that House Republicans had added additional “poison pills” to spending bills, including ones that target environmental funding."

[garyrevel]

Lesbian Congresswoman, Becca Balint, tries to educate ignorant Mandy Gunasekara on transgender facts

From LGBTQNation linked at Lesbian Congresswoman slams ex-Trump official for saying investment strategies turn kids transgender (msn.com) Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) slammed a former Trump administration official yesterday at a House Oversight Committee hearing after she claimed that certain investment strategies can turn kids transgender. The hearing is one of many that the GOP-controlled House…

[rpnewspaperblog]

MANDY GUNASEKARA: Conservatives Should Speak Up On The Environment | Newstalk Florida

Mandy Gunasekara  From clean air to climate change to emergency response, conservative leaders can and should lead the environmental policy space. We’ve got to get fear and politics out and focus on what will make a tangible difference in improving the lives and health of all Americans. The original environmental movement in the U.S. started this way, but for a variety of reasons, it has lost…

[notwiselybuttoowell]

[dailyvideovault]

New video posted on: https://dailyvideovault.com/democratic-candidates-criticize-trump-at-climate-change-forum/

Democratic candidates criticize Trump at climate change forum

[feelingbluepolitics]

*** Highest recommendation. ***

"The agency will change the way it calculates the benefits of mercury controls, a move that would effectively loosen the rules on other toxic pollutants."

"The [t]rump administration on Thursday will weaken regulations on the release of mercury and other toxic metals from oil and coal-fired power plants, another step toward rolling back health protections in the middle of a pandemic.

"The final Environmental Protection Agency rule does not eliminate restrictions on the release of mercury, a heavy metal linked to brain damage. Instead, it creates a new method of calculating the costs and benefits of curbing mercury pollution that environmental lawyers said would fundamentally undermine the legal underpinnings of controls on mercury and many other pollutants.

"By reducing the positive health effects of regulations on paper and raising their economic costs, the new method could be used to justify loosening restrictions on any pollutant that the fossil fuel industry has deemed too costly to control.

"'That is the big unstated goal,' said David Konisky, a professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University. 'This is less about mercury than about potentially constraining or handcuffing future efforts by the E.P.A. to regulate air pollution.'

..."The proposed change is the latest in the [t]rump administration’s long-running effort to roll back environmental regulations and reduce regulatory burdens, particularly on the coal, oil and gas industries. Over the past three years the administration has weakened rules to cut planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, restrict coal companies from dumping debris in streams and claimed falsely that [t]rump has revived the dying coal industry.

"Over the past few weeks as the nation struggled with the coronavirus, the administration has also rushed to loosen curbs on automobile tailpipe emissions, opted not to strengthen a regulation on industrial soot emissions and moved to drop the threat of punishment to companies that kill birds 'incidentally.'

"The deregulatory push appears designed to secure less restrictive rules quickly, in case Republicans lose control of Congress and the White House in November. A new government could move quickly under the Congressional Review Act to overturn any regulation or federal rule within 60 days of it being finalized — making any rule completed after late May or early June vulnerable.

..."The mercury rollback is a particular victory for Robert E. Murray, the former chief executive of Murray Energy Corporation and a top fund-raiser for [t]rump. Mr. Murray personally requested the rollback in a written 'wish list' to top officials shortly after [trump] took office. The company has since declared bankruptcy and is undergoing a reorganization.

"Mandy Gunasekara, a Republican strategist, testified in February to a House committee that the changes to the mercury rule, then in the planning stages, would 'fix a dishonest accounting mechanism that the last administration used to justify any regulatory action regardless of costs.' Ms. Gunasekara has since become chief of staff to Andrew R. Wheeler, the E.P.A. administrator.

"Environmental lawyers and public health leaders called the timing of the final mercury rule, as well as its substance, an attack on air quality.

"'What is most disconcerting to me is this administration’s lack of interest in science and, frankly, their lack of concern for our nation’s children,' said Aaron Bernstein, interim director of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. 'Mercury pollution in the United States damages our children’s brains before they even come into the world, and estimates are that that cost is in the billions of dollars.'

"Patrick Parenteau, a professor at the Vermont Law School, noted that in virtually every environmental rollback, [t]rump’s E.P.A. has acknowledged in the fine print that enormous increases in health problems and deaths will occur because of increased pollution.

"A plan to weaken carbon dioxide emissions at power plants, for example, predicted as many as 1,400 additional premature deaths a year. A draft analysis of the soot policy put forward this week showed that tightening the existing standard by 25 percent could save as many as 12,150 lives a year.

"Two people close to the administration said the White House was concerned enough about the public perception of loosening environmental rules during the outbreak that it held the mercury plan for several weeks after it passed a review from the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. E.P.A. officials assured the White House that the agency was merely responding as required to a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that found it must justify the economic impact of the mercury standards.

"The weakening of the mercury rule would be one of the most significant regulatory rollbacks engineered by the [t]rump administration."

[blue-politics-reblogs]

"When the chemical company Brenntag received a fine in 2017, the National Association of Chemical Distributors asked for help from two new [t]rump administration appointees who previously worked in chemical lobbying, according to emails obtained by The Hill through a Freedom of Information Act request.

"The two appointees were Mandy Gunasekara, a former NACD lobbyist who is now chief of staff at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Nancy Beck, former president of the American Chemistry Council. Beck, now detailed at the White House, has been nominated by [t]rump to lead the Consumer Product Safety Commission."

Beck has been in the news as the person who buried CDC's pandemic guidances, withholding public release.

..."Brenntag was ultimately fined, although the penalty it received was roughly 20 percent lower than the one initially proposed by the EPA." 

[updexnews]

Democratic candidates criticize Trump at climate change forum

Democratic candidates criticize Trump at climate change forum

[ad_1]

Ten Democratic presidential candidates blasted the Trump administration’s environmental policies at a forum dedicated to the topic of climate change Wednesday night. Mandy Gunasekara, a former senior Trump EPA official, joined “Red and Blue” to defend the president’s approach, while Axios energy and climate change reporter Amy Harder provided a fact check for Democrats and Republicans.