Wheeler Nomination Solidifies Trump Administration as Anti-Environment
With his latest presidential nomination, President Trump continues to display a complete disregard for the sustainability of the Earth: This time, he wants to give coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler the second highest position at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
After appointing oil and gas industry favorite Scott Pruitt – a man who relentlessly sides with the financial interests of the industry over protecting the environment – as EPA administrator, it previously seemed hard to imagine President Trump making a more damaging move for the environment. But his latest nomination will push the outlook for clean air and water from bad to worse by giving Pruitt a deputy administrator every bit as unfit as he is to protect Americans’ health and the environment.
For the larger part of the last ten years, Wheeler has fought environmental protections on behalf of fossil fuel companies and was, in fact, a registered lobbyist for Murray Energy — the nation’s largest privately owned coal mining company — until just two months before his nomination. This is a man who has spent his career trying to make it easier for corporations to pollute the air and water, putting their profits over the health and safety of Americans and putting no weight whatsoever on keeping our air and water clean.
During the last decade, while Wheeler has raked in financial rewards for lobbying on behalf of energy companies, my organization, Public Justice, has been on the other side (the side of the Earth, and Americans who drink water and breathe air). We have worked to protect communities from destructive coal mining practices. In Appalachia, for example, our challenges to mountaintop removal mining practices resulted in Patriot Coal announcing the end of its use of those operations, and the admission of the irreversible environmental impact it caused. In West Virginia, we saw a stream run bright orange from contamination, which only becomes less surprising (though more disturbing) once you realize that four out of five coal plants in the U.S. have no limit on the amount of toxic heavy metals they’re allowed to dump into our water. It’s no wonder that 72 percent of all toxic water pollution in the U.S. comes from coal-fired power plants — a stat provided by the very agency Wheeler hopes to lead (with the apparent hope of weakening it).
And that’s why we can confidently say Andrew Wheeler is not fit to be the second most powerful person at the EPA — an agency Wheeler has litigated against in his previous job.
But if you want more reasons to disqualify Wheeler than just his allegiance to the coal industry, look at the company he keeps: Wheeler served as general counsel to Senator James Inhofe, who you might know from his most famous gimmick: carrying a snowball to the Senate floor in an absurd attempt to discredit the overwhelming body of scientific evidence establishing that pollution by humans is the principal cause of climate change. Judging by Wheeler’s 2006 comments that the Earth might be going through a “cooling phase,” Inhofe’s granddaughter could have asked him the same question that she posed to the Senator: “Why is it you don’t understand global warming?”
When the Earth keeps recording the hottest months and years on record - month after month, and year after year - when nearly every glacier on the Earth is demonstrably shrinking, when we see towns in Alaska hit records for “hottest day ever” by up to 50 degrees on some days (!), when the polar ice sheet is thinning and disappearing to the point that many countries are competing to begin drilling for oil in places that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago . . . when all of that is happening, how is it possible that we want the number two job at the EPA to be filled by someone who’s hallucinating that the Earth is cooling?
Wheeler’s nomination comes just as Pruitt announced the repeal of a 2015 rule designed to protect communities located near toxic coal ash sites and cut greenhouse gas emissions from existing U.S. power plants. Pruitt has not indicated whether the EPA will put a new rule in place, but has said the previous rule “ignored states’ concerns.”
Yet talk about states’ economic and other concerns often glaringly ignores the health and environmental impact of pollution in those communities. In Hancock County, West Virginia, a coal-fired power plant promised residents a recreational area with a lake for families, fishing, boating, and more. That artificial lake turned out to be the largest coal ash dump in the nation, containing 20 billion gallons of coal ash waste which contaminated residents’ groundwater, affecting their drinking water, gardens, and more.
So when the EPA says that Pruitt went to Kentucky for his announcement because he wanted to speak “directly to people in coal country about how the rule negatively affected the whole industry,” someone should remind him that he is also accountable to those people for how the industry negatively affects their health and environment. (The focus on jobs and economics also curiously ignores the enormous number of jobs created by clean energy sources, which the Trump Administration is rapidly moving to squelch.)
Clearly, coal companies and climate change deniers do not need more allies inside the EPA.
There is no evidence to indicate that Andrew Wheeler will put the interests of American families ahead of coal companies and fossil fuel lobbyists. And while the current administration has demonstrated nothing but disdain for all kinds of scientific evidence, environmental advocates and affected communities have long relied on that same evidence to defend themselves from corporations that seek to exploit them.
Americans should rely on the evidence when it comes to this nomination, too: Andrew Wheeler is a bad pick for the EPA. Please take three minutes out of your day to call the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected with your Senators. Tell them: American families deserve better than Andrew Wheeler. Reject his nomination.
Photo by Duncan Hull, via Flickr