February, 16 2011, 11:27am EDT

House Republicans' Bill Would Gut Decades of Environmental Protections
Spending Legislation Would Mean More Pollution, Worse Climate Change, Fewer Protections for Endangered Species
WASHINGTON
Formal debate began today on House Republicans' spending bill that would cripple many of our nation's cornerstone laws protecting air, water, wildlife, public lands and public health. The continuing resolution would, among other things, halt the reduction of dangerous carbon dioxide pollution and remove Endangered Species Act protections for the iconic gray wolf and other imperiled species. It would loosen restrictions on toxic mercury pollution and mountaintop mining; open up public lands to harmful activities; and slow progress to curb climate change and protect U.S. citizens from dirty air and water.
"This bill isn't mere tinkering with policy, it's carpet-bombing some of our nation's most important environmental laws," said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. "In crafting this bill, Republicans have created a feeding frenzy for those intent on dismantling laws that for decades have protected our air, water, climate and wildlife."
The 2010 budget resolution expires March 4. The continuing resolution is supposed to simply provide stop-gap funding to keep the government from shutting down. Debate on the bill began today; a vote is expected in the House later this week.
"Many of these amendments don't have anything to do with reducing the budget. They're about satisfying the wish-lists of polluters and others who prize big profit margins over vital protections for America's wildlife, clean air and water," Suckling said.
Among the hundreds of amendments to the bill are proposals that would stop the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. Just weeks ago, the EPA began enforcing the Clean Air Act to reduce dangerous CO2 pollution from new sources like coal-fired power plants and oil refineries.
"The EPA is rightly doing its job to clean our air and protect its citizens from the worst effects of climate change. Some in Congress, though, would rather give polluters free rein to continue to dump greenhouse gases without any limit at all," said Suckling.
In amendment after amendment, the bill also attempts to make end runs around some of the nation's bedrock environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act, which provides vital protections for the gray wolf that is still recovering in a tiny portion of its historic habitat.
"I'm not sure I've ever seen a Congress so openly hostile to science and protecting the environment," Suckling said. "Wolves exist in less than 5 percent of their historic habitat, and yet these members of Congress are determined to strip protections and open them up to widespread killing."
The House Republicans' continuing resolution and amendments :
- Stop federal agencies from protecting the public from the impacts of mountaintop-removal mining.
- Eliminate 2011 funding for implementation of Clean Air Act rules to curb CO2 and other greenhouse gas pollutants.
- Block implementation of a decades-long effort to restore salmon to the San Joaquin River and eliminate certain protections from water diversions for salmon and other endangered species in the San Francisco Bay-Delta.
- Halt the Chesapeake Bay health program.
- Scuttle national forest travel plans that advance conservation, wildlife conservation and stream protection.
- Limit the president's ability to protect national treasures through the 1906 Antiquities Act, which Republican Teddy Roosevelt used to save thousands of acres.
- Prohibit EPA from implementing portions of the Clean Water Act, threatening drinking water and potentially leaving wetlands without protection from pollution.
- Restrict EPA's ability to implement coal-ash safeguards. Coal ash is a dangerous waste generated by burning coal that contains arsenic, lead, hexavalent chromium, selenium and other harmful byproducts.
- Exempt Big Oil from Clean Air Act review for drilling in the Arctic.
- Block EPA from enforcing existing rules to control mercury and other toxic pollutants at cement plants.
- Block attempts to stop polluters in Florida from fouling waters with fertilizers, sewage and manure.
- Prevent the Bureau of Land Management from implementing its new "wildlands" policy that allows the agency to survey and provide interim protections for certain public lands that have not received a formal wilderness designation from Congress.
- Defund the Council on Environmental Quality, established by President Richard Nixon to coordinate environmental policy among all federal agencies.
- Slash spending on land and water acquisition and conservation programs by more than $200 million compared to the 2010 funding level.
At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature — to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive.
(520) 623-5252LATEST NEWS
Oxfam Says Russian Use of Chemical Weapons in Ukraine Would Be 'Egregious Violation of International law'
"The increasing erosion of the rule of law is deeply concerning," said an Oxfam campaigns manager.
Jul 07, 2025
Anti-poverty organization Oxfam on Monday expressed grave concern over reports that Russia has been increasingly deploying chemical weapons in Ukraine.
The Associated Press reported late last week that two Dutch intelligence agencies are claiming that Russia has been ramping up its use of chemical weapons in its war against Ukraine. Among the chemical weapons allegedly being deployed by Russia are chloropicrin, a banned poison gas that was used by European powers during World War I, and CS gas, which is typically used as a riot control agent.
Sarah Redd, Oxfam's advocacy and campaigns manager in Ukraine, called reports of banned chemical weapons use deeply troubling and called for a full investigation into the matter.
"Oxfam is appalled at the recent intensification of violence against civilians in Ukraine, especially the reports of Russia's use of chemical weapons, which would be an egregious violation of international law," she said. "The increasing erosion of the rule of law is deeply concerning. Such laws were put in place to prevent humanity from sliding back into a darker chapter of history. Oxfam calls for an immediate and independent international investigation into these allegations and to hold those responsible to account."
Russia is a signatory of the Chemical Weapons Convention, a treaty first drafted and enacted in the 1990s that bars the use of both chloropicrin and CS gas in war. This makes Russia subject to potential investigations carried out by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, although such an investigation can only take place if requested by member states.
Ukraine has claimed that Russia has carried out more than 9,000 chemical weapons attacks ever since it launched its invasion of the country more than three years ago. During the 2024 election campaign, President Donald Trump claimed that he could bring an end to the Ukraine-Russia war within a single day although so far fighting between the two nations has only intensified.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Indefensible': Trump Budget Law Subsidizes Private Jet Owners While Taking Healthcare From Millions
A provision of the budget law that President Donald Trump signed last week will leave taxpayers to "pick up the tab for the private jet industry and billionaire high flyers."
