Trump's Picks for EPA and Interior Threaten the Future of Clean Water

By Sharon Lerner, The Intercept

11 December 16

nvironmentalists have been rightly focused on the fact that climate deniers Scott Pruitt, Trump’s pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, whom he is expected to nominate for the Department of the Interior, could devastate the Clean Power Plan, the Paris Accord and, through them, national and even global progress on climate change. But Trump’s picks could permanently damage the country’s waters, too.

Both have a record of wide-ranging hostility toward the environment. As Attorney General of Oklahoma, Pruitt repeatedly (and often unsuccessfully) sued the EPA to stop the agency from doing its job. McMorris Rodgers, a conservative member of the House from Washington who has received almost a half-million dollars in campaign contributions from oil and gas companies, earned a zero rating from the League of Conservation Voters. Both have already made the dismantling of water protections a particular priority.

If appointed, these two foes of the earth will likely usher in dark days for our nation’s lakes, streams, and rivers. Our waterways are already in serious peril, according to an EPA evaluation of U.S. lakes released Friday. According to the report, 30 percent of lakes now contain the pesticide atrazine.

Water contamination will almost certainly increase if Pruitt declines to issue penalties to polluters and cuts the budgets of divisions responsible for enforcement, as his record and rhetoric has indicated he will.

“A lot of how much protection we get has to do with whether the agency chooses to buddy up to the industry or really hold them accountable for the violation of the laws,” said Maya van Rossum, the Delaware Riverkeeper. Van Rossum is currently involved in fighting fracking and more than a dozen pipeline projects and fears the threats to the river basin will only increase.

“Under a Pruitt EPA, we’re going to have a whole agency that’s about turning a blind eye, rather than holding industries accountable and protecting the people,” said van Rossum.

While it will take years to feel the full effects of some environmental disasters, the impact of not enforcing water laws will be felt more quickly. “The scary thing about water is there’s no wiggle room,” said Lisa Garcia, vice president of litigation for healthy communities at Earthjustice. “Once you discharge contamination into our drinking water, that’s an immediate impact. This could turn into real impacts to human health. It’s not something you want to play around with.”

Yet Pruitt and McMorris Rodgers already have. Both nominees have vocally opposed the Waters of the United States Rule, which would extend federal protection to thousands of lakes, rivers, and streams and allow the EPA to use the Clean Water Act to prosecute people who pollute them. Last year, Pruitt sued the EPA over the rule because it would harm the “property rights of the average American.”

Though a court is currently reviewing the rule, as EPA head Pruitt could decide not to defend it or even withdraw it. Other water protections in the works that he could snuff out include a tightening of the rules on lead and copper piping. If finalized, those rules could help prevent another Flint.

“We’re really concerned about lead and copper,” said David Goldston, director of government affairs for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “But really it’s everything.”

The fact that Trump has already surrounded himself with so many enemies of the environment makes the threat all the worse. “An entire constellation of anti-environmental people would clearly put in place policies that are counter to the public interest,” said Goldston.

Now environmental groups are turning their energies to fighting the appointments. Some have noted that only a few Republicans would need to break ranks to block Pruitt’s path in the Senate. And the opposition to McMorris Rodgers has already begun. Just hours after Trump’s choice was reported, Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, called on any senator “with a concern for future generations of Americans” to oppose her: “Rep. McMorris Rodgers poses a clear and present danger to our treasured public lands.”

And Now We Sit and Watch in Disbelief

By Garrison Keillor, The Washington Post

10 December 16

t's a wonderful satire right out of Twain or Thurber, a minority of the electorate goes for the loosest and least knowledgeable candidate, certain that he will lose and their votes will only be harmless protest, a middle finger to Washington, and then — Whoa. The joke comes true. You put a whoopee cushion on your father's chair and he sits down and it barks and he has a massive coronary. You wanted to get a rise out of him and instead he falls down dead. Very funny.

Thank you, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania for this wonderful joke. Voters in high dudgeon against Wall Street manipulators and the Washington aristocracy vote for the billionaire populist who puts tycoons in power and the Republican hierarchy who owned the logjam that the voters voted against. If Billy the Kid had been smart, he'd've run for sheriff.

And now we sit and watch in disbelief as the victor drops one piece of china after another, spits in the soup, sticks his fist through a painting, and gobbles up the chocolates. Not satisfied with the usual election-night victory speech, he stages a post-election victory tour and gloatfest, a series of rallies in arenas where he can waggle his thumbs and smirk and holler and point out the journalists in their pen for the mob to boo and shake their fists at. He puts the Secret Service through their paces, highways are closed, planes diverted, cities disrupted, just so the man can say how much fun it was to defeat Hillary Clinton and confound the experts.

I stood in an airport last Thursday and watched live cable news coverage of his first stop in Indiana where he toured a factory whose owner had been promised a $7 million tax break in return for not laying off 800 workers. In November, 178,000 new jobs were created and unemployment fell, and here was a platoon of journalists in Indiana trailing a big galoot with a red tie who offered a corporation $7 million not to lose 800 workers. No gain, simply a non-loss. It was a classic TV moment, extensive live coverage of essentially nothing whatsoever and we all stood in a stupor and watched, like people mesmerized by drops of rain sliding down a windowpane.

Eighty-thousand Trump voters in three states gave us this man, which goes to show you how much damage a few people can do. It takes 12 million to provide health care, 3 million to run the public schools, but 19 men with box cutters can turn the country upside down and empower the paranoid right and create the pretense for wars that will cost billions and kill a million people and give us a permanent army of blue uniforms yelling at us to take off our shoes and put our laptops into plastic trays.

He is a showman and oddity has paid off for him, as it did for Lady Gaga and Gorgeous George and Liberace. But the public demands new tricks. Today, railing at the journalists who slavishly cover him is, like bear baiting or lion taming, entertainment enough, but by next fall he will need to pull canaries out of his ears, and by 2018 he'll be diving on horseback from a high tower into a pool of water while playing "Malaguena" on a trumpet.

Meanwhile, the Democrats wander in the woods, walking into trees. A wealthy San Francisco liberal is re-elected as minority leader in the House, having flung millions into the wind and gotten skunked in 2014 and drubbed this fall, and a lackluster black Muslim congressman from Minneapolis is a leading candidate for chair of the Democratic National Committee, the person who will need to connect with disaffected workers in Youngstown and Pittsburgh. Why not a ballet dancer or a Buddhist monk?

Meanwhile, the emperor-elect parades in the nude while his congressional courtiers admire him and the nation drifts toward the rapids. The one bright spot is the old draft-dodger's new-found fondness for generals, including the one who talked him out of the idea of torturing prisoners of war. Military experience does encourage a certain respect for reality. There is hope that if the showman should decide late one night to incinerate Iran or North Korea and get it over with, someone might say, "Hold on. Let's think this through."