Скачать или смотреть Trump Admin Ignored Internal Concerns When Clipping Bird Protections, Documents Show

In its dash to permanently weaken protections for hundreds of species of migratory birds, the Trump administration dismissed concerns from agency staff about its rushed timeline for completing an assessment of environmental impacts, according to internal documents obtained by HuffPost.  In December 2017, Interior Department lawyer Daniel Jorjani issued a legal opinion legalizing all unintentional deaths of snow geese, bluebirds and other migratory birds. That includes deaths caused by oil and gas production, power lines and chemical spills. The move was a gift to polluting industries, protecting them from being prosecuted for incidentally wounding or killing animals, as oil giant BP was over damage from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  The Trump administration’s interpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, or MBTA, broke from decades of legal precedent and has forced federal wildlife officials to largely abandon investigating bird fatalities, even in cases where there is evidence that birds were intentionally killed. The shift has allowed both industry and individuals to kill birds without any fear of consequence, as HuffPost previously reported.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which administers and enforces the MBTA, has since introduced a rule that would permanently codify the 2017 legal guidance. That is now awaiting approval from the Office of Management and Budget. A final environmental impact statement is expected as soon as this month, which would allow the administration to finalize the rule before President Donald Trump leaves office.  As documents that the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request and shared with HuffPost show, at least one agency official expressed concerns about the timeline for enacting the rule earlier this year. But another official dismissed or erased those concerns from internal planning documents, as tracked editing changes reveal.   The tracked changes, which do not include individuals’ names, eliminated warnings that shortened deadlines would “be difficult to achieve” and swapped in language asserting the agency’s right to “choose to negotiate” timelines “down.”  At first glance, the findings look like a benign back-and-forth in an office clerical document. In reality, they showed an internal struggle over the first serious attempt in a generation to weaken a century-old statute credited with bringing birds like the snowy egret and the sandhill crane back from the brink of extinction. The effort came as the oil and gas industry has expanded its footprint across the United States and as new research shows North America has lost one in four of its native bird species since 1970.  “Imagine I’m an oil industry executive and 1,000 birds die in my toxic pit of wastewater. ‘No problem!’ says the Trump administration,” said Taryn MacKinney, an investigative researcher at the Union of Concerned Scientists.