Why Trump Wants Even More Pollution Than Industry Does

[G_j]

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/why-trump-wants-even-more-pollution-than-industry-methane-climate.html?utm_medium=s1&utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=nym

One of the key liberal assumptions about Republican environmental policy is that it associates what’s good for industries with the public interest. (I’ve made this assumption many times myself.) One of the oddities of the Trump administration’s environmental policy is that it permits levels of pollution well beyond what business is even asking for.

The most recent example is the administration’s rollback of rules limiting methane emissions. Methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, trapping about 25 times more heat per unit than carbon dioxide. It is emitted as a by-product of drilling for oil and gas. The Environmental Protection Agency drew up regulations under the Obama administration to require drillers to capture leaked methane.

The Trump administration argues such regulations are not needed, because industry has all the incentive it needs to capture the methane on its own. “Trump officials were confident the oil and gas industry had an economic incentive to limit methane because capturing it allows companies to sell more gas,” senior administration officials tell the Washington Post. It sounds plausible in theory that drillers will stop leaks on their own because they don’t need to let a valuable gas float off into the sky, except for the nagging detail that in the real world, industry allows huge amounts of methane emissions.

The American Petroleum Institute has supported Trump’s anti-regulation emissions policy, but several of the largest drillers have opposed it. They have good reason. The Trump rollback will face a legal challenge, producing years of uncertainty during which drillers won’t know which rules they’ll ultimately have to follow. And it allows the sloppiest drillers to gain an advantage in the meantime over the more efficient ones.

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[no_hypocrisy]

1. My hypothesis: Trump either wants to accelerate the Apocalypse (doubtful as I don't believe he

knows what the word means) or to push the destruction of the world to the point where remediation will be useless; so, therefore, pollute some more and no regulations.

[dalton99a]

2. Kick