Donald Trump’s Environment Chief Could be his Best Pick Yet, by James Delingpole.
Donald Trump’s next head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could be his most inspired and devastatingly effective pick yet. The name of this dark horse candidate is Don van der Vaart and if reports that he is being considered are true, then he may go down in history as the first EPA administrator who actually has a clue what he is doing.
No, really.
Since Richard Nixon founded the EPA in 1970 — presumably as a cynical bid to greenwash his tarnished image at the height of the last eco-craze — the organisation has been run by a string of useless placemen and placewomen, who’ve done little that actually helps the environment, but plenty to burden the economy, consumers and business alike with more pointless regulation.
Banning DDT was pointless but a product of green zealotry, and has since been overturned by the UN at the international level. However that ban is responsible for 30 to 50 million deaths due to malaria. Rachel Carson, hero to the eco-left, and those who listened to her bear some of that responsibility.
Typical of these was its first Administrator William Ruckelshaus. A lawyer, by training, not a scientist, Ruckelshaus was the man responsible for instituting the America-wide ban on DDT. He did this on no scientific basis whatsoever. In fact, Judge Edmund Sweeney had presided over a seven-month EPA hearing, examining more than 9,000 pages of expert testimony, and concluded:
“DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man…DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man…The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.”
Ruckelshaus, who had not attended the hearings or read the report, overruled him. Which probably made not much difference in the United States. But the knock-on effects of the near worldwide ban that followed meant that DDT could no longer be used to control mosquito populations, which in turn led to an explosion in malaria, causing the death of millions.
Trump’s new guy:
For a start he has an actual science PhD (in chemical engineering) – something, astonishingly, none of previous incumbents at the EPA have ever earned.
Another plus is that the Watermelons — green on the outside, red on the inside — of Big Eco absolutely loathe him. …
Finally, he’s got his priorities right. Unlike the ideological greenies, he understands that while of course it’s important to have a clean environment the people who live in it matter too.
hat-tip Charles
