Obama Picks Superfund Polluter Lawyer for Environmental Post

President Barack Obama has nominated a lawyer who has spent much of her career defending major polluters to a sensitive environmental post.

Yes, you read that correctly.

If you feel like you’re experiencing an especially vivid and painful flashback to the days of former President Bush’s environmental follies, you’re not alone. It was common Bush administration practice to put the fox in charge of the hen house. The term ‘conflict of interest’ was seemingly meaningless to an administration that put nepotism ahead of the interests of the people and the land.

But it’s not something that most liberals would expect from President Obama, who has sought to separate himself from such practices.

From Think Progress:

On Tuesday, Obama “announced his intent to nominate” Ignacia S. Moreno to be Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division in the Department of Justice. Moreno, general counsel for that department during the Clinton administration, is now the corporate environmental counsel for General Electric, “America’s #1 Superfund Polluter“: Number five in the Fortune 500 with revenues of $89.3 billion and earnings of $8.2 billion in 1997, General Electric has been a leader in the effort to roll back the Superfund law and stave off any requirements for full cleanup and restoration of sites they helped create.

Before General Electric, Moreno worked as a corporate attorney at Spriggs and Hollingsworth. Moreno’s name is found in the Westlaw database as an attorney defending General Motors in another Superfund case, the GM Powertrain facility in Bedford, Indiana: Historical uses and management of PCB containing hydraulic oils and PCB impacted materials has contaminated on-site areas as well as the sediment and floodplain soil within Bailey’s Branch and the Pleasant Run Creek watershed.

If confirmed, Moreno will be in charge of the office that enforces environmental laws and defends federal regulations in lawsuits. Her experience lies in defending polluters, not enforcing environmental justice. And considering the particularly heinous nature of the crimes she has defended – like GM’s PCBs – can she really be expected to do the right thing?

Some say that Moreno’s industry experience could actually help her enforce the law, including Eric Schaeffer, director of the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project. Schaeffer, who resigned as chief of the EPA’s enforcement office in 2002 in protest of the Bush administration’s enforcement tactics, thinks that Moreno can use her knowledge to the government’s advantage. But who’s to say that Moreno has had a change of heart?

It’s an understatement to say that environmentalists are concerned about this nomination. I think ‘sputtering outrage’ more accurately captures the general sentiment. We expect better than this from President Obama.

Link [Think Progress] + [The New York Times]
Photo credit: The Daily Mail

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