Climate Arrests? Yes, They're Happening Under Joe Biden's Tyrannical EPA!

If you want to understand just how tyrannical our government has become you need read a memorandum put out in September of last year by the EPA’s Assistant Administrator for Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, a fellow named David Ulhman. According to Grok, this is Ulhman’s background:

Prior to his current role, Uhlmann was the Jeffrey F. Liss Professor from Practice and the Director of the Environmental Law and Policy Program at the University of Michigan Law School, where he worked from 2007 to 2022. His work has included advocacy for criminal and civil enforcement of environmental laws, corporate accountability, and addressing climate change and sustainability issues.

And, when you put a true believer in charge who aims to criminalize the activity of anyone who is not a true believer, this is what you get; the first climate arrest as reported in a nice summary at Legal Insurrection.

What I’d like to focus on, though, is the memo which was the basis of this latest reiteration of the Jacobin or Leninist enterprise. Here are the key parts (emphasis added):

During his first week in office, President Biden issued Executive Order (EO) 14008 calling on all federal agencies to implement a whole of government approach to tackling the climate crisis. EPA Administrator Regan subsequently made addressing the climate crisis the top cross-cutting goal in EPA’s Strategic Plan. With this memorandum, I am directing all EPA enforcement and compliance offices to address climate change, whenever appropriate, in every matter within their jurisdiction.

The climate crisis continues to accelerate: this year will be the warmest on record, with more billion- dollar weather events during the first eight months of the year than in any prior calendar year in the United States. Wildfires are no longer geographically limited, bringing death, catastrophic property damage, and unhealthy air to greater proportions of the country. Sea levels and ocean temperatures are rising dramatically. If we fail to take decisive action by the end of this decade, searing heat, widespread drought, destructive storms, and coastal flooding will become even more commonplace.

To meet the urgency of this moment, I am requiring that EPA’s enforcement and compliance program: (1) prioritize enforcement and compliance actions to mitigate climate change; (2) include climate adaptation and resilience in case conclusions whenever appropriate; and (3) provide technical assistance to achieve climate-related solutions and build climate change capacity among EPA staff and our state and local partners. These requirements apply across all EPA enforcement and compliance activities, including criminal, civil, federal facilities, and cleanup enforcement.

EPA’s Climate Enforcement and Compliance Strategy builds on the announcement last month of EPA’s first-ever climate enforcement initiative. The climate enforcement initiative targets methane emissions from oil and gas facilities and landfills as well as illegal importation of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). The strategy announced today goes further and requires EPA’s enforcement and compliance program to fairly and vigorously enforce the full array of EPA’s climate rules, including, but not limited to, greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting requirements and limits on other climate pollutants such as carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. As new climate rules are developed, they will be prioritized as well…

The strategy announced today requires that all EPA enforcement and compliance staff embrace climate-related solutions, whenever appropriate, including at federal facilities and cleanup sites, so that entities in both criminal and civil enforcement matters factor climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience into their operations…

EPA’s climate rules promise meaningful reductions in GHG emissions to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Whether EPA achieves those GHG reductions will depend upon the strength of the climate rules, the efforts of the regulated community to comply with those rules, and the willingness of the Agency to take swift enforcement action against violators. To protect communities from climate change that already is occurring, EPA also will need to include climate adaptation and resilience whenever possible in criminal, civil, and administrative settlements…

Enforcement and compliance teams should consider targeting investigations at facilities presenting the highest risks from climate change impacts, which may include considering how frequently the geographic area is impacted by catastrophic weather events each year…

Violations of requirements under other laws may also provide opportunities for injunctive relief that results in increased resilience to future impacts from climate change, thereby reducing risk of future harm to the environment or a community.

Enforcement staff should ensure consistent consideration of climate change in the case development process and incorporate relevant climate adaptation and resilience considerations in administrative actions, civil referrals, consent decree approval requests, and criminal cases referred to the Department of Justice. Enforcement staff should appropriately anticipate and prepare for future extreme weather events when developing case resolutions by including injunctive relief in regulatory settlements that will be resilient to the projected impacts of climate change. Case teams may incorporate greener cleanup provisions in Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) settlements, as well as green infrastructure provisions in Clean Water Act settlements to help with flood control and mitigating climate change via creation of carbon sinks.

Readers of this substack will quickly appreciate what’s going on here; namely, an invitation to NGOs to sue the EPA and supposed offenders so there can be more and ever bigger settlements that fund all sorts of Big Green Grift projects. Ulhman has been trying to create a Super EPA that rules everything, can arrest anybody and is within its limits to do anything it wishs in the name of climate change. His memo recklessly subsitutes theory for facts and expectations for reality. He even wants EPA staff to anticipate extreme weather events and pounce on them with injunctions and the like in the name of climate.

This is corruption. This is tyranny. And, it needs to stop. Lee Zeldin needs to fire everone below him down to the last administrative position in this horrendous, politicized and, yes, corrupt agency. We can no longer afford this nonsense.

#ClimateArrests #Climate #EPA #Biden #ClimateChange #Tyranny