President Donald Trump will likely announce his decision whether to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement when he returns from the Group of Seven summit at the end of this month, EPA Director Scott Pruitt said Wednesday.
"It's very important we make decisions there soon," Pruitt told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program, indicating the announcement will likely come in early June.
Trump promised during his presidential campaign to pull the United States out of the U.N. accord, which was reached in 2015 to combat climate change. If the United States leaves the agreement, it will join just two other countries — Syria and Nicaragua — in being off the list, The Washington Post reports.
Meanwhile, Pruitt said Wednesday that while former President Barack Obama was considered "an environmental savior," the EPA did not take steps "at all" to clean up