The Supreme Court limited the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate emissions. NPR's Michel Martin asks former EPA head William K. Reilly how that will impact the agency's goals.
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A bipartisan coalition of seven former cabinet secretaries and chief climate change negotiators moved to push President Biden forward on the Amazon. Read more via the New York Times.
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“While campaigning, Biden repeatedly labeled climate change as one of four urgent crises—alongside the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic collapse and racial justice. Those issues were the only four listed on the Biden transition website in the hours after the election was called in his favor. By using the nation’s emission-reduction program as a means to address each of those challenges, the future Biden Administration is poised to place climate change at the center of U.S. politics.” Read more via Time.
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Evidence that air pollution disproportionately affects minority and low-income people is undeniable and needs to be confronted, three former EPA chiefs agreed yesterday.
Their views amounted to a striking admission of failure to address deeply rooted environmental inequities that can cut lives short or contribute to debilitating disease.
"Nobody's asking for special favors here," Bill Reilly, who led the agency under President George H.W. Bush, said during a virtual forum keyed to the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Clean Air Act. "They are not getting the benefit of the equal protection of the laws, and that's what they should have."
Read MoreA bipartisan group of former EPA administrators slammed the agency's operations under President Trump, labeling it as a uniquely bad time for EPA. Read more via E&E News.
Read MoreFour former heads of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Democrats and Republicans, on Monday issued a sharp rebuke of the Trump administration’s record on the environment after the current administrator said the agency is focused on “work that has been neglected for years.” Read more via Reuters.
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Two former Republican heads of the Environmental Protection Agency are rebuking President Trump over his record on climate change and other issues — and are backing his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, for president.
Christine Todd Whitman and William K. Reilly say they are crossing party lines because Trump and his EPA deputies lack respect for the agency's science and history.
“There has been nothing like an administration on the environment in the last 50 years to compare with a dereliction that characterizes this administration,” Reilly, who served as George H.W. Bush's EPA administrator, said in a call with reporters organized by the Biden campaign. Read more via The Washington Post.
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The leaders who ran the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for more than a quarter century, serving under Republican and Democratic presidents, agree that President Donald Trump has set the agency against science. Read more via Bloomberg Green and watch video on Bloomberg.
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This week I spoke with Christine Todd Whitman and William K. Reilly, former Environmental Protection Agency administrators who served under Republican presidents and who recently said they were backing Joseph R. Biden Jr., President Trump’s Democratic challenger, in the November election.
The Trump campaign derided their group, Republicans and Independents for Biden, as “has-been politicians,” but the former E.P.A. chiefs brushed off the criticism. They told me they felt strongly that the rule of law, respect for science and action on climate change were on the line in 2020.
Here is a condensed version of our conversations, edited for length. Read more via the New York Times.
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Six former EPA heads from Republican and Democratic administrations joined over 100 ex-employees in a sweeping report on how a future administration should revitalize environmental protection, promote scientific expertise and remove political intrusion from agency decisionmaking.
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Andrew Schwartz and Scott Miller from CSISt talk to William Reilly, former President of the World Wildlife Fund and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator during the George H.W. Bush administration. Bill contemplates how the Covid-19-induced increase in remote work will reshape American cities facing lower demand for office space, transit, and in-person conferencing. Bill also expresses optimism about making progress toward climate goals as we quickly adapt to new technologies. Listen to the podcast via CSIS.
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Fifty years ago this week, one out of every 10 Americans, 20 million in all, came together for a series of rallies, teach-ins, and speeches, to tell their leaders they were no longer willing to put up with choking air and poisoned water. The fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day is an occasion to celebrate the environmental movement’s vast success cleaning up America’s skies and waterways, but also a moment to take stock of lessons learned - for how to address the existential environmental issue of our time: climate change here.
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Members of the bipartisan commission created to investigate the spill say Congress and the Trump administration have failed to take safety seriously. Read more via the New York Times.
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Read more via the New York Times.
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The Noordwijk Ministerial Conference was a critical milestone on the road to international emission targets for carbon dioxide. Held in November 1989 in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, the Conference was attended by representatives of 67 countries, 11 international organizations, and the Commission of the European Community (EC). The conclusions of the resulting Noordwijk Declaration on Atmospheric Pollution and Climate Change1 have often been referred to in subsequent climate debates.
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Three Republican former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency accuse the agency's current leadership of supporting the "undermining of science" and a potentially "catastrophic" approach to climate change.
In an exclusive interview with ABC News Live, before a rare joint appearance on Capitol Hill, former EPA administrators William Reilly, Lee Thomas and Christine Whitman warned that recent gains in cleaner air and water in the U.S. are beginning to "backslide." Watch the video on ABC News.
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