The Trump administration’s actions are bad for the environment [letter] | Letters To The Editor

President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is making polluters great again.

In March, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the cancellation of 31 environmental regulations, one of the most sweeping deregulatory changes in the agency’s history. Trump is vowing to promote the opening of hundreds of coal-fired power plants that were being phased out. Coal produces more pollutants than any other energy source. It was being phased out because of that, as well as for being more expensive than renewable sources.

More than 1,100 EPA scientists are being laid off. Environmental justice offices that enforce laws protecting poor and minority communities are being shuttered. And the EPA will no longer consider the costs of climate disasters in its policies.

“Granting businesses a new license to pollute … will speed up the clock on the planet — let alone the country — becoming unlivable,” wrote MSNBC’s Hayes Brown in a column.

Under past Republican and Democratic administrations, the EPA helped to clean national waterways and our air; to replace lead pipes and asbestos; and to reduce acid rain and remove toxins and nuclear waste from the most contaminated lands. It also fought to protect poor people whose neighborhoods took the brunt of pollution from power plants, garbage incinerators, refineries and factories.

Now the EPA is being decimated. More Americans will become sicker and die sooner.

Is this really the way you want the United States of America to fail at protecting its environment and people, and make worse what humans have been doing to themselves?

Step up and call and write to your legislators now.

Alan Peterson, M.D.

Pequea Township