The fresh hell for this week begins with a flamethrower taken to all federal regulations on everything. CNBC brings us the details.

The measure will expand regulatory review with the goal of revoking two regulations for every new one put forward, according to a senior administration official. Under the order, federal agencies will propose rules they want to drop and the White House will review them. With the order, Trump followed through on repeated campaign promises to cut rules that he said hold back the economy. In meetings with business leaders since his election, Trump has touted his efforts to reduce regulations and cut corporate taxes. While signing the order surrounded by small business owners, Trump called it "the largest ever cut by far in terms of regulation." It sets a budget each year for what new regulations would cost the economy, companies and employers.

This is not a serious policy proposal. It's something you say on the radio in order to sell some hair-replacement products or male enhancement potions. But I think we can safely say that absolutely no Republican will throw his body into the gears of the machine on this one. So I think it's instructive to look at this most recent dose of fresh hell in the context of last week's announcement that the president* is all on board with starting up not only the Dakota Access pipeline, but also our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death funnel and conservative fetish object.

The tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Getty Images

Over the weekend, on Joy Reid's electric teevee program, the indefatigable Jane Fleming Kleeb checked in on the Skype machine to remind us that the pipes for the Keystone project are already here, that they were manufactured in India and China, and that they've been sitting out in the open in North Dakota subject to incredible extremes in temperature for going on four years now. This would seem to demand a certain amount of stringent inspection and regulation before we stick those pipes in the ground and start running tar-sands oil through the most precious farmland on the continent.

Which reminds me.

Back last fall, the National Academy of Sciences released a report that essentially said we're not anywhere close to having the technological capability—or a concrete plan—to clean up a massive spill of this particular poisonous glop. (The report got lost when President Obama suspended the Keystone project.) The report stated quite clearly that cleaning up a tar sands spill is vastly more complicated, and vastly more difficult, than cleaning up conventional oil spills.

The majority of the properties and outcomes that differ from commonly transported crudes are associated not with freshly spilled diluted bitumen, but with the weathering products that form within days after a spill. Given these greater levels of concern for weathered diluted bitumen, spills of diluted bitumen should elicit unique, immediate actions in response.

Broadly, regulations and agency practices do not take the unique properties of diluted bitumen into account, nor do they encourage effective planning for spills of diluted bitumen.

In light of the aforementioned analysis, comparisons, and review of the regulations, it is clear that the differences in the chemical and physical properties relevant to environmental impact warrant modifications to the regulations governing diluted bitumen spill response plans, preparedness, and cleanup."

There are real-world examples already. In 2010, 800,000 gallons of tar-sands oil spilled into the Kalamazoo River. The clean-up costs already have passed $1 billion, and it may essentially be futile, because there's no real way at this time to clean up the bitumen that's sunk into the riverbed. Three years later, another tar-sands deluge swept through Mayflower, Arkansas, ruining several residential neighborhoods. As is the case in Michigan, the bitumen will persist in the water table for the foreseeable future.

This kind of thing is guaranteed to happen again and again if federal regulations are eviscerated along the lines implicit in the president*'s new executive order. The man who advised the administration's transition team on these issues, and on all things regarding energy and climate policy, was Myron Ebell, the extremist head of the extremist Competitive Enterprise Institute and one of the king climate denialists in Christendom. Not all the poison travels through pipelines.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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