The De-Regulators
The De-Regulators
Call them "protections," he shouted into the void.
In 2017 a kid was walking his dog somewhere in Idaho and they triggered a device called an M-44. It looks kind of like a sprinkler but instead of water it shoots sodium cyanide at whatever triggers it, and so the kid had to watch his dog die right there and then he himself had to get rushed to the hospital for treatment.
This wasn’t a totally isolated incident. One group has tracked almost 50 dog deaths and almost a dozen injuries to humans (including one death, years after exposure) from the M-44, also known as a cyanide bomb. They have been used for a few decades in an absurdly misguided effort to control coyote populations, but along with the dogs and people they tend to kill all sorts of other things that they’re not meant to kill: foxes, opossums, pigs, bears.
They’re an ugly, blunt-force tool, one that lawsuits from environmental groups appeared to put an end to a couple of years ago, but now of course they’re back in the news because the Trump administration has decided to reauthorize the M-44’s use for no reason other than they seem to like killing things and poisoning us.
Since it began, the administration has engaged in an incredible assault on environmental regulation; at latest count, more than 80 rollbacks of regulations have been attempted or completed. These range from climate and emissions standards to pesticide use and pollution monitoring.
This isn’t surprising or anything. I mean, it’s one of the only things he said he would do while campaigning that he then went on to actually do. Just after taking office, Trump issued an executive order calling for agencies to cut two regulations for every new one that was issued, which sounded at the time like some sort of Dadaist reverse perpetual motion machine, but apparently was only a starting point: a recent investigation found that the EPA has managed to exceed that requirement, rolling back 26 regulations to only four new regs issued.
That was the “best” ratio of any agency. Again, not shocking: when you put first Scott Pruitt and then Andrew Wheeler in charge, two industry stooges with no clear ambition beyond “the companies I like should make more money,” not sure what else we should expect.
And in a lot of cases, the rollbacks make sense from the perspective of an administration that thinks corporate power is the only thing that matters. Changing rules about methane emissions on public lands makes it cheaper for oil and gas companies to drill there; rolling back limits on mercury emissions from power plants would give coal—more or less in its death throes if the market actually had its say—a last wobbly leg to stand on; and so on. The latest effort, a weakening of the Endangered Species Act, got support from industry groups of various sorts while managing pretty much universal disdain from environmental advocates and scientists. But sometimes there’s not a notable industry-friendly angle; instead, they seem to be following The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer’s maxim: The cruelty is the point.
The M-44 killed a total of about 6,500 animals last year, and 250 of those were unintentional. While farmers and ranchers might need some respite from coyotes (though killing them using any method at all does not, uh, work), we kill half a million of them every year. Why do we need the fucking cyanide bomb to throw in 1.3 percent of that total?
I’ve been beating a dead-on-arrival horse for a long time that the term “regulations” should be discarded in favor of “protections.” This is purely a rhetorical gambit, but my bet is that would be harder for politicians to scream endlessly about regulatory rollbacks if instead they were screaming about “ending protections” or some such.
Take a 2018 rollback that would eliminate an Obama-era rule on coal power plants. The new plan from the Trump administration would, according to its own EPA analysis, actually cause the deaths of 1,400 additional people per year. On the one hand, it can be a rollback of an onerous regulation that would kill jobs and hurt an industry; on the other, it is proactively removing a protection that would result in thousands of deaths. Are you regulating an industry, or are you protecting people?
The other thing about regulations is that they are just incredibly easy to mislead people about. When the EPA (or other agency) establishes a regulation they do so based on really thorough and often very complicated studies; they have to find that there is some population of people who are being harmed by the thing they want to regulate, and they have to estimate what those harms are and how many people and what the proposed regulation would do to reduce or eliminate those harms and so on. They eventually produce documents like a Regulatory Impacts Analysis that say things like “The monetized benefits from reductions in mercury emissions, calculated only for children exposed to recreationally caught freshwater fish, are expected to be $0.004 to $0.006 billion in 2016 using a 3% discount rate and $0.0005 to $0.001 billion using a 7% discount rate.”
That sort of jargon is politician catnip. You can, and they often do, make it say nearly anything, and the inevitable debunking is not going to be anywhere near as loud as the lie. My favorite (wrong word; I hate it with a galactic flame that has now lasted four years) example was from old friend Rick Santorum; I wrote about it for FactCheck.org when I worked there, and then included it in my book as well.
I won’t rehash the whole thing, but basically ol’ Frothy Mixture imagined that the EPA had based its regulation on mercury emissions on some imagined group of women spread out across the country who catch for themselves and eat six pounds of fish every week. That tidbit was laundered from the EPA’s technical support documentation through a faulty Cato Institute brief submitted to the Supreme Court (god you should see the emails I exchanged with a Cato lawyer trying to pretend they didn’t completely fuck up their analysis, either intentionally or not) and then a mangled Wall Street Journal op-ed before getting to Santorum. He was off by a factor of 60 for the fish and a factor of “not remotely which people the EPA was talking about” for the hundreds of thousands of women.
I don’t have a solution to this sort of thing; it would probably be a good idea to make protecting health and the environment a tad easier from a bureaucratic perspective, which could in turn make it a tad harder for bad actors to weaponize misinformation, but the details of that sort of thing are not trivial. Again, maybe calling them “protections” would flip the narrative so that attempts to roll anything back read as assaults on the public first and easing of burdens on industry second, but I acknowledge that ship has sailed.
random bits
If you want to know more about the guy now leading the EPA’s charge toward regulatory oblivion, read Rebecca Leber’s story in Mother Jones from last year. You will emerge infuriated.
ALERT: Giant parrot.
Since I wrote about the DRC Ebola outbreak last week, some better-ish news: a trial found that a couple of new treatments can reduce the mortality rate from the virus substantially. In other words, it is not necessarily an incurable disease anymore.
I swear I will not write about the Trump administration’s science-related skullduggery every week. It’s just hard to avoid sometimes.
notes from [gestures around]
Just like last week: This is a still sort of a placeholder. My wife and I are leaving the U.S. for some indeterminate period of time on September 1; in future editions, I’ll try and include something about where we’ve been staying, still hopefully science-ish. Not sure exactly what just yet, but we’ll be in Indonesia to start, so we’ll see how this idea goes.
