Just over two weeks before President Donald Trump is set to leave the White House, his U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday finalized a rollback of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act—a law that's been in place since 1918 and which conservation groups credit with holding corporate polluters accountable for harming bird species.
In what the Western Values Project called a "parting gift to Big Oil by corrupt former oil lobbyist Interior Secretary David Bernhardt," the USFWS announced a new rule under which the federal government will no longer penalize or prosecute companies when their actions cause the inadvertent death of birds.
In the case of oil spills like the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed more than one million birds in 2010; electrocutions by power lines; ducks and other species stuck in fossil fuel tailings ponds; and illegal actions like the spraying of banned pesticides, companies will no longer be held to account as long as they don't intentionally kill birds.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/01/05/brutal-blow-wildlife-and-gift-big-oil-trump-finalizes-rollback-migratory-bird-treaty?cd-origin=rss
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