The Mad King is determined to blow up the outside world.

War Games: Attacks on Mother Nature Intensify

By Frank Carini / ecoRI News columnist

Six months ago, the natural world was fighting for survival. Now, it’s under a full-frontal assault. Our war with Mother Nature, our most important ally, is utterly senseless.

While we have been operating on Defcon 2 — full alert status, war is imminent — for decades, we now find ourselves at Defcon 1, a full-blown conflict has begun. A nuclear summer looms.

The Mad King and his cabinet of IKEA rejects are attacking Mother Nature on all fronts. In April, the regime rolled back environmental safeguards around future logging projects on more than half of the country’s national forests. The Mad King used the threat of wildfires to arm the timber industry. A map of the areas with less logging protections doesn’t bode well for the White Mountains.

The rollbacks exempt impacted forests from an objection process that allows tribes, local governments, and conservation and environmental groups to challenge logging proposals before they are finalized. It also narrows the number of alternatives federal officials can consider when weighing logging projects.

The regime’s act of war covers 176,000 square miles — an area larger than California and nearly 60% of U.S. Forest Service lands.

House MAGAs want to cede control over the country’s public lands to the oil, gas, and mining industries. Their budget is packed with giveaways to corporations and the wealthy. Much of the gifts come at the expense of the natural world.

Their giveaways include a “pay to play” permitting provision that would allow corporations to pay a fee to speed up permitting and exemptions from judicial oversight.

The Mad King is running a brothel, pimping out Mother Nature to the highest bidders.

Grist recently reported that in the past few months federal enforcement of major violations of environmental laws — too meager to begin with — appears to have ceased. A Grist review of data from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice found the regime hasn’t filed any new cases against major polluters in its first three months. The number of minor civil and criminal enforcement cases has also significantly declined since the Mad King recaptured the Oval Office.

Since Jan. 20, the Mad King has pledged to go easier on polluters, has rolled back dozens of environmental regulations, granted exemptions from federal air quality requirements to coal plants, and weakened pollution standards for cars and trucks.

Having taken a flamethrower to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the EPA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and other environment-related departments, combined with deregulating the fossil fuel industry and water-guzzling data centers — some being built in the driest areas — the regime’s actions could prove catastrophic for the country’s endangered rivers, according to American Rivers.

The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit noted the Mad King’s gutting of environmental protections will, for one, threaten the long-term survival of the Mississippi River, the longest river in the United States, and its 30-million-acre floodplain that provides habitat for some 900 species of fish and wildlife.

Taking water — and the rest of the resources and free services the natural world provides — for granted is the American way. The Mad King recently ordered his mercenaries to repeal a Biden-era rule that restricted water flow from showerheads.

“In my case, I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair,” said the self-absorbed bigot who paints himself orange. He added that he lets the water run for 15 minutes.

The Mad King also wants to rescind two Biden-era rules finalized by the Bureau of Land Management last year that advanced protections for millions of acres across the West and Alaska’s North Slope.

The regime’s Interior secretary has said these areas aren’t national wildlife refuges, but national strategic petroleum reserves.

The regime’s blitzkrieg on the natural systems that protect us will dirty where we live, work, and play. This unnecessary war will produce more pollution and unleash more toxins into the air we breathe and the water we drink. Biodiversity will more quickly vanish. As more flora and fauna disappear, the faster our well-being will deteriorate.

The bounty of the natural world allows us to thrive. As we selfishly raid and degrade it, our survival as a species declines — the decay beginning with those of us pushed to the margins by humanity’s collective greed and ignorance.

Mother Nature will strike back. The escalation of extreme weather will mount, and the planet’s fever will continue to rise. Mother Nature’s hydrogen bomb is the climate crisis. She’s done trying to warn us. Peace talks have been suspended.

Frank Carini can be reached at frank@ecori.org. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.