In a twisted July 8 speech dedicated to the environment in the White House East Room, President Trump made a series of misleading or false statements as he “celebrated” his administration’s environmental achievements. In his speech the president said, “We want the cleanest air, we want crystal clean water, while also condemning the proposed “Green New Deal.” Trump appeared completely unaware of the cutting irony of his dishonest claims as his administration aggressively promoted the kinds of pollution generated by oil drilling, fracked natural gas extraction, coal mining and wholesale deregulation of toxic pesticides and chemicals.
In response to the speech many of the nation’s leading environmental groups issued statements condemning the president’s record. Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, spoke for many when he said, “Donald Trump is resorting to greenhouse gaslighting the public to try and cover up the fact that he is the worst president in history for the environment, climate and public health.”
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Scott Edwards, director of the Food & Water Watch Justice program. Here, he discusses his group’s ongoing campaign to protect U.S. environmental laws from the Trump administration/Republican party drive to deregulate virtually all of the nation’s polluting industries.
SCOTT EDWARDS: Tweets and the racism and the Mueller issue. It’s overwhelming. And the amount of press and attention that his outrageous, unacceptable behavior creates allows people like Andrew Wheeler who’s now the administrator of the EPA to do his dirty work sort of under the radar. And, he’s having an absolutely devastating impact on the lives and safety of the American public. I’m sure you and all your listeners remember Scott Pruitt, who is Wheeler’s predecessor and Pruitt was sort of this bumbling clownish kind of character and was always in the press and always getting attention from his used Trump hotel mattresses to using his sirens to go to lunch and on and on and on. And Wheeler is much worse than Pruitt. He’s very unassuming. You don’t get the headlines around Wheeler that you did around Pruitt.
He does his job quietly, effectively. And he may be one of – and this is saying a lot – certainly, one of the most sinister members of the Trump administration. He is orchestrating an agenda at EPA that is literally killing Americans by the thousands. Just to give you one example and we can certainly talk about lots of other examples. Pruitt began this of course by withdrawing, as soon he got into office because, you know, Trump is driven to undo anything and everything that Obama did, whether it was good or bad or whether he has a view on it or not, but simply because it came out of the Obama administration has to be undone – undoing the Clean Power Plan. And Wheeler has now introduced what they call the Affordable Clean Energy rule to take the place of the Clean Power Plan.
But if you look at that one little shift, withdrawing the Clean Power Plan and implementing the Affordable Clean Energy plan, that Wheeler orchestrated. It will cost the lives of about 5,000 Americans annually. That’s more people than were killed in 9/11. And this is on an annual basis that Wheeler’s done this act, and you know, there was some press around it, but given all the noise on all the other issues, nobody’s really talking about this. I mean, imagine if somebody did something to take the lives of 5,000 Americans a year. It would be unacceptable and we should be denouncing it. And many of us do denounce what Wheeler’s doing, but not enough people are. I mean, it just is simply outrageous what’s happening here at EPA. You know, the Trump agenda promote fossil fuels and to hell with climate and to hell with community and public health.
This, administration kowtowing to the agricultural industry. At the end of the Obama administration, there was a decision to move into banning several pesticides, but I think the most egregious one was called chlorpyrifos. And certainly, you know, that’s a highly dangerous toxic pesticide that’s been tied to damaging children’s brains. I mean, this is an absolutely horrendous chemical that we’re dumping on our crops. And Wheeler once again moved to “save the day” and actually stayed any action on this pesticide; says that EPA needs to study it further, even though EPA a couple of years ago made the finding that this is tied to injuring development in children and, and Andrew Wheeler saying, “Oh, they want to sort of study it for another three, four or five years,” kicked the can down the road and allow this pesticide to be used on crops. Of course, you know, the people are getting folks to exposed to this, right? Our farmworkers, many of them who are immigrants and this administration has clearly shown the disregard for immigrant populations here and couldn’t care less about these folks getting exposed to this kind of toxin.
BETWEEN THE LINES: What has, or what should the Democratic House of Representatives be doing to stop, slow down or initiate investigations about these Trump environmental policies and deregulatory policies and the connecting the dots between the corrupting influence of money coming from big industries to politicians.
SCOTT EDWARDS: There needs to be a lot more oversight by this House. I mean, they can only do so much, right? Because the Senate has shown, you know, a Republican-controlled Senate has shown that they will never stand up to Trump no matter how low he stoops, no matter what he does. But, certainly the House needs to hold hearings across the board on the environmental record of Trump and his administration, so that there needs to be a lot more oversight from the House on people like Wheeler and other members of this administration who are –again, and I can’t emphasize this enough – who are killing Americans on a daily basis. Literally killing them.
For more information, visit Food and Water Watch at foodandwaterwatch.org and the Food and Water Watch Justice Program Legal Action at foodandwaterwatch.org/solution/legal-action.
