Yesterday, President Trump held a press conference to announce his issuance of an executive order to fast track dangerous fossil fuel and energy projects and eliminate environmental regulations that protect Americans from flooding. Instead of addressing the critical importance of updating America’s water infrastructure, so that children in cities like Flint, Michigan don’t have to drink lead contaminated water, the President used the press conference to reinforce hateful, bigoted ideology surrounding the atrocious events in Charlottesville, VA, and made clear his intentions to pursue a dangerous agenda that puts American lives and property at risk for the sake of corporate profits.
“If it wasn’t clear already, yesterday President Trump proved that he is unable to uphold the traditional role of a President that we look to as a standard bearer for our nation’s morals and values,” said Waterkeeper Alliance Executive Director Marc Yaggi. “In his remarks, the President managed to both empower hate and bigotry in our country and facilitate reckless fossil fuel development at the expense of taxpayer dollars and future generations.”
The executive order claims to “dramatically reform the nation’s badly broken infrastructure permitting process,” but the actual intent is to severely limit environmental reviews for dangerous pipeline and energy infrastructure projects that will put our health, climate, and waterways at risk. The order requires agencies to “streamline” the review and approval of these projects and lowers the standards that protect the public from bad government decision-making. Separately, the Trump administration wants to drastically cut funding to many of the agencies tasked with these reviews. Weakening environmental processes and standards for these projects will disproportionately impact the nation’s drinking water sources and will cause the greatest harm to the country’s most vulnerable people and communities.
The order also revokes a common-sense executive order issued by President Obama that would have saved lives and prevented costly property damage by limiting the construction of federal projects in flood-prone areas along waterways, and puts two different federal agencies — the Departments of Interior and Agriculture — in charge of creating “Energy Corridors” on federal lands.
“The creation of ‘Energy Corridors’ without site-specific environmental impact analyses that ignore flood risk, will create hundreds of more scenarios like the Dakota Access pipeline where rushed, incomplete and inappropriate permits are issued for pipeline crossings of waterways that provide drinking water for millions of Americans,” said Waterkeeper Alliance Clean and Safe Energy Campaign Manager Donna Lisenby. “The President’s executive order puts every drinking water source in the United States at risk. We can’t drink oil.”