Washington, DC – Today, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and Co-Chair of the Senate Climate Action Task Force, released the following statement on the Trump Administration’s opening of a process to replace the Clean Power Plan:
“Not long ago, Donald Trump and his children called climate change ‘scientifically irrefutable’ and its consequences ‘catastrophic’ and ‘irreversible’. Yet today, Donald Trump’s fossil fuel industry lackey, Scott Pruitt, is unraveling one of the most important steps we’ve taken to combat the climate crisis. The Trump Administration is willing to cast aside its obligations under the law, and America’s position of leadership in the world, to serve the most malign and voracious special interest, the fossil fuel industry.
“But today’s action isn’t the win for big polluters that Scott Pruitt and his industry string-pullers claim. The law requires EPA to act. Judges will demand the EPA protect Americans in states like Rhode Island from warming temperatures, rising seas, and the other dangers posed by climate change. They will require facts to be factual and conclusions to be logical. And they will understand that under Scott Pruitt’s leadership, fossil-fuel industry polluters have captured the agency he runs.
“Congress may be bound and gagged by polluters and their dark money, but our courts and administrative agencies are not. They represent the rule of law. That means there will be a day of reckoning for dirty industry and its climate denier fringe.”
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