Dow Chemical Lawyer to lead EPA's Response to Toxic Spills

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  • March 3, 2018 at 4:52 pm #83408
    Avatar photoBilly_T
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    Is Trump just trolling America? Seriously, even Bush wouldn’t have been this blatantly anti-planet, and he was very bad on the environment.

    Dow Chemical, the EPA and Superfund sites

    The White House announced on Friday President Donald Trump’s chosen nominee to run the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Solid Waste: Peter C. Wright, a corporate lawyer from The Down Chemical Company.

    Tapped as the EPA’s assistant administrator, Wright would lead the agency’s efforts in responding to toxic spills and cleaning hazard waste sites.

    In the official announcement, the White House says Wright has “led Dow’s legal strategies regarding Superfund sites and other Federal and State-led remediation matters.” Wright has been a managing counsel for Dow since 1999.

    Dow and Dupont (a rival chemical company that merged with Dow last year) are responsible for over 100 of the toxic sites currently undergoing or scheduled for cleanup, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.

    March 3, 2018 at 5:00 pm #83409
    Avatar photoBilly_T
    Participant

    I found this settlement with the EPA from 2011.

    https://www.epa.gov/enforcement/dow-chemical-company-settlement

    In related environmental news:

    Oil Was Central in Decision to Shrink Bears Ears Monument, Emails Show By ERIC LIPTON and LISA FRIEDMANMARCH 2, 2018

    Excerpt:

    WASHINGTON — Even before President Trump officially opened his high-profile review last spring of federal lands protected as national monuments, the Department of Interior was focused on the potential for oil and gas exploration at a protected Utah site, internal agency documents show.

    The debate started as early as March 2017, when an aide to Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, asked a senior Interior Department official to consider shrinking Bears Ears National Monument in the southeastern corner of the state. Under a longstanding program in Utah, oil and natural gas deposits within the boundaries of the monument could have been used to raise revenue for public schools had the land not been under federal protection.

    “Please see attached for a shapefile and pdf of a map depicting a boundary change for the southeast portion of the Bears Ears monument,” said the March 15 email from Senator Hatch’s office. Adopting this map would “resolve all known mineral conflicts,” the email said, referring to oil and gas sites on the land that the state’s public schools wanted to lease out to bolster funds.

    The map that Mr. Hatch’s office provided, which was transmitted about a month before Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke publicly initiated his review of national monuments, was incorporated almost exactly into the much larger reductions President Trump announced in December, shrinking Bears Ears by 85 percent.

    Since taking office, Mr. Trump has been focused on expanding oil, gas and coal development and sweeping away Obama-era environmental initiatives that the administration contends hurt America’s energy industry. The debate over shrinking national monuments sparked a fierce political battle, now being fought in the courts, over how much land needs federal protection.

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