Oklahoma is 1,400 miles from the entrance of the Chesapeake Bay at Havre de Grace, Md., halfway across the country. But the distance didn’t matter to Oklahoma’s attorney general, Scott Pruitt, after the Environmental Protection Agency drew up a plan to clean the polluted bay. He tried to stop it.
Pruitt was one of 21 state attorneys general who signed an amicus brief opposing the largest cleanup of a water body in U.S. history. The brief supported a federal lawsuit filed by the American Farm Bureau Federation and the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau that claimed the EPA usurped the power of states in the watershed to regulate pollution that flows into the bay from cities and farms.
Pruitt is now President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to run the EPA, the agency that Pruitt has railed against, suing it more than a half-dozen times over regulations on clean water and clean air that he disagreed with.
How can anyone deny that the Chesapeake Bay needs to be cleaned up? Where did all the fish go? Oysters? Crabs? These ocean dwellers are slowly returning as clean up efforts continue. Does this bureaucrat think that people who rely on the Chesapeake Bay for their livelihoods don’t need jobs? There have to be fish, crabs and shellfish in order to make a living off the Bay.
People who live here in Prince William County can all do their part also to keep the Bay clean. We are part of the watershed. I don’t think for one second that our local government would do anything necessary to prevent the fouling of the Bay, unless of course the EPA ordered it to happen. In fact, I have heard the BOCS chairman moan and groan about the regulations the board must pay to comply with.
Taking it a step further, we need clean air to breath. Factory emissions must be curtailed. Why do people deny these things. Anyone who thinks burning coal is clean, has never lived around it. Anyone who thinks that burning coal is healthy has never met anyone with black lung disease.
I simply do not believe the ignorance. The Senate must block the appointment of Scott Pruitt. Our planet depends on it. Trump needs to grow up and realize that live goes beyond appeasing his base, who probably didn’t pass 8th grade science.
