EPA head holds closed meeting to dirty S.C. water

The Environmental Protection Agency’s top official, Administrator Scott Pruitt, convened a meeting with corporate lobbyists and hand-chosen elected officials today in Orangeburg, S.C., to garner support for the agency’s misguided plan to strip away protections for America’s rivers, lakes, and streams.

South Carolinians love their lakes, rivers, and ocean. Today’s meeting raises the question  of why Washington, D.C. insiders are meeting with corporate lobbyists to push regulations that will strip protections from South Carolina’s clean water resources. Before joining the EPA a few months ago, Pruitt was subsidized by fossil fuel interests while he attacked health and environmental standards as Oklahoma’s Attorney General. Now that he is head of EPA, he has hired coal and oil lobbyists to run the agency and pursue an agenda of removing rules that, for years, protected America’s clean water and air while hand in hand with economic prosperity.

Pruitt’s meeting was apparently an invitation-only event at corporate offices in Orangeburg with no scientists or resource specialists in attendance, just corporate lobbyists and select officials.

EPA is now run by Washington, D.C. coal and oil lobbyists whose mission is to strip away clean water protections from America’s rivers, streams, and lakes and open the way for unlimited pollution,” said Blan Holman, Managing Attorney in SELC’s Charleston office. “South Carolinians love our rivers and lakes and we won’t let Washington fossil fuel lobbyists degrade this state’s clean, healthy water. The repeal of the Clean Water Rule is special interest lobbyist proposal, and everyone who uses our lakes and streams for fishing, swimming, hunting, and drinking is going to fight back.