Amber Valletta Writes Passionate Op-Ed Opposing Trump’s EPA Pick, Scott Pruitt
Amber Valletta is the latest celebrity using her platform to speak out against President Trump’s administration picks. The actress and activist has written a passionate op-ed opposing the nomination of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.
Valletta begins by expressing her concern, as someone who cares about the environment and as a mother.
“Without the EPA and the national pollution safeguards it enforces, more children would have asthma,” she says. “Our water would be less safe. More chemicals would poison our bodies. And more people would die prematurely from respiratory disease and heart attacks. In its more than 50 years of existence, the EPA has saved millions of lives. Placing Scott Pruitt in charge of this critically important agency would put the environmental protections we’ve learned to take for granted at grave risk.”
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The 42-year-old Oklahoma native and Sierra Club ambassador explains she’s “dismayed” by what fossil fuel has done to her home state. Citing a report from the American Lung Association, Valletta says every Oklahoma county for which data was available received a failing grade for ozone pollution.
“The consequences for families in the state have been heartbreaking,” she writes. “One community that suffered was the small town of Bokoshe. For years, the residents fought to stop toxic coal ash from being dumped in their community. Scott Pruitt, who should have been fighting for those families, did nothing — allowing the people he was charged with protecting to keep getting sick.”
Valletta continues, “As troubling as Scott Pruitt’s record in Oklahoma is, though, what I find most scary about his nomination is what it says about how President Trump intends to treat the Environmental Protection Agency. Scott Pruitt has spent his entire time in office attacking the EPA. He’s sued the EPA 14 times in an effort to, among other things, block the safeguards that protect children and families from mercury poisoning and methane pollution. He’s also been leading the legal attacks upon the EPA’s life-saving, job-creating, climate-protecting Clean Power Plan, which the agency has calculated would avoid 2,700 to 6,600 premature deaths, as well as 140,000 to 150,000 asthma attacks in children per year by 2030.
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“I may not have voted for Donald Trump, but I recognize that many mothers like me did,” she says. “I refuse to believe that any of those mothers did so in the hope of seeing more sick kids or needless deaths. If we allow the one federal agency responsible for protecting us from pollution to be demolished, we will be going back to the dark days before passage of landmark protections like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. We would also lose what could be our last best chance to act on climate change, while also squandering our status as a global leader in developing the clean, renewable energy sources of the future. And our children, who have no choice but to place their trust in us to protect their future, would rightly feel betrayed.”
Valletta concludes, “At every juncture as Oklahoma’s attorney general, Scott Pruitt has consistently chosen to undermine and attack environmental safeguards — not to defend them. That makes him exactly the wrong person to put in charge of the agency whose mission is to protect all of us from pollution.”
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