Set the oceans free

Also Trump wants to wreck the oceans. It’s not as if we need them for anything.

President Trump on Wednesday ended an eight-year-old policy to protect oceans, which was created as hundreds of millions of gallons of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico from a broken well, covering more than 65,000 square miles, killing untold numbers of wildlife and devastating fisheries in several Gulf Coast states.

President Barack Obama mentioned the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the largest and costliest oil spill in the nation’s history, in the second sentence of an executive order that detailed the first national ocean policy and called on federal agencies to work closely with states and local governments to manage the waters off their coasts.

“The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and resulting environmental crisis is a stark reminder of how vulnerable our marine environments are, and how much communities and the nation rely on healthy and resilient ocean and coastal ecosystems,” Obama’s July 2010 order said.

In contrast, Trump’s order does not mention the explosion that killed nearly a dozen workers and the spill of 210 million gallons of oil. The second sentence gives a nod to domestic energy production, the jobs it could provide and the financial rewards that can be reaped.

Beautiful clean coal.

In a statement, National Ocean Industries Association President Randall Luthi praised the new executive order as a “renewed broad vision” to foster energy security and create jobs. Luthi called the Obama policy “an uber-bureaucratic solution to a government self-imposed problem.”

“The offshore energy industry has successfully operated side by side with other ocean users, without major conflict, guided by the planning inherent in the five-year offshore national program and the leasing process mandated by the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act,” Luthi said.

Except for the Deepwater Horizon thing that is, and Exxon Valdez before that, and all the other oil spills.

Image result for oil spill

 

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