Press Releases

Rep. Don Beyer issued the following statement today on President-elect Trump’s recent nominations:

“The trio of Scott Pruitt for Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State, and Gov. Rick Perry for Secretary of Energy confirms our worst fears about President-elect Trump's intentions on climate change and the environment.

“As Oklahoma’s Attorney General, Scott Pruitt organized and led a national push to oppose the EPA. He made himself the mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry as it fought protections of air and water quality. As a denier of climate science, he is unqualified to run the nation’s premiere agency on the environment and the fight against climate change.

“At the helm of Exxon-Mobil, Rex Tillerson continued the corporation's efforts to undermine climate science as well as its unyielding insistence that fossil fuels remain the dominant, if not sole, energy source for the immediate future.  Exxon-Mobil’s regard for shareholders alone, and its refusal to acknowledge that stock value could be married with a wiser and more sustainable long-term world energy portfolio caused untold harm. It is appalling that the Secretary of State who negotiated the Paris Agreement, perhaps the most ambitious step towards fighting climate change in history, could be followed by this nominee.

“Rick Perry impressed almost no one during his presidential run, and his most famous statement was his call to abolish the very agency he has been tapped to lead, once he remembered that it is called the ‘Department of Energy.’ The notion that he will succeed the Obama-era Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winner, and incumbent Ernest Moniz, an MIT nuclear physicist, is at once saddening and frightening, as was his call to close the agency tasked with developing clean energy technologies.

“Climate change remains the world’s greatest threat. Delaying or reversing our efforts to fight climate change will have potentially catastrophic effects on the planet.”