Air Quality in the U.S. Has Gotten Worse Under the Trump Administration, Which Couldn’t Care Less

After years of steady decline, pollution is back on the rise. It’s not a huge mystery as to why

Air quality in the United States is getting worse, and research suggests the dirty air is taking years off Americans’ lives.

According to a study published this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, fine particulate pollution increased 5.5 percent between 2016 and 2018, and evidence suggests the spike is responsible for 9,700 premature deaths last year alone. The study was based on data provided by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The bump in pollution comes after the amount of fine particulate matter in the air had decreased every year — and 24.2 percent overall — from 2009 to 2016. Some of the factors that study’s authors say are driving the increase are largely unrelated to Trump administration decisions: The health of the economy has prompted more driving and increased wildfires have put more particulate into the atmosphere. But the author’s also cite the government’s failure to enforce the Clean Air Act, which the Trump administration has worked to dismantle.

The study’s authors are not alone in contending that the effects of the rise in fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) are “significant.” A separate study published in August found that airborne PM 2.5 shortens life expectancy by an average of four months in the United States, and one year globally. Joshua Apte, an engineering professor at the University of Texas who authored the study, described PM 2.5 to the New York Times as “the single most important environmental pollutant for ill health and death.”

The Trump administration does not care. In May, the Times reported that the EPA had doctored its own formula for calculating deaths caused by PM 2.5 in order to subvert the 2015 Clean Power Plan and ramp up coal production, one of the leading causes of PM 2.5. The move was defended by William Wehrum, the agency’s assistant administrator for air and radiation who previously served as a coal-industry lobbyist and has been under investigation for using his new office to benefit his former clients. Meanwhile, Americans are dying as more PM 2.5 is filling the air.

One of the reasons Wehrum and the EPA have been able to disregard the effects of PM 2.5 is that many of the agency’s air pollution and public health experts have been fired. On Tuesday, a group of the dismissed, dubbed the Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel, wrote an open letter to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler urging him to impose stricter air quality regulations while noting the “overall consistent scientific basis for finding that the current primary PM 2.5 standards are not protective of public health.”

While the EPA takes steps to increase pollution, President Trump has been oblivious, repeatedly insisting at rallies and while speaking to reporters that America’s air has never been cleaner.

REPORTER: Mr. President, why did you go to the climate change meeting today at #unga?

TRUMP: Because I believe in clean air and clean water. Very simple. We have the cleanest air, we have the cleanest water -- cleaner than it's ever been before in our country. (This is a lie.)

We have a feeling the new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research is not going to sway Trump’s thinking on the issue

 

Another reason to impeach Trump.
Hes killed 9,700 Americans.
The fuck is Congress waiting for?

 

Trump’s Boasts Notwithstanding, Farmers May Want To Hold Off On That $500,000 Combine

Farmers Turn Backs On Trump



WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is telling farmers they’ll need “more land,” “more tractors” and more “bigger and better and more powerful” tractors — and fast — because of the “incredible” deal he has made with China for the purchase of $50 billion in U.S. farm goods.

Farmers, though, may want to hold off on signing a loan for that half-million-dollar combine: It appears the president has gotten his numbers mixed up and has overstated his boast by about 100 percent — on a “deal” that has not even been finalized.

“There’s a lot of misunderstanding out there,” said Darin Von Ruden, a dairy farmer in Westby, Wisconsin, and president of the Wisconsin Farmers Union. He added that farmers were initially optimistic when Trump announced the “deal” ending his trade war this month, but have come to see that that feeling may have been premature. “The numbers are what they are.”

A senior administration official confirmed on condition of anonymity that the $40-$50 billion figure Trump has been touting is for two years of agricultural purchases, not one — meaning that if a deal is actually completed using those numbers, it would merely restore agricultural sales to China to where they were before Trump began his tariff dispute.

Van Ruden said from what he has been able to determine, the Chinese have not made any firm pledges, and could continue to buy from Brazil and Argentina unless U.S. growers drop their prices. “There’s no guarantee at all in this they will be buying from American farmers,” he said.

Trump, nevertheless, has been bragging about the as yet unwritten, unsigned deal since his Oct. 11 Oval Office meeting with the vice premier of China, Liu He.

