Bring on the Brown Skies, Go Wehrum!
General Clark interviewed Barbara Boxer on this week's ClarkCast. Senator Boxer can expect to head the Environment and Public Works Committee, should the Dems take a majority in November. She blasted Bush's appointment of former big timber lobbyist Bill Wehrum as an Assistant Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency scheduled for Senate consideration on Wednesday.
From Grist last summer when Wehrum was only a "temporary" appointment to cover Jeffrey Holmstead's old job:
Instrumental indeed, says Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch: "Wehrum has been Holmstead's Rasputin -- the behind-the-scenes architect of all the most controversial initiatives that Holmstead took credit for." Wehrum was a lead author of the doomed "Clear Skies" legislation, O'Donnell says, and played key roles in making changes to new-source review and designing the rules governing the administration's market-based trading program for mercury emissions, which are now being challenged in federal court. "You mention his name to career staffers at EPA and they groan as if they have an abdominal problem," said O'Donnell.
Boxer cautioned in today's ClarkCast, "Mr. Wehrum has been involved in almost all the rollbacks. We have proof that he sat down with industry, more of the same where industry is writing regulations and they are really, really endangering the health of the people." She said, "Watch it when they name things 'Healthy Forest' and 'Clean Skies,' look behind the names. You know it's not true."
Discussion thread on Securing America
Very important, this Senate committee review on Wednesday of William Wehrum as Assistant Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. As Boxer says, this is a very bad guy. As Wes says, this is an enemy of environmental protection.
Write to the media.
Write to Boxer. Back her up on this. eMail Barbara Boxer
