Coronavirus and Environmental Irresponsibility

From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday abruptly waived enforcement on a range of legally mandated public health and environmental protections, saying industries could have trouble complying with them during the coronavirus pandemic.

The oil and gas industry were among the industries that had sought an advance relaxation of environmental and public health enforcement during the outbreak, citing potential staffing problems. The EPA’s decision was sweeping, forgoing fines or other civil penalties for companies that failed to monitor, report or meet some other requirements for releasing hazardous pollutants.

The move was the latest, and one of the broadest, regulation-easing moves by the EPA, which is seeking to roll back dozens of regulations as part of President Donald Trump’s purge of rules that the administration sees as unfriendly to business. Civil and criminal enforcement of polluters under the administration has fallen sharply.

Former Obama-era EPA chief Gina McCarthy, now president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the announcement “an open license to pollute.”

The administration was “taking advantage of an unprecedented public health crisis to do favors for polluters that threaten public health,” McCarthy said, in part of what was a flurry of condemnation from environmental groups to the announcement.

This is not the first, nor will it be the last, of the many interactions between our civilization’s failure to protect the environment and runaway viral and/or bacterial infections within the human population.

Let’s begin with something interesting, though unproven scientifically: High level players at the UN are telling us that what we’re experiencing now is essentially nature’s firing a warning shot at humankind. More here. Again, interesting but quasi-scientific.

More to the point are the proven long-term effects of global warming:

• More disease-carrying mosquitoes and other insects, for longer periods of time through the year, over wider regions of the planet.

• Release of pathogens that were frozen long before homo sapiens came on the scene a couple of hundred thousand years ago, as a result of melting permafrost in the arctic. Whatever they are, we have no reason to think we have any immunity to them, since we have never had contact with them.

• Flood waters spread disease.

• Storms impede the distribution of medical supplies and treatment.

We can continue to refuse to take care of our home, but we’ll certainly suffer the consequences. What’s particularly offensive about this is our rationale for letting the environment fall apart: human greed, rich people demanding to get richer. It’s nothing more than that.