EPA Moves to Loosen Methane Rules as Trump Opens Alaskan Rainforest

https://truthout.org/articles/epa-moves-to-loosen-methane-rules-as-trump-opens-alaskan-rainforest/
"Climate disruption is not lurking in some faraway land of maybe; it was here yesterday and the day before, and last week, and last year. It is here today, and will be here tomorrow, and for the rest of our lives. It will never get better, and is going to get worse, but if we heed the stop signs, we have the chance to, perhaps, keep it from driving us into extinction. Clearly, the president of the United States doesn’t see it that way. “I’m an environmentalist,” said Donald Trump after blowing off a G7 meeting on the climate crisis. “A lot of people don’t understand that. I think I know more about the environment than most people.” In his mind, nuking hurricanes and buying Greenland to plunder its newly ice-free resources is what environmentalists do. Now, Trump the “environmentalist” has also reportedly ordered Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to open Alaska’s 16.7 million-acre Tongass National Forest — the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world — to logging, energy and mining projects. Not satisfied with his quest to erase Barack Obama from the history books, Trump has begun erasing Clinton-era environmental protections like the one that has defended Tongass for 20 years. “Trump has taken a personal interest in ‘forest management,’” reports The Washington Post, “a term he told a group of lawmakers last year he has ‘redefined’ since taking office.” Trump did not stop with Tsongass. On Thursday, his administration announced it intends to roll back regulations on the release of methane by the oil and gas industry. Methane is a highly dangerous greenhouse gas that has “80 times the heating-trapping power of carbon dioxide in the first 20 years in the atmosphere,” according to The New York Times. There is near-universal fear among environmental scientists that melting Arctic permafrost — exacerbated by the ongoing fires — will release a methane bomb into the atmosphere, creating a feedback loop that will drastically worsen climate disruption."