Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt

On Tuesday, Donald Trump signed an executive order repealing protections for the oceans and Great Lakes. Instead, according to The Hill, Trump’s executive order gives priority to “ocean industry” and “particularly oil and natural gas drilling.”

With much of the nation’s ire currently directed at the way Trump is demanding billions for his wall as ransom for handing back stolen children, it’s easy to overlook how many other outrages are moving ahead at full speed. Trump is still engaged in an accelerating trade war. He’s still intent on driving a wedge between the US and traditional allies. He hasn’t paused his attacks on the FBI and the investigation. And he hasn’t halted the string of policies designed to boost the use of fossil fuels in the face of not just environmental disasters, but a declining interest from the markets.

The order encourages more drilling and other industrial uses of the oceans and Great Lakes.

This follows executive orders that Trump has already issued which destroyed the Stream Protection Rule, allowing coal mines to dump waste into streams and rivers. And Trump has removed funding for environmental programs that protect the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay in every one of his budgets. For 2019, the Baltimore Sun reports that Trump’s budget would remove all funding for the Gulf of Mexico. And San Francisco Bay. And the Everglades. And Long Island Sound. And that’s just the start of a long list. After cutting 100 percent of funding for the Great Lakes in his first proposed budget, Trump has compromised this year … cutting it by 90 percent.

All of this goes on top of suspending the Waters of the United States rule, which protected large lakes, wetlands and the streams that fed them. That change, made back in January, removed the primary means of protection from about 60 percent of the waters in the country. Trump has systematically removed environmental protection from every pond, stream, river, lake, Great Lake, bay, gulf, and sea shore that touches the United States, as well as protection for the oceans beyond our borders. He’s pressing for the “industrial use” of the ocean at a time when the weight of plastics in the seas threatens to outweigh that of all fish, and thousands of oil and gas wells are being drilled on land across the nation.

After all this, Trump still insists that he supports “clean, clean water” … but, where does he think that water comes from?