Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler said he wants to use a second Trump term to clean up air, water, and toxic waste pollution in places he says have been “left behind” by prior administrations more concerned with climate change.
His vision for the agency’s future, which he unveiled Thursday during a major address at the Nixon Library, doesn’t include a large focus on climate change. Wheeler accused prior administrations and the governors of Democratic-led states such as California and New York of spending too many resources on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, at the expense of cleaning up pollution.
“Communities deserve better than this, but in the recent past, EPA has forgotten important parts of its mission,” Wheeler said. “It’s my belief that we misdirect a lot of resources that could be better used to help communities across this country.”
Wheeler was commemorating the EPA’s 50th anniversary this year. President Richard Nixon created the agency in 1970 and signed the country’s foundational environmental laws, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.
Nonetheless, the Trump EPA, with Wheeler at the helm, has spent much of its tenure gutting Obama administration regulations on climate change, air, and water pollution. In many cases, the EPA has replaced those mandates with narrower, weaker regulations.
Environmentalists have fought the organization tooth and nail. They say that Wheeler’s plans to alter the way the agency operates, such as proposals to restrict the types of science the EPA can use and to revise how the EPA counts the costs and benefits of its regulations, are industry-influenced attempts to undermine the agency’s ability to set stricter standards.
During his speech, though, Wheeler slammed the governors of New York and California for overlooking air and water pollution in their focus on climate change.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s moves to block natural gas pipelines leave people in his state and in New England using “more polluting wood and heating oil to heat their homes,” Wheeler said.
Wheeler also criticized California for its recent rolling blackouts, which he, like other Republican politicians, blamed on the state’s increasing reliance on renewable energy.
When the power was shut off, 50,000 gallons of raw sewage spilled into the Oakland Estuary when back-up wastewater pumps failed, Wheeler said.
Wheeler’s vision for the EPA’s future is centered on people and places that he says have been “left behind” because they are the most polluted areas in the country. The EPA can help “revitalize” those places, often low-income and minority regions or former industrial towns now largely abandoned, by taking a holistic approach to cleaning them up, he said.
That means the EPA’s air office would work with the agency’s toxic cleanup program, known as Superfund, and water quality officials, instead of addressing problems in “silos,” as Wheeler said the agency does now.
“This will do more for environmental justice than all the rhetoric in political campaigns,” Wheeler said.
Wheeler’s focus on environmental injustices comes as racial unrest across the country has thrust the disproportionate effects pollution has on minority and low-income people into the spotlight.
Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, released a sweeping plan to elevate tackling those disproportionate pollution effects in July, as part of his revamped $2 trillion climate plan. His running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, also recently unveiled a major environmental justice bill with Green New Deal author Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat.
Environmentalists and former EPA officials say the Trump administration’s actions over the last three and a half years have only increased the pollution burden on minority people.
“Their decisions to weaken and roll back basic air and water protections increase chronic medical conditions, expand sacrifice zones across our country, increase susceptibility to COVID-19, and send a clear message that the lives of black, brown, and Indigenous lives have little value to the current administration,” said Mustafa Santiago Ali, senior vice president for environmental justice for the National Wildlife Federation.
Ali formerly served as a senior adviser for environmental justice and community revitalization at the EPA.
Wheeler, during his remarks, said several EPA programs would see a shake-up during a second Trump term, including the water infrastructure, Superfund, and pesticides. Those will be bolstered by the EPA’s structural changes, some already underway, including the revisions to EPA’s cost-benefit math and a requirement to use science only where the underlying data can be made public.
And despite his criticism, Wheeler also appeared to suggest he’d seek common ground with the Democratic-led states that have been his constant adversaries, especially California, which has sued the EPA several dozen times over environmental rollbacks.
“To do this involves a new vision, and for a country searching for a new consensus, on the environment as well as on many other things, this can seem tough,” Wheeler said. “But I believe we can find a new consensus, if we strive to.”
