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Trump just appointed a new head of NASA, the space agency, that has a primary role in science disclosing global warming. The head of NASA is a climate change denier.
The drool starts from the top.
In Florida, the South Florida Water Management District has turned into a paranoid place where science is being forced to the shape of political outcomes.
This didn't happen overnight. For decades, conservatives who spouted anti-regulatory nonsense -- in order to fatten their profits -- tilled the fields of misdirection so that, eventually, something entirely awful and exotic could grow there: Rick Scott, as Governor, and Donald Trump.
Of the two, Scott is a smoother operator. He answers only the questions from the public that he wants to, and always has a frame for his response that reinforces his talking points. Incredibly, Scott and his spokespersons claim that no one has done more for the environment than he has. What Scott did, in fact, was to make science subservient to the demands of big agricultural industries, like Big Sugar.
As extreme as Scott is, it would never have happened without the continuous push and momentum created by his predecessor, Jeb Bush. Jeb had no use for environmental regulation and held the core belief that anything government could do, private industry could do better. That's exactly how "self-regulation" first became a mantra and then provided the fuel to gut government agencies and missions that had already been weakened from within, by allocating budgets and priorities away from science and away from fact.
Florida is an outlier state. That is one reason Trump feels such affinity with Scott. They are both wealthy as a result of skating the edges of the law. They both occupy center seats of power. They both understand their jobs to undermine "the administrative state" that suppresses private profits. Both deride the concept of a "public good".
Science and fact-based regulations to protect public health and the environment instead serve political ends: to accumulate more power and wealth. That's why, for Trump and his backers like the Koch Brothers and fossil fuel supply chain, it is important to have a head of NASA who doesn't believe in global warming and isn't a scientist. That's why citizens protesting the South Florida Water Management District and its hired-gun governing board are facing the full wrath of the state.
There is nothing normal with what is happening in Florida and the nation. There will be a very steep price to pay, eventually, for those who scavenged rewards from these aberrant politics.
Trump is breaking the environment beyond repair
By Linda J. Bilmes FEBRUARY 20, 2018
Boston Globe
HUMPTY DUMPTY famously cannot be �put back together� again. For those who care about the environment, every day since Donald Trump took office is a Humpty Dumpty day �with something being broken beyond repair.
The federal government has started selling off parcels of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments to anyone who hammers four poles into the ground and pays a $212 fee. The Trump administration has also slapped a 30 percent tariff on imported solar panels � making it more expensive for Americans to go solar and crippling the domestic solar panel installation industry. Additionally, the administration suspended the �Waters of the United States� rule, a key Obama-era regulation designed to reduce pollution in 60 percent of the nation�s lakes, rivers, and streams. The president�s 2019 spending plan would gut the Department of Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and especially NOAA � where his budget would force the agency to stop protecting coastal estuaries, Pacific salmon, and marine mammals.
