Trump's EPA Pick Says Pesticides Aren't Bad for You
Seems like he's trying to find the stupidest people out there, or perhaps this guy is the only one who wanted the job?
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/11/trump-epa-pesticides
Trump's EPA Pick Says Pesticides Aren't Bad for You
In addition to not believing in climate change, Myron Ebell has several other lovely qualities.
Tom Philpott
Nov. 16, 2016 6:00 AM
To craft environmental policy for the next administration, President-elect Donald Trump settled on notorious climate-change denier Myron Ebell. The decision rattled climate activists—see Julia Lurie's interview with Bill McKibbon and David Roberts on Vox. But it isn't just greenhouse gas emissions that are likely to get a free ride under an Ebell-influenced Environmental Protection Agency. Farm chemicals, too, would likely flow unabated if Ebell's agenda comes to dominate Trump's Environmental Protection Agency.
Ebell's group dismisses the well-established existence of endocrine-disrupting chemicals as a myth conjured by "anti-chemical activists."
Ebell directs the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The group's website, SafeChemicalPolicy.org, exists to downplay the health and ecological impacts of chemicals.
If the incoming EPA takes its cues from Ebell's group, the agency's coming decisions on some widely used farm chemicals won't be hard to predict.
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So, Ebell's group doesn't just brazenly trash established science when it comes to climate change, to the delight of the fossil fuel industry. CEI provides the same service for the companies that dominate agrichemical production. And it's not hard to see why. The center does not reveal its funding sources, but back in 2013, it allowed a Washington Post reporter to have a look at the biggest donors to its annual gala dinner that year. Predictably, the group got a nice cash infusion from petroleum, coal, and auto interests. But Big Ag chipped in, too: Pesticide/seed giants Monsanto and Syngenta each gave $10,000, as did their trade group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization.
President-elect Trump has been roundly mocked for running as a crusading reformer, and then tapping a bunch of industry lobbyists and apologists like Ebell to lead his transition. Rather than "draining the swamp" in Washington, Trump seems to want to inject it with agrichemicals.
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