The New Republic | Trump’s “God Squad” Might Vote for a Whale’s Extinction This Week by Jonathan Rosenbloom

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The New Republic | Trump’s “God Squad” Might Vote for a Whale’s Extinction This Week by Jonathan Rosenbloom

On Tuesday morning, a group of federal officials will gather at 18th and C Streets in Washington, D.C., to perform a task usually reserved for the divine. They will sit in a conference room and decide which species are permitted to continue existing on Earth, and which have become too great an inconvenience to the extraction of oil and gas.

Inside the Beltway, they call this group the “God Squad”—and for good reason. Officially known as the Endangered Species Committee, it holds the rare, federally sanctioned power to exempt projects from the requirements of the Endangered Species Act. By order of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the committee is meeting for the first time in more than 30 years to consider an exemption for “oil and gas exploration, development, and production activities” in the Gulf of Mexico. (Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly insisted Burgum that call the meeting, on national security grounds.)

We have been trained to view these meetings as dry regulatory disputes over administrative law or the “rational” weighing of economic interests. But what happens on Tuesday is a matter of life and death. The committee—composed of the heads of the Interior, Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Army, and the Council of Economic Advisors—can decide that the very presence of an endangered species is an unacceptable obstacle to the oil and gas industry’s balance sheet. When the God Squad grants an exemption, the species in question is put at risk of extinction.

Read more: https://newrepublic.com/article/208313/trump-god-squad-endangered-rices-whale-extinction-gulf-mexico

#donaldtrump #endangeredspeciesact #fossilfuels #gulfofmexico #whales