Delaware Sen. Tom Carper emerges as unlikely environmental warrior

WASHINGTON — The lawmaker leading the charge against President Trump’s relentless efforts to roll back environmental regulations is a soft-spoken, small-state senator who’s collected hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions from the chemical industry and whose vote for the Keystone XL Pipeline sparked left-wing outrage.

It was only natural some progressives doubted whether Delaware Sen. Tom Carper, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, was up to the task.

But some of those concerns were allayed last month with Carper’s steadfast and impassioned opposition to Scott Pruitt, Trump’s choice to run the Environmental Protection Agency.

Democrats lost the fight: The GOP-controlled Senate narrowly confirmed the Oklahoma attorney general as the 14th administrator of the EPA. But the normally collaborative Carper earned kudos from fellow Democrats — and scorn from some Republicans — for the ferocity of his opposition.

Read more:

Senate confirms Scott Pruitt for EPA chief amid last-minute drama

EPA head suggests rollback of Obama-era rules may begin next week

He led a rare partisan boycott of the EPW committee meetings last month to decide whether Pruitt’s nomination should be advanced to the full Senate for approval (it was). Then on the floor, the senator who prides himself on being a behind-the-scenes compromiser delivered a withering rebuke of Pruitt’s record and his numerous lawsuits to overturn federal environmental rules.

“Never have I been forced to consider a candidate to lead the EPA who has been so focused throughout his career on crippling the agency he now seeks to lead or so hostile to the basic protections to keep Americans and our environment safe,” Carper said.

Carper’s performance reassured environmental activists who fretted after the retirement of California Sen. Barbara Boxer, the staunchly liberal senator from the state that helps set much of the nation’s environment and public health standards.

“He clearly has big shoes to fill,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president for Government Affairs at the League of Conservation Voters. But “we think he’s absolutely done a stupendous job. The nomination fight over Scott Pruitt as his first major (test) spoke volumes to his leadership.”

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker was pleased as well but not surprised.

"He’s a pretty impressive leader," Booker said. "He's not one of these people who is going to be a show horse and chest thump. If you know him, he’s extraordinarily effective.”

Carper’s ascension to the committee seat Boxer held for several years coincides with the arrival of Trump, a real estate mogul openly disdainful of government regulation who has called climate change a “hoax” perpetrated by China.

With a focus on the economy, the new president already has signed executive orders to green light the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines, to begin undoing Obama administration rules on water protection, and to require any agency to eliminate two of its own regulations for every one it proposes.

The White House has also proposed eliminating 20% of the agency’s roughly 15,000 work force, according to The Washington Post.

“We have undertaken a historic effort to massively reduce job crushing regulations,” Trump said during his address Tuesday to a joint session of Congress.

Thanks to filibuster rules that require 60 votes to pass most legislation, the Senate is considered Democrats' last hope to stop or at least slow down the president's agenda. With Republicans holding only 52 seats, that makes Carper a key player on environmental issues.

Asked to name three environmental areas that most concern him about a Trump presidency, Carper ticks off the weakening of power plant emission rules, a de-emphasis on combating climate change, and the increased threat of mercury. All are air-related issues, not surprising for the former governor who reminds visitors how much cross winds carrying particulates from west to east have made Delaware the end of “America’s tailpipe.”

“For many years, I could have shut down the economy in the state of Delaware, closed every plant and manufacturing facility, ordered every vehicle off the road and we would still have been in violation of clean air standards because of cross-border pollution,” he said during an interview in his Capitol Hill office Tuesday.

Carper’s record suggests he will look for ways to reach accord with the administration in a way Boxer wouldn’t. That may lead to unrest among progressive activists, many of whom still remember his vote in 2014 for a bill to expedite the Keystone pipeline.

“We were very, very, very unhappy with Sen. Carper’s vote,” said Stephanie Herron, volunteer and outreach coordinator for the Delaware Sierra Club who helped organize a protest outside Carper’s district office in Wilmington after the vote.

Herron said the senator could be tougher on fracking. But she applauded him for his long record of pushing for vehicle fuel efficiency and praised him for his recent stance on the EPA administrator.

“We were very pleased and thankful for all the work he did opposing the nomination of Scott Pruitt,” she said, noting that he entered a number of letters the Sierra Club had gathered from state residents concerned about Pruitt into the Congressional Record.

Republicans have viewed Carper as a Democrat they can work with on some hot-button issues. But such partnerships in the future could prove more complicated now that liberals expect him to lead the opposition to Trump's environmental agenda.

South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the third most powerful Republican in the Senate, said the pressure from outside environmental groups and the roster of liberal firebrands (such as Bernie Sanders of Vermont) on the committee will make it difficult for Carper to compromise.

“All the pressure that he’s under every single day is going to make it hard and that’s just the nature of the beast now in the modern political environment,” Thune said. “That’s what he’s dealing with (though) I don’t think it’s necessarily his inclination.”

Carper’s moderate streak stems from his time as governor where he had to balance environmental priorities with economic ones, taking into account the chemical, banking and pharmaceutical industries that employ thousands in the state.

His co-sponsorship of a controversial overhaul of an industry-backed law designed to protect the public from dangerous chemicals in consumer products drew heat from Democrats (including Boxer) and environmental groups who said it would undermine efforts to protect the public's health and would weaken current law.

Carper and other supporters of the bipartisan measure called it a decades-long overdue update of the toxic substances law that would for the first time require the testing of every chemical used in consumer products while offering businesses a predictable and manageable review process for chemicals that do not pose a safety hazard.

A compromise version passed last year with Carper and Boxer supporting it and was signed into law.

Over the years, Carper has been a beneficiary of the chemical industry including hometown giant DuPont. The senator received $383,585 in federal campaign contributions since 1989 from chemical and related manufacturing interests, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Carper said he has found home-state companies to be largely above board.

“In the chemical industry, there are white hats and those whose hats are less white,” he said. “The DuPont company is a white hat for the most part and others in our state have been as well.”

Carper knows he’ll have to win over some skeptics on the left. But he thinks he’s already shown he won’t be squishy about fighting for environmental protections.

“I’m sure there’s some who had doubts. I think a lot of those misgivings were addressed in the course of the battle over the nomination of Scott Pruitt to head up the EPA,” Carper said. “That’s what we heard. We’ve had just incredible, very positive feedback. That’s heartening.”