“A tremendous deal for the farmers. A purchase of from 40 to 50 billion dollars’ worth of agricultural products,” Trump said during a photo opportunity with Liu. “So I’d suggest the farmers have to go and immediately buy more land and get bigger tractors. They’ll be available at John Deere and a lot of other great distributors.”

“Farmers cannot produce enough. They will get more land and bigger tractors,” Trump continued later that night at a campaign rally in Louisiana. “We cannot produce that much wheat and corn. I got China to order a lot.”

At his rally in Dallas last week: “I want the farmers to tell me they can’t produce that much and I’ll say, ‘Yes, you can!’ They’re going to take in $50 billion instead of $20 billion from China.”

The false boasts continued at this week’s Cabinet meeting: “But we took it from $20 to potentially $50 billion. It will be bought — more — more agriculture will be bought — product — will be bought than any time in our history, by far.”

White House officials did not respond to HuffPost queries about Trump’s false claims.

Trump has for decades been prone to both exaggerations and outright lies, and the number of falsehoods he has said or written since taking office is now about 7,000, according to Daniel Dale, a journalist who has tracked them since Trump’s inauguration.

Veronica Nigh, a trade economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation, said that farmers would be fine with a $40 to $50 billion figure over two years, if it actually happens.

Sales to China dropped from $22 billion in 2017 to $16 billion in 2018 to just $7.3 billion in 2019 because of the tariffs China imposed on soybeans, corn, pork and other U.S. agricultural products to retaliate for the tariffs Trump levied on Chinese goods.

“So $20 to $25 billion would put us back to where we were before and would be better than where we are now,” she said, adding that farmers were “eager” for a final agreement. “We’re looking at those numbers more as a direction than a promise.”

As for Trump’s recommendation to run out and buy up land and expensive equipment, she said farmers have becoming quite proficient at “gauging ups and downs in the sector” and so are not likely to make major investments on just the president’s words.

“And so with the history of being cautious business people, probably not,” she said.

 

White House Calls on All Federal Agencies to Cancel NY Times, Washington Post Subscriptions

The White House on Thursday followed up its plan to cancel its subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post by urging all federal agencies to do the same thing.

“Not renewing subscriptions across all federal agencies will be a significant cost saving for taxpayers — hundreds of thousands of dollars,” White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement, without indicating how she arrived at that cost savings or how many subscriptions government agencies have.

The Post offers free digital subscriptions to federal employees who use their government email addresses, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news.

Also Read: White House Cancels NY Times and Washington Post Subscriptions (Report)

Representatives for the White House, Times and Post did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The move follows Trump’s statement to Fox News earlier this week that the White House “won’t be renewing” its subscriptions to the papers, which he has long derided as “fake news” for their aggressive coverage of his administration. Grisham subsequently confirmed the White House’s cancellation plans to Politico on Tuesday.

In September, Trump kicked off Labor Day morning by attacking the “LameStream media” in a series of tweets, singling out the Washington Post and saying the paper “brought racist attacks against our Nation.” Later that month — and many times before — he went after the Times by name as well.

Tuesday, the Post’s Paul Farhi wrote on Twitter in response to the news, “Two reactions: 1. Thanks for subscribing in the first place; and 2. He’s just getting around to cancelling now?”

 

Good. Maybe the Whitehouse can cancel raw story.
Oh, wait.
All ready did.

 

In the event he was impeached or voted out of office I wonder if the mad clown would do something extreme while still in office to get even with America for not recognizing, at least in his own mind, how Great he was?

 

First, lets see all of the evidence justifying impeachment.
Not the leaked shit; lets see all of it.

Second, even DNC pundits are starting to understand Trump will certainly win reelection if he isn't impeached or assassinated.

Shooter is still wondering just how far into the slime despicables will go to avenge hillary.

 

Oh no you don't .
Despicables been saying almost since this started that Trump himself already gave out all the evidence needed.

So, was that a lie, or is your post a lie?

 

Dang! A well thought out and well written response to a question pointing out your hypocrisy and lies.
Attaboy!

