| Dear Katy, Once again, Donald Trump's contempt for the environment is on full display with his recent nomination at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Peter Wright, a lawyer for Dow Chemical and a former Monsanto employee, is Trump's pick to head up the EPA office that oversees chemical spills at Superfund sites. This nomination is another in a long line of attempts by Trump to put the fox in charge of the henhouse: Dow Chemical is linked to at least 100 of the more than 1,300 toxic Superfund spills across the country.1 It's beyond dangerous to put a Dow shill in charge of cleaning up his company's toxic spills. We must pressure the Senate to reject Wright's nomination before it ever comes up for a vote. Tell the Senate: No Dow Chemical shills at the EPA. Click here to sign the petition. According to a biography by the American Bar Association, Wright "manages the legal issues and outside counsel with respect to Dow's largest and most significant environmental matter, the mid-Michigan dioxin matter," a toxic Superfund site that Dow has been litigating for more than 40 years and has yet to clean up.2 The dioxin contamination, which is highly toxic and linked to a whole host of health problems including cancer, extends 50 miles down the Tittabawassee and Saginaw rivers and into the Saginaw Bay, and continuously threatens communities along its banks.3 Earlier this year, Dow won a major lawsuit that prevented local residents from suing the company for the dioxin contamination.4 Wright's nomination is yet another example of the Trump administration's cozy relationship with Dow Chemical. Dow Chairman and CEO Andrew Liveris headed up Trump's now-disbanded American Manufacturing Council, and last year, the company donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural committee.5 So it wasn't a surprise that after a brief meeting with Liveris last March, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt overturned an Obama-era rule banning chlorpyrifos, the popular brain-harming pesticide manufactured by Dow.6 Activism to stop Trump's nominees works. In just the last few months, hundreds of thousands of CREDO members took action to stop the nominations of a different chemical industry shill, Michael Dourson, at the EPA, climate change denier Kathleen Hartnett White at the Council on Environmental Quality and racist climate denier Sam Clovis at the Department of Agriculture. The Senate will be taking up Wright's nomination soon, so we must act now to stop another dangerous Trump nominee from devastating our environment. Tell the Senate: No Dow Chemical shills at the EPA. Click the link below to sign the petition: https://act.credoaction.com/sign/dow_epa?t=7&akid=27732%2E12967895%2EgZJQ6U Thanks for everything you do. Josh Nelson, Co-Director
CREDO Action from Working Assets Add your name: - Mark Hand, "Trump nominates Dow Chemical official to lead emergency response to toxic spills," Think Progress, March 5, 2018.
- American Bar Association, "Making Rain: How to Bring Your Next Environmental Case Into the Door and Keep Them Coming," accessed March 16, 2018.
- World Health Association, "Dioxins and their effects on human health," October 2016.
- Associated Press, "Dow Chemical wins key ruling in dioxin pollution dispute," Jan. 26, 2018.
- Bess Levin, "Dow Chemical Donates $1 Million to Trump, Asks Administration to Ignore Pesticide Study," Vanity Fair, April 20, 2017.
- Associated Press, "EPA chief met with Dow Chemical CEO before deciding not to ban toxic pesticide," June 30, 2017.
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