Former Environmental Protection Agency Administrators William Ruckelshaus and William Reilly, who both served in Republican administrations, on Tuesday endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, turning their backs on Republican candidate Donald Trump. “Donald Trump has shown a profound ignorance of science and of the public health issues embodied in our environmental laws,” they wrote in their endorsement published on the Clinton campaign website.
Trump has careened to the hard right when it comes to the environment, calling climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, saying he would “cancel” the international Paris Agreement on climate change, and pledging to deregulate the energy industry.
“That Trump would call climate change a hoax—the singular health and environmental threat to the world today—flies in the face of overwhelming international science and the public conviction and commitment of almost 200 national governments that adopted the Paris Agreement on climate change in December 2015,” Ruckelshaus and Reilly wrote.
Clinton, on the other hand, “understands that environmental protection is a public health issue. She recognizes the threat that climate change represents to this country and the rest of the world. She is committed to reasonable, science-based policy to meet those challenges,” the endorsement says.
Ruckelshaus, served as both the first administrator of the EPA under President Richard Nixon and the fifth under President Ronald Reagan. Reilly served as the EPA Administrator under President George H. W. Bush.
This isn’t the first time Ruckelshaus and Reilly have flown in the face of the current Republican thinking on climate issues. In March the two filed an amici curiae brief in support of the EPA in a legal challenge against the agency’s Clean Power Plan, carbon emissions standards for existing coal-fired power plants.
The regulation, which Trump has said he would overturn, has drawn the ire of Republicans in Congress, who argue it is an unconstitutional overreach of the EPA’s authority. “[Ruckelshaus and Reilly’s] shared view is that EPA’s Clean Power Plan represents a lawful exercise of EPA’s regulatory authority under the Clean Air Act to address the unprecedented challenge of global climate change,” the brief says.