 

Coal Jobs Are About to Take Another Hit
Justin Fox,Bloomberg 11 hours ago

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(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In 1923 there were 862,536 coal miners in the U.S., about 2% of the country’s total workforce. These days, their ranks are much thinner. As the Washington Post uncharitably pointed out in 2017, more people now work at Arby’s than in the U.S. coal mining industry.

This did not stop Donald Trump from making the revival of coal mining a major plank of his presidential campaign, and a focus of his efforts after he took office. And sure enough, the number of coal mining jobs did stop falling in 2017.

There are indications, though, that the decline is about to resume. Before the 2000s, job losses in coal mining were mainly about better mining equipment and the rise of less-labor-intensive above-ground mining operations. For the past decade, though, the main driver has been falling U.S. coal consumption. Natural gas pushed coal aside to become the main fuel used in electricity generation and renewables gained ground, even as demand for electricity remained flat.

There was a brief uptick in consumption in 2016 and early 2017 as rising natural gas prices drove some utilities to switch temporarily from gas back to coal, but after that the consumption slide resumed. Lately it has even accelerated: In July, according to numbers released last week by the Energy Information Administration, coal consumption was 11.6% lower than in July 2018. Yet coal mining employment has held up.

Why the disparity? Well, there was a revival in U.S. coal exports after a global economic slowdown in 2015 and 2016. But the main driver of the employment gains seemed to be that U.S. coal was emerging after years of retrenchment and lots of bankruptcies as a consolidated, leaner industry with a friend in the White House and hopes for better times ahead. Robert Murray, whose privately held Murray Energy Corp. had bought several bankrupt mining operations, predicted just after President Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 that Trump would put the industry on a path to revival “in three months” thanks to environmental deregulation and resurgent demand from steelmakers and other manufacturers.

This week, Murray Energy filed for bankruptcy protection. The biggest U.S. coal miner, Peabody Energy Corp., which emerged from bankruptcy in April 2017, announced a 21.7% revenue decline for the quarter ending in September. In its earnings release, Peabody also said it planned to “reweight its investments” away from the U.S. “to capture higher‐growth Asian demand.” Some U.S. mine shutdowns and layoffs have been announced already, and as Bloomberg’s Will Wade reported earlier this month, all signs point to more cutbacks soon. The coal mining employment decline may show up in this Friday’s jobs report, or it may take a little longer, but it’s coming.

What happened to the industry’s comeback? Well, for one thing, coal has its limits as an export commodity for U.S. miners. It’s bulky, it doesn’t command a high price and the No. 1 export destination, India, is really far away. Exports stopped rising in the spring of 2018, have fallen more than 40% since, and even at their peak only amounted to about 15% of U.S. production. For another, industrial coal use has failed to rebound as hoped, with an increase in demand for coking coal used in steelmaking more than offset by falling demand for other uses — and now the steel boomlet seems to be fading as well. Industrial uses account for only about 7% of U.S. coal consumption, down from nearly 50% in the 1950s.

But this story is mostly about electricity generation, which accounted for 93% of U.S. coal consumption and 84% of production in 2018. Overall domestic electricity use, after setting a new record in 2018 for the first time since 2007, is down over the first eight months of 2019 thanks to slightly cooler weather. And the shift away from coal in power generation resumed after a lull in 2017, with coal-fired power plant retirements in 2018 nearly breaking the record set in 2015.

It was exactly this shift that President Trump had pledged to stop — even reverse. He has clearly failed. It’s not for lack of trying: The Environmental Protection Agency has rolled back the Clean Power Plan that the Barack Obama administration drew up to restrict carbon-dioxide emissions by power plants, and the Energy Department tried to force electricity consumers to subsidize coal and nuclear power to keep plants open. The latter effort foundered in part because of a peculiarity of American governance: The members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission who decide on such matters are presidential appointees, but some have to be Democrats and all are free to go against the president’s wishes without much consequence.

The overriding issue, though, seems to be that the electrical utility industry just isn’t buying what the president is selling, in part because its leaders assume that future presidents won’t share his head-in-the-sand attitude toward climate change but mainly because burning coal to generate electricity makes less and less economic sense amid a fracking boom that has kept natural gas cheap and technological progress that has driven down the cost of wind and solar. In short, promising a coal revival was a shortsighted, ill-informed and unrealistic thing for the president to do.

