Trump Touts Fictitious Environmental Record

President Trump, who has the worst environmental record in U.S. history, is scheduled to deliver a speech today in which he plans to tout his administration's environmental record.

"I don't envy the fact checkers covering President Trump's speech," said EWG President Ken Cook. "The spectacle of the president straining to document a positive environmental record should be seen for what it is - utter fantasy. There has never been a president who has actively pursued an agenda so hostile to the environment and public health at the behest of polluters than Mr. Trump."

From the very beginning, the Trump administration has repeatedly made decisions that put our air, water and land at greater risk from polluters.

Under former Environmental Protection Administrator Scott Pruitt and current agency head Andrew Wheeler, the EPA has rolled back key climate change and air pollution control programs, pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate pact, cooked the books on approving toxic chemicals and blocked a ban of a pesticide so dangerous it can harm a child's brain at even low levels of exposure.

Among the actions taken by President Trump and his EPA that will endanger the environment and human health:

• Approving scores of new toxic chemicals without adequate safety reviews.
• Fighting a federal court ruling ordering the EPA to carry out a ban on the brain-damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos.
• Refusing to ban deadly asbestos.
• Gutting an Obama-era rule that has dramatically cut emissions of mercury, a highly toxic chemical known to harm the nervous systems of children and fetuses. The Obama rule has cut emissions of mercury and other heavy metals, such as lead and arsenic, from coal-fired power plants by 70 percent.
• Repealing and replacing Obama's Clean Power Plan, which sought to reduce air pollution from coal-fired power plants in order to save lives and lower the number of children suffering from asthma. The Trump replacement plan, according to researchers at Harvard University, would mean 36,000 premature deaths and more than 600,000 cases of childhood respiratory disease each decade.
• Repealing critical safeguards that prohibit the dumping of pollution into sensitive waterways that provide tap water for more than 117 million Americans.
• Failure to confront the growing PFAS contamination crisis.
• Pulling out of the Paris Climate pact, leaving the U.S. as the only nation on earth not part of the agreement.