Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Laughter erupts after Trump official's climate proposal" video.

  1. Trump is playing a dangerous game with our oceans and coastal communities. By massively expanding offshore oil drilling while simultaneously rolling back drilling-safety standards put in place after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Trump is making more major oil spills inevitable. If a spill happens in the Arctic Ocean — where Trump is trying to invite oil companies into federal waters that were protected by President Obama — treacherous conditions would make cleanup impossible. And wherever the next big oil spill happens, wildlife will die and coastal communities will suffer. The Gulf of Mexico and its coastline still haven’t recovered from 2010’s Deepwater Horizon blowout, which killed 11 workers, and thousands of marine animals as it gushed more than 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf for almost three months. The country’s worst environmental disaster clearly called for new regulations to prevent it from happening again.  Trump is currently rolling back those safety regulations in his reckless pursuit of so-called “energy dominance.” Just as he pretends climate change isn’t real. After well-blowout prevention devices suffered catastrophic failures on Deepwater Horizon, Obama called for 3rd party inspections of safety equipment. It was a measured, reasonable response to such an epic industry failure. In April Trump signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to “reconsider” several oil rig safety regulations. Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary, and the same Zinke that is currently under multiple investigations of ethics violations, is in charge of the rolling back the safety regulations. Calls for reversing the Obama-era regulations is part of Trump’s efforts to ease restrictions on fossil fuel companies and generate more domestic energy production. (GREED) Doing so, the agency asserted, will reduce “unnecessary burdens” on the energy industry and save the industry $228 million over 10 years.(GREED) The Obama-era rules, written in 2016, tightened controls on blowout preventers, devices that are intended to stop explosions in undersea oil and gas wells, and called for rig operators to have third parties certify that the safety devices worked under extreme conditions. In the Deepwater Horizon spill, a supposedly fail-safe blowout preventer failed after a section of drill pipe buckled. Environmental groups warned that reversing the safety measures would make the United States vulnerable to another such disaster. “Rolling back drilling safety standards while expanding offshore leasing is a recipe for disaster,” Miyoko Sakashita, director of the oceans program at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “By tossing aside the lessons from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Trump is putting our coasts and wildlife at risk of more deadly oil spills. Reversing offshore safety rules isn’t just deregulation, it’s willful ignorance.”
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