These promises do seem to have helped create and sustain a couple thousand coal mining jobs for a couple of years, which is something. Now, though, those jobs are likely to begin disappearing just as the president ramps up his reelection campaign. This should be a warning to anyone who ever banks on what Trump says, such as the stock market investors who bid up prices every time the White House says something hopeful about trade negotiations with China. It probably won’t have major consequences in the 2020 election, though, given that the three states with the most coal miners — West Virginia, Kentucky and Wyoming — don’t have a lot of electoral votes and are highly unlikely to flip to the Democrat under any circumstances.

Pennsylvania, the state with the fourth-most coal miners, is a more interesting case, in that it’s big, it’s a swing state and it’s an epicenter of the natural gas fracking boom, with three times as many people now working in oil and gas extraction as in coal mining.(1) Democratic contenders Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have both said they would move to ban fracking, with Warren pledging last month that she would do so on her first day as president. A fracking ban could help coal miners, at least temporarily, but would be a disaster for natural gas drillers and for the gigantic new Royal Dutch Shell plastics plant under construction near Pittsburgh, and would probably mean higher electricity prices for everybody. It’s also something that neither Sanders nor Warren may be able to deliver. Donald Trump does not have a monopoly on unfulfillable campaign promises. So what’s a Pennsylvania fossil-fuels worker to think?

(1) That's according to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, and includes support activities for oil and gas extraction and coal mining as well as the extraction and mining themselves.

To contact the author of this story: Justin Fox at justinfox@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Sarah Green Carmichael at sgreencarmic@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

 

Notice again one of @shootersa favorite fraudulent tricks. Hysterically scream for proof on one thread. And then when proof is provided to him just ignore that and go to another thread and start screaming for the same proof all over again. You can provide shootersa proof all day long and he will either ignore it or deny it and just screaming for more. I think just about everyone ought to be onto that scam by now.

Anyway back on topic. Just like shootersa Trump constantly tries to lie about things that are on video tape. Who are you going to believe? Me or our lying eyes and ears? But I bet this one cut a little deeper than usual. Trump's fragile ego couldn't stand being booed at the National's game. So he had to try another public event where he was guaranteed to get cheered to prove to himself the nation still loves him. And what better place than an MMA fight where the fans would be thrilled to have a president show up at their blood fest. But instead what Trump got was an instant and honest reality check on how the majority of Americans are feeling about him. Its easy for him and his followers to ignore the polls. But he can't just ignore the boos in his face.

Internet ridicules Trump for calling videos of him being booed in NYC ‘Fake News!’: ‘You got booed, son’

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/11/in...ing-booed-in-nyc-fake-news-you-got-booed-son/

 

Trump ‘terminated’ two newspapers from the White House out of spite — but he still reads them every day

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/11/tr...t-of-spite-but-he-still-reads-them-every-day/

 

No shit. Because even if Trump was not mentally ill he would still be stupid and ignorant and believes he is above all laws and the Constitution. And like I said this is costing us way more than just his golf and vacations.

WATCH: Trump complains federal judges have given him ‘many, many bad nights’

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/11/wa...l-judges-have-given-him-many-many-bad-nights/

 

Newly unearthed emails show Trump’s doctored hurricane map threw government agencies into chaos

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/11/ne...ane-map-threw-government-agencies-into-chaos/

 

The pressure is getting to the mad king dictator.

Trump goes on berserk Sunday afternoon ‘NOTHING WAS DONE WRONG!’ tweetstorm as impeachment looms

*What is so fucking hilarious about that is the Republicans know fucking A well they can't defend the transcript. The know is proves bribery/extortion beyond reasonable doubt. So now they are back to trying to use their worn out excuse that Trump was too stupid and incompetent to know he was committing a crime.

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/11/tr...s-done-wrong-tweetstorm-as-impeachment-looms/

 

I do not know how many people watched the videos of Donkey tRump Jr. at his "book" presser in L.A. at a college where the woman dressed as a nun made his useless ass look like a little bitch, where his fathers supporter heckled and booed him off the stage, and his idiot twat Guilfoile or however they want to spell that bullshit were run off by a group of people that openly stated that they are ultra conservative, nationalist isolationist supporters of Donkey tRump Sr. Sad when even the far right turns on their own kind.