The Energy 202: Here's why two former Republican EPA chiefs are backing Biden over Trump (Washington Post)
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.
By contrast, both say they worked well with Biden when he was a senator and support his plan to curb the country's greenhouse gas emissions.
The pair of endorsements is the latest fault line within the GOP between elder politicos and current officeholders over climate change.
Whitman, who was George W. Bush's EPA chief between 2001 and 2003, said she was aghast to learn the Trump administration had blocked federal scientists from talking about climate change at conferences.
“It is only those with their heads buried in the sand that don't think climate change is occurring, and that's Donald Trump,” said Whitman, who also served as New Jersey's governor for two terms. “I have seven grandchildren, and I really worry about their future with the denial of climate change,”
The two have found themselves in disagreement with other Republicans before.
Nearly two decades ago, Whitman left her job at the EPA after butting heads with others in the Bush administration who thought she was too willing to set new regulations. And she and Reilly aired their grievances during a Capitol Hill hearing last year against the agency's shrinking size and ambition under EPA chief Andrew Wheeler.
Yet increasingly, a handful of veteran Republicans have been saying climate change is a threat that deserves serious attention.
Two former Republican secretaries of state, James A. Baker III and George P. Shultz, as well as former GOP treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., are advocating for a tax on carbon pollution. In exchange for doing away with a host of EPA regulations, the group hopes a fee of $40 per ton of the greenhouse gas will prompt businesses and people to cut emissions.
But those calls have largely fallen on the deaf ears of Republicans in Congress. Neither the House nor the Senate have advanced any climate legislation when Republicans controlled both chambers at the start of the Trump administration.
For Whitman and Reilly, Biden is a Democrat they can work with.
Reilly said he appreciates Biden's help in strengthening the Clean Air Act in 1990, when the Democratic nominee was in the Senate.
The amendments to the law, signed by the elder Bush, greatly reduced acid rain and proved to be one of the nation's most consequential environmental statutes. The decrease in particulate air pollution due to the law forestalled more than 160,000 premature deaths in 2010 alone, according to an agency study.
"His record is long, and it's very clear he has supported environmental health," Reilly said of Biden.
Whitman said she appreciates Biden's focus on the climate issue. Prodded by young climate activists once skeptical of his campaign, Biden is calling to spend $2 trillion over four years to boost electric cars and energy-efficient buildings and to eliminate climate-warming emissions from the power sector by 2035.
“He's got the proposals,” she said. “He understands the importance of the issue.”
Both former EPA administrators are part of Republicans and Independents for Biden, a coalition launched this month. Samantha Zager, deputy national press secretary for the Trump campaign, dismissed their support for Biden as an instance of Washington bureaucrats sticking together.
“Joe Biden has been part of the D.C. bureaucracy for nearly half a century, so it’s no surprise these bureaucrats would leech on to Biden instead of support President Trump, who in just one term has already begun draining the swamp to ensure Washington works for the American people instead of career government officials," she said.
Wheeler has countered by saying it is “incontrovertible” the environment has actually improved under Trump's watch.
In a speech Monday morning at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank, Trump's EPA chief said the agency has returned to its core work, which includes cleaning up toxic Superfund sites and financing clean water infrastructure, during his tenure.
At the same time, he criticized his predecessors in the Barack Obama administration for what he called an “overweening focus on climate change" that amounts to “virtue-signaling” to foreign governments.
The Trump administration has rolled back several Obama-era rules designed to combat climate change, including regulating methane emissions from oil wells and curbing carbon dioxide releases from coal-fired power plants. U.N. climate scientists say the world has just a decade to cut emissions and forestall a dangerous rise in temperatures.
"We have done more in the first four years of the Trump administration to improve the environment than probably any administration, except perhaps during the very first years of EPA," he said.
Whitman took issue with Wheeler's assertion.
“If he would just substitute ‘delete’ [or] 'destroy' for the word 'improve,' he'd be right on,” she said.