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Trump's Deregulation Team Seeks to End Offshore Drilling Safety Measures; Halts Funding for Safety Studies
The oil and gas industries, enormous donors to (and owners of) Trump and the Republican Party, are ecstatic about some late-2017 deregulation that didn't hit the media cycle at all. While a plan to vastly expand offshore drilling was unveiled in early January, they already had some terrible things to celebrate at the end of 2017.
Safety measures on offshore drilling for oil and gas are being eliminated and funding halted for studies on safety. One again, Trump and the GOP are working for corporate interest and against the American people and our environment.
Regulators in the Trump administration are proposing to roll back safety measures put in place after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.... The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement submitted the proposal Dec. 8 to the White House budget office that reviews new regulations but hasn’t made it public.
Among the changes....[end] requirements to stream real-time data on oil-production operations to facilities onshore....strike a provision requiring that third-party inspectors of critical equipment—like the blowout preventer that failed in the Deepwater Horizon case—be certified by BSEE.
At the same time, funding for ongoing studies to enhance the safety of offshore drilling has been halting causig the safety studies to be ended. This is simply idiotic.
The Trump administration has paused its funding for a major study meant to improve how regulators enforce offshore oil and natural gas drilling safety. BSEE requested the study in 2016 as part of an ongoing effort to implement lessons learned from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said Thursday that the BSEE sent a stop-work order for the study earlier this month.
This is the second time Trump’s Interior Department has halted a National Academies study. In August [2017], the Office of Surface Mining stopped funding for a study into the potential health effects of people living near mountaintop removal mining operations.
Drillers considered safety measures burdensome, costly, and promised to police themselves. Officials appointed by Trump, Pruitt, and Republicans said OK, as long as you keep donating to our reelection campaigns and pay us huge sums to speak at your conferences.
After Mr. Trump took office, industry groups such as the American Petroleum Institute, the Offshore Operators Committee and the National Ocean Industries Association flooded the agency with suggestions for changing the so-called well control rule, BSEE’s response to Deepwater Horizon as part of a painstaking..... The revisions fit into a Trump administration effort to loosen regulatory restrictions on business and industry....
We are allowing history to repeat, learning nothing from the disasterous 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The rules put in place after to help prevent future catastrophies are being eliminated because the oil companies paid Trump and Republicans to do so.
....a pendulum swing back from the government’s response to Deepwater Horizon in allowing industry, not regulators, more say on what constitutes safe operation in U.S. waters. That accident, the largest oil spill in the history of the U.S., killed 11 workers on the drilling rig and spilled more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. “That is literally going back to business as usual,” a former federal official said.
Regulations are intended to protect us and our world. Our course they might cost a few bucks and be disliked by corporations!
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