Trump EPA action cut human life value from $1 million to $0 | Letters

We can expect more lives of all species will be lost since all of our planetary life systems are in danger, as are we. This is serious.

While it lacks the open barbarity of the Trump administration’s most dramatic crimes — kidnapping, say, or unwarranted violence tantamount to murder — the repeal of the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding” is potentially the regime’s ugliest, most sweeping and most damning abuse of power.

Laughably disguised as a boon to struggling industry and stressed consumers, the decision unleashes car manufacturers, power plants and the entire oil-and-gas complex to do their worst — not merely by once again casually poisoning the atmosphere and threatening the well-being of every creature that breathes, but by wildly shrinking the odds that the nation might perform its crucial role in mitigating global warming and the devastation of which science has repeatedly warned us.

Compounding the implications of Trump’s appalling action are his transparent motives: to further with a grand gesture his service to the Very Wealthy, and to take another whack at Barack Obama by reversing one of his administration’s most significant accomplishments.

Don’t for an instant believe that the current president actually doubts that the science of global warming is on the money — it’s just not his money or that of the class of folks whose fealty he craves. Donald Trump is shrewd, cunning, and monumentally unprincipled. He knows global warming is real. The problem is that the man simply doesn’t care.

David Korr, Bayside

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Devastating effects will last for decades

Those of us living on this planet should be enraged that the Environmental Protection Agency revoked scientific measures called “the endangerment findings.” These have been the basis for regulating carbon and methane emissions since 2009.

Unless you lived under a bushel basket for the last twenty years, you have experienced the effects of an already changing climate. Since scientific restrictions are now banished, we can expect that more lives of all species will be lost since all of our planetary life systems are in danger, as are we. This is serious.

Lee Zeldin, EPA Administrator, labeled these safeguards “an ideological crusade by the Obama administration”. Not true. They have a bipartisan origin. Both the Obama and Biden administrations followed an earlier bi-partisan precedent. The Clean Air Act was passed unanimously in the U.S. Senate, and 374-to-1 in the House of Representatives before being signed into law by Richard Nixon, December 31, 1970. It brought about major reductions in pollutants, improving public health. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was then created to protect it.

The recent overturning of these protective rulings is a case of ideology trumping science. Its devastating effects will last for decades.

Is this really what we want? In the words of Chief Seattle, “we did not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrowed it from our children.”

Suzanne Moynihan, Milwaukee

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Trump administration thinks your life is worth nothing

Thank you Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for your front page article in the Feb. 14 edition of your newspaper on the EPA. The article featured Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s decision to ignore 99% of the scientific communities conclusions with regard to climate change in order to curry favor with the Petroleum Institute and will Expose Americans to unnecessary illness and death, as well as accelerate the environmental problems associated with climate change. The article left out one very important change which the Trump administration has ordered and that is that the value of a human life which has always been taken in consideration when considering environmental rules that impact industry, and traditionally has been more than $1 million, has been reduced to 0.

Yes, that’s right, the Trump administration thinks your life is worth nothing. To make things even worse, the EPA has been instructed not to take the value of human life into consideration regarding regulations to limit environmental pollution, the only consideration going forward will be the impact on the regulated industries. Truly, this administration does not care about anything except billionaires, banks and corporations. If you need proof, please reread the article.

Barry Snider, River Hills

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