Trump will clean up hazardous sites

The argument

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working harder than ever to clean up our Nation’s contaminated lands and hazardous sites. In FY 2018, EPA completed cleanup work on all or part of 22 Superfund sites from the National Priorities List, the largest number in any one year since 2005.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Completing cleanup work on 22 Superfund sites in a single year is a real achievement, but critics argue it is a narrow programme metric that cannot establish the broad claim that an administration is 'better for the environment'. Superfund completions reflect long-running remediation projects begun years or decades earlier and depend on prior funding and legal settlements, so a single year's total is a lagging indicator of a pipeline rather than a measure of a new administration's stewardship — and over the same period the administration proposed cuts to the EPA's overall budget, including its Superfund programme. More importantly, hazardous-site cleanup is one slice of environmental policy among many. Set against it, critics point to the withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, the replacement of the Clean Power Plan with a weaker rule, the relaxation of vehicle-emissions, methane and mercury standards, and roughly a hundred documented rollbacks of environmental regulations. A comparison of who is 'better for the environment' spans climate, air, water and land, and cherry-picking one favourable statistic from a single programme cannot settle it. The premise supports 'the EPA cleaned up contaminated sites', which is narrower than the environmental verdict the conclusion asserts.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Completing work on 22 Superfund sites in one year reflects long-pipeline remediation begun years earlier and is a narrow programme metric, not overall stewardship — the administration also proposed cutting the EPA and Superfund budgets. [Rejecting P3] One favourable statistic from a single programme cannot establish 'better for the environment' against the wider record of the Paris withdrawal and roughly a hundred rollbacks of climate, air and water rules.