The Endagered Endangered Species Act

The Trump regime is taking aim at dismantling most of the Endangered Species Act so energy, timber, fishing, and mining companies can get back to ripping the country's national parks, wetlands, forests and wildlife refuges apart for their chewy profitable centers.

The Endangered Species Act, which for 45 years has safeguarded fragile wildlife while blocking ranching, logging and oil drilling on protected habitats, is coming under attack from lawmakers, the White House and industry on a scale not seen in decades, driven partly by fears that the Republicans will lose ground in November’s midterm elections.

In the past two weeks, more than two dozen pieces of legislation, policy initiatives and amendments designed to weaken the law have been either introduced or voted on in Congress or proposed by the Trump administration.

The actions included a bill to strip protections from the gray wolf in Wyoming and along the western Great Lakes; a plan to keep the sage grouse, a chicken-size bird that inhabits millions of oil-rich acres in the West, from being listed as endangered for the next decade; and a measure to remove from the endangered list the American burying beetle, an orange-flecked insect that has long been the bane of oil companies that would like to drill on the land where it lives.

“It’s probably the best chance that we have had in 25 years to actually make any substantial changes,” said Richard Pombo, a former congressman from California who more than a decade ago led an attempt to rethink the act and is now a lobbyist whose clients include mining and water management companies.

He and others argue that the act has become skewed toward restricting economic development and Americans’ livelihoods rather than protecting threatened animals.

The new push to undo the wildlife protection law comes as Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress, and is led by a president who has made deregulation — the loosening of not only environmental protections but banking rules, car fuel efficiency standardsand fair housing enforcement — a centerpiece of his administration.

The Trump administration unveiled its main effort to overhaul the Endangered Species Act on Thursday, when the Interior Department and the Commerce Department proposed fundamental changes to the law. Those include a provision that for the first time could allow the economic consequences of protecting plants or animals to be considered when deciding whether or not they face extinction.

If the proposal is finalized, species that remain on the endangered list would still see their habitats protected, but it would become more difficult to list a new species for protection and easier to remove those now on the list.

The myriad proposals reflect a wish list assembled over decades by oil and gas companies, libertarians and ranchers in Western states, who have long sought to overhaul the law, arguing that it represents a costly incursion of federal regulations on their land and livelihoods. Until now, those efforts have largely failed, even during periods when Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress.

So Trump is literally going to put a price on extinction of species and of course decide that corporate profits are more cost-beneficial to "Murica's biggest companies.  I am once again prompted to remind everyone that maybe having Hillary around wouldn't have been "worse than Trump", but then again "climate change and the environment" have completely dropped off everyone's problem list (along with ISIS, Medicare and Social Security,and LGBTQ rights) in the Trump era anyway, so this is actually a smart move for Team Evil right now.

Republicans are going to burn down the environment before they lose in November, and they'll probably have the votes from red state Dem senators to do it, especially Manchin, Tester, and Heitkamp.

Seems like a win for them.