Enforcing environmental laws is a key to environmental justice
Now that the nation's eye is on racial justice, the Environmental and Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler has discovered that he wants "to solve the environmental justice issues we face today."
As a whopper, this may not quite match President Trump's claim to be America's "number one environmental president," but it is a remarkably strange way to describe the Trump-Wheeler team's record of attacking environmental protections for low-income communities, communities of color and indigenous people. Those attacks include reduced enforcement of laws protecting clean air and water and proposals for drastic cuts to programs that protect our most vulnerable communities.
The attacks began while Wheeler was still lobbying for the coal industry, when the Trump administration's first EPA budget proposed to eliminate funding for EPA's environmental justice program. When that proved politically unpalatable, the administration contented itself with starving the program, cutting its staff nearly in half, and funding it with a minuscule 1/1500th of the agency's budget.
Evidently, that still provides too much support for environmental justice. So the 2021 Trump-Wheeler budget proposes to shrink spending for the environmental justice program to its lowest level ever, eliminate the Superfund environmental justice program and cut $240 million from programs serving low-income communities and people of color. These cuts would virtually wipe out water infrastructure programs for poor and disadvantaged communities, and slash grants to control deadly air pollution, reduce diesel emissions and support tribal environmental programs.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/enforcing-environmental-laws-is-a-key-to-environmental-justice/ar-BB1atT9S?li=BBnbfcQ&ocid=hplocalnews