Jul 07, 2025
The Republican budget measure that U.S. President Donald Trump signed into law late last week contains a provision that analysts say will allow private jet owners to write off the full cost of their aircraft in the first year of purchase, a boon to the ultra-rich that comes as millions of people are set to lose healthcare under the same legislation.
FlyUSA, a private aviation provider, gushed in a blog post that with final passage of the unpopular budget reconciliation package, "business jet ownership has never looked more fiscally attractive or more fun to explain to your accountant."
The law, crafted by congressional Republicans and approved with only GOP support, permanently restores a major corporate tax break known as 100% bonus depreciation, which allows businesses to deduct the costs of certain assets in the first year of purchase rather than writing them off over time.
Forbes noted that the bonus depreciation policy "applies to a slew of qualified, physical business expenses which depreciate over time, such as machinery and company cars, but the policy is often associated with big-ticket luxury items, such as private aircraft, and its institution last decade led to a boom in jet sales."
"Trump and congressional Republicans have certainly delivered for the billionaire class."
Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies, called bonus depreciation "a massive tax break for billionaires and centi-millionaires that use the most polluting form of transportation on the planet."
"A corporation purchasing a $50 million private jet could potentially deduct the entire $50 million from their taxes in the year of the purchase, rather than spreading the deduction over many years," Collins wrote. "This amounts to a massive taxpayer subsidy, as ordinary taxpayers pick up the tab for the private jet industry and billionaire high flyers."
"Subsidizing more private jets on a warming planet is reckless and indefensible," he added.
The National Business Aviation Association, a lobbying group for the private aviation industry, celebrated passage of the Republican legislation, specifically welcoming the bonus depreciation policy as "effective for incentivizing aircraft purchase." (The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy argues that "depreciation tax breaks have never been shown to encourage more capital investment.")
Meanwhile, communities across the United States are bracing for the law's deep cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance, which are expected to impose damaging strains on state budgets and strip food benefits and health coverage from millions of low-income Americans.
"Trump and congressional Republicans have certainly delivered for the billionaire class," said Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen. "This is certainly one of the cruelest bills in American history, backtracking on the country's painfully slow history of expanding healthcare coverage and, equally remarkably, taking food away from the hungry."
"That's a lot of needless suffering just to make the richest Americans richer," he added.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'These Deaths Are on Trump's Hands': Texas Flooding Spotlights Assault on Climate Science
"The Trump regime is gutting scientific research into climate and atmospheric science for political reasons, at the very time we need a much better understanding of it," said one environmentalist. "This is so reckless and dangerous."
Jul 07, 2025
Deadly flooding caused by torrential rain in central Texas late last week called attention to U.S. President Donald Trump's full-scale assault on the climate research and monitoring agencies tasked with studying and predicting such weather catastrophes, as well as his ongoing attacks on disaster preparedness and relief.
Though local National Weather Service (NWS) forecasters did issue warnings in the lead-up to Friday's flooding—which killed at least 82 people, including dozens of children—key roles were reportedly vacant ahead of the downpour, prompting scrutiny of the Trump administration's mass firings and budget cuts, in addition to years of neglect and failures by Republicans at the state level.
Asked whether he believes the federal government should hire back terminated meteorologists in the wake of the Texas flooding, Trump responded in the negative and falsely claimed that "very talented people" at NWS "didn't see" the disaster coming.
"This is an absolute lie," replied meteorologist and climate journalist Eric Holthaus. "Worse, this is the person responsible for making those kids less safe and he's trying to deny the damage he caused."
Holthaus wrote Sunday that Trump's staffing cuts "have particularly hit the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Environmental Modeling Center, which aims to improve the skill of these types of difficult forecasts."
"Though it's unclear to what extent staffing shortages across the NWS complicated the advance notice that local officials had of an impending flooding disaster," he added, "it's clear that this was a complex, compound tragedy of a type that climate warming is making more frequent."
"Republicans have fired meteorologists, cut emergency disaster aid, and given an extra $18 billion to the fossil fuel corporations causing this crisis."
Under the guise of "government efficiency," the Trump administration has taken an axe to staff at federal climate agencies and is trying to go even further with its budget for the coming fiscal year. The Washington Post noted Sunday that "a budget document the Trump administration recently submitted to Congress calls for zeroing out climate research funding for 2026, something officials had hinted at in previous proposals but is now in lawmakers' hands."
"But even just the specter of President Donald Trump's budget proposals has prompted scientists to limit research activities in advance of further cuts," the Post noted. "Trump's efforts to freeze climate research spending and slash the government's scientific workforce have for months prompted warnings of rippling consequences in years ahead. For many climate scientists, the consequences are already here."
Since the start of his second term, Trump has dismissed the hundreds of scientists and experts who were working on the National Climate Assessment, moved to slash NOAA's workforce, and announced a halt to climate disaster tracking, among other changes—all while working to accelerate fossil fuel extraction and use that is supercharging extreme weather events. One NOAA veteran warned that Trump's cuts could drag the agency back to "the technical and proficiency levels we had in the 1950s."
"The Trump regime is gutting scientific research into climate and atmospheric science for political reasons, at the very time we need a much better understanding of it," environmentalist Stephen Barlow wrote on social media on Sunday. "This is so reckless and dangerous, which is why I suggest we call these tragedies Trump events."
Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, said over the weekend that "Republicans have fired meteorologists, cut emergency disaster aid, and given an extra $18 billion to the fossil fuel corporations causing this crisis."
"These deaths are on Trump's hands," she added.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular