Former NJ governor and EPA head blasts Trump's "trumping the science"
Democracy at Work interviewed Governor Christine Todd Whitman, who served as EPA head under President George W. Bush.
Whenever I think of the word “governor,” the first face that pop into my head belongs to Christine Todd Whitman.
It started with her 1993 gubernatorial campaign. Born and raised in New Jersey for the first eight years of my life, I hadn’t put much thought into local politics until I saw an ad for “Christie Whitman” on Halloween. My father, a high school principal in Plainfield and staunch Democrat (which he remained until the administration of another Republican governor, Chris Christie), saw Whitman’s spot and shook his head and uttered some sotto voce disapproval.
“Why don’t you like her?” I innocent asked. My dad, perhaps realizing he had biased his child (which went against his neutral educator’s sensibilities), quickly offered some context.
“I’m a Democrat, and she’s a Republican, so I’m not going to vote for her,” he explained. “But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t like her. Read about her and Florio [Governor James Florio, Whitman’s Democratic opponent], then decide for yourself.”
When I finally interviewed Whitman for the first time in 2017, I thought of this chat with my father. In person, as throughout her political career, Whitman is an intelligent, pragmatic stateswoman. There is a reason why my subconscious evokes her face upon hearing the word “governor”: When Whitman led New Jersey, she was known for being moderate, compassionate, realistic…. in short, someone who governs.
This isn’t to say Whitman and I totally agree, any more than she and my dad totally agreed. Yet whether as one of New Jersey’s most productive chief executives, as President George W. Bush’s first head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or as the co-founder of the centrist Forward Party, Whitman always operates competently and in good faith. She encourages people to disagree without being disagreeable… and, for these reasons, her observations about the EPA and modern politics are more relevant than ever.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How do you feel about Trump’s cuts to the EPA and his overall environmental policies?
Well, I’m struck by the irony of the fact that we have to “worry” about Tylenol, but we don’t worry about the impact of air pollution on people. It’s far more deadly and far more spread out and problematic. It’s really sad. We, as the American people, are losing when we start to give this back away from what we know to be important environmental protections.
How do you connect Trump’s denial of environmental science to some of the other pseudoscience, such as what he says about Tylenol causing autism or his opposition to mRNA vaccines? I feel like a lot of this anti-science policy making is linked, and I’m curious what your thoughts are.
Oh, absolutely! I mean, the basic message we’re getting from this administration, which again is very dangerous because it’s going to take a while to try to build back, is that you can’t trust science, that science will lie. They don’t believe in science, period. They’ve got a head of HHS who is a — I mean, his whole family said, ‘Don’t give him this position.” They were against him. They know him.
The whole administration, throughout it, they have shown a disdain for science, and so we’re losing because many of our scientists are leaving, are leaving the country, and other countries are saying, “Come on!” Europe is saying, “Hey, we need you. We’ll take you. We understand the importance of this, and we want the best brains!” The United States has some of the best brains, but they’re being told that what they’re doing doesn’t matter, that we don’t believe the science, and so they’re being outright fired and we as a nation are going to pay a steep price in the future for this.
I think it’s interesting that you say this in August, I interviewed Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who RFK Jr. appointed as director of the National Institutes of Health. In that conversation, he said this to me, and I’m now reading his quote:
“When I’m done, I’m going to ask for your reaction. I don’t want to offer my own commentary because I don’t want to bias you. Here is what Dr. Bhattacharya said to me. He said:
“We ought to value truth, right? If we can have a culture of truth, then we’re not trying to destroy a scientist simply for the fact that they don’t agree with the consensus. We shouldn’t be destroying a scientist simply for being wrong. What we want is a culture where people can discuss and disagree about ideas without trying to destroy the person for having those ideas. There should not be an orthodoxy in science that determines truth.”
Now what are your thoughts about that?
I would agree with it. We shouldn’t demonize people with whom we disagree. We should be able to discuss science in an intelligent way. We learn as we go forward that some things that we thought were safe, like plastics, we’re now finding have an unanticipated impact. So I’m perfectly comfortable with challenging science, but to disregard science and to start making scientific decisions based on political desires, that is what’s wrong. And that’s what this administration is doing.
It’s not the first. I will say that in my battle over the definition of “routine” and the Clean Air Act with the Bush administration, the numbers that they gave me at the end of the day, the straw that broke the camel’s back as it were, were numbers for which we could find no justification in science. What determined whether the utility was going beyond their license, and they were creating more pollution and therefore were subject to the Clean Air Act… They raised that threshold so high that it was almost meaningless.
And I couldn’t sign that that was their decision to make. But it, interestingly enough, once they did it and had an administrator who would sign the regulation, and he did enforce it, it was thrown out in court because it didn’t have a scientific basis. It really came from industry, and that’s where you get crossways and, the American people are the people who lose when it’s the political and business desires that trump — no pun intended — trump the science.
I appreciate that you didn’t intend for the pun. Frankly, I’ve thought of that pun myself many times as “Trump trumping science,” but I don’t want my editors to roll their eyes at me, so I try to avoid suggesting it.
Laughs
But what you said reminds me of Governor Gavin Newsom, who recently got a number of California officials to refer to EPA administrator Lee Zeldin as committing a moral abdication. And they’re saying this for reasons that you can identify with, because they’re trying to rescind the 2009 Endangerment Finding, which listed six greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide and methane as violations of the Clean Air Act. How do you feel about Trump rescinding the 2009 Endangerment Finding? Does that remind you of what you experienced under Bush?
Oh, it’s far worse! Far worse! I mean, the Bush administration, I disagreed on that, and it turned out that I had some reason to disagree with it, and the courts upheld basically where we had been coming out with the agency.
But George Bush didn’t dismiss science entirely, and this was more the vice president’s [Dick Cheney’s] area. Anyway, the president wasn’t focused that much on it, but he wasn’t out to destroy the Environmental Protection Agency, which is what Trump is committed to doing. He started in his first term and he’s continuing it.
This is much, much different. This is a very calculated bit-by-bit effort undertaking of dismantling the agency. Its sole purpose is to protect human health and the environment. I mean, that’s it. It has no other reason for being, and the men and women who work there are really committed to that. They are career civil servants. I was always told, “Oh, watch out, you know, they’re all wide-eyed liberals and they hate Republicans and they’re going to undermine you every step of the way,” and that’s not what I found at all.
I found people who, as long as they believe that what you were trying to do, you believed and they believed were going to help the environment, even if they didn’t like the way you were going about it, they’d be there for you.
I’m appreciating you saying that because Trump has vilified government workers and government scientists, can you offer a counter narrative so that people will understand what they’re really like?
I found them to be people who were extremely focused and dedicated to protecting human health and the environment. There was an atmosphere of respect for one another. I will say, when we had a potential regulation coming and we put together a panel to discuss it, I would always make sure that there was a representative from the industry that was being impacted on that panel, because they knew more about the industry — how it worked, and the kind of impact that the regulation might have — than anybody else. And they deserve to be heard. Theirs shouldn’t be in the only voice, and they shouldn’t necessarily have been the predominant voice, but they needed to be heard and we needed to take that into consideration. And we did consider cost benefit analysis. That’s legitimate.
These were the people who were there, who understood that, and they didn’t try to to stop that. They were interested in doing the job they sworn to do.
I’m glad that you said all of that. I also want to pivot now to a recent news item from Tesla. Even though Elon Musk is allies with Trump, Tesla recently sent a letter to the EPA asking that they not rescind the legal underpinnings for carbon emission rules and scuttle tailpipe CO2 standards. Do you think there is a possibility that the business community might pressure Trump to stop some of his anti-environment actions? I know that the cliche is that business is anti-environment, but I wonder if sometimes the corporate world might see that what Trump is doing is bad for their financial bottom line.
That’s it. It’s the financial bottom line. With all due respect to Tesla, their whole thing is about greenhouse gas emission or tailpipe emissions being bad, therefore buy a Tesla. Go electronics, all electric. So I’m one of those people, I guess I’m a cynic, in that I don’t care why people get to doing the right thing as long as they’re doing it. If they’re reducing emissions, great. If it helps their bottom line, God bless ‘em. I’m not going to fight back against that!
But I think that is based less on their environmental concerns than it is on their bottom line concerns. And the same is true actually for many of the utilities, the power utilities, they all have renewables in their portfolios. Very few of them don’t have some major investment in either wind or solar or geothermal or nuclear.
They’ve made these investments. They don’t want a total rollback either.
It reminds me of how Disney rescinded its decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel once they saw the financial consequences. Do you think that maybe, on a broader scale, not just in terms of the environment, but in general, the business community might realize that Trump’s extremism is too far, that even if you’re conservative, this is way beyond the pale? Is there any reason for optimism, in your opinion?
I think you’re seeing buyers remorse these days. It’s not everywhere. It’s not everyone. But there are a number of people that are finally saying, no, no, this is not what we wanted. We wanted change. We wanted to reduce regulations because we hate them. We don’t like government in our business. So we were delighted that we had somebody that swore they were going to take it out. But this is getting over the top.
Back Seat Socialism
Back Seat Socialism is a column by Matthew Rozsa, who has been a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently, he is writing a book for Beacon Press, “Neurosocialism,” which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.