OLYMPIA, Wash. — Two veterans of the Washington state Senate have been added to President Donald Trump’s “landing team” for the Environmental Protection Agency — a team that’s virtually certain to take aim at EPA-funded research.
State Sen. Doug Ericksen, R-Ferndale, and former state Sen. Don Benton, R-Vancouver, were among 10 members named to the team in an email, Reuters reported Monday. Both Ericksen and Benson have long been critical of environmental regulations.
Both also have prior connections to the incoming president: Benton was Trump’s campaign manager for Washington state, while Ericksen was assistant campaign manager. According to the email, Ericksen will now serve as the EPA landing team’s communications director.
The landing team has a 120-day tenure, which means Ericksen will be absent for at least some of the Legislature’s regular 2017 session. That could be problematic, considering that the Republicans hold a slim 25-24 majority in the state Senate.
In an interview with The Seattle Times, Ericksen said he would commute between Olympia and the nation’s capital, and as a result would “be racking up frequent-flier miles like you won’t believe.” He told the Times that his dual role passed legal muster.
The U.S. Senate is expected to confirm Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s nomination as EPA administrator, and the landing team’s role is to help with the transition.
Today, a report published online by Axios said the Trump transition team was urging an end to EPA-funded scientific research.
The report said the transition team’s memo recommended that the scientific data used to support regulations must be publicly available for independent reviews. It also called for overhauling the EPA’s scientific standards to prevent conflicts of interest.
As chairman of the Senate’s Environment, Energy & Telecommunications Committee, Ericksen has been the leading opponent of Gov. Jay Inslee’s efforts to deal with carbon pollution and climate change. He also has been the leading advocate for the oil industry in the Legislature.
In 2015, Ericksen charged that Inslee wanted to drive gasoline prices up to $4 a gallon to support his efforts to trim carbon emissions and to make biofuels more competitive with petroleum. At that time, Inslee’s office pooh-poohed those charges.
In that same year, Ericksen’s committee hosted a long briefing from the Heartland Institute’s science director, Jay Lehr, who cited rising temperatures on Mars, Jupiter and the Neptunian moon Triton to show that global warming on Earth is not manmade. Founded in 1984, the Chicago-based Heartland Institute receives a significant amount of its donations from oil companies. In the 1990s, it teamed with a tobacco company in an effort to prove that secondhand smoke is not a health hazard. Today, the Institute is a leading skeptic about global warming.
For the 2017 session, Eriksen filed a bill dubbed the “Preventing Economic Disruption Act” to increase penalties for people blocking roads and railroads to businesses. That bill has not had a committee hearing yet.
In a December press release, Ericksen pointed to two 2016 incidents for why he filed the bill. In Olympia, protesters blocked a railroad to stop oil drilling equipment from being moved. In Skagit County, protestors blocked trains headed to two northwestern Washington oil refineries.
Benton retired from the state Senate in 2016 after serving there for 20 years.
In the 2013 legislative session, Benton introduced a bill — which quickly died — that called for prohibiting Washington and its local governments from restricting property rights due to policies traced back to the United Nation’s “Agenda 21.” Created in 1992, Agenda 21 is a 300-page document that addresses sustainable-development efforts. The United States signed the Agenda 21 agreement, which is non-binding. In 2013, Benton said in an interview that Agenda 21’s policies have seeped into state and local government regulations, including rules requiring stream setbacks for construction.
