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| Looks like a fox in the hen-house to me... |
The petition to the Senate reads:
"Reject the nomination of Dow Chemical lawyer Peter Wright as assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management."
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Once again, Donald Trump's contempt for the environment is on full display with his recent nomination at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Peter Wright, a lawyer for Dow Chemical and a former Monsanto employee, is Trump's pick to head up the EPA office that oversees chemical spills at Superfund sites.
This nomination is another in a long line of attempts by Trump to put the fox in charge of the hen-house: Dow Chemical is linked to at least 100 of the more than 1,300 toxic Superfund spills across the country.1
It's beyond dangerous to put a Dow shill in charge of cleaning up his company's toxic spills. We must pressure the Senate to reject Wright's nomination before it ever comes up for a vote.
According to a biography by the American Bar Association, Wright "manages the legal issues and outside counsel with respect to Dow’s largest and most significant environmental matter, the mid-Michigan dioxin matter," a toxic Superfund site that Dow has been litigating for more than 40 years and has yet to clean up.2 The dioxin contamination, which is highly toxic and linked to a whole host of health problems including cancer, extends 50 miles down the Tittabawassee and Saginaw rivers and into the Saginaw Bay, and continuously threatens communities along its banks.3 Earlier this year, Dow won a major lawsuit that prevented local residents from suing the company for the dioxin contamination.4
Wright's nomination is yet another example of the Trump administration's cozy relationship with Dow Chemical. Dow Chairman and CEO Andrew Liveris headed up Trump's now-disbanded American Manufacturing Council, and last year, the company donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural committee.5 So it wasn't a surprise that after a brief meeting with Liveris last March, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt overturned an Obama-era rule banning chlorpyrifos, the popular brain-harming pesticide manufactured by Dow.6
Activism to stop Trump's nominees works. In just the last few months, hundreds of thousands of CREDO members took action to stop the nominations of a different chemical industry shill, Michael Dourson, at the EPA, climate change denier Kathleen Hartnett White at the Council on Environmental Quality and racist climate denier Sam Clovis at the Department of Agriculture.
The Senate will be taking up Wright's nomination soon, so we must act now to stop another dangerous Trump nominee from devastating our environment.
Tell the Senate: No Dow Chemical shills at the EPA. Click the link below to sign the petition:
- Josh Nelson, CREDO Action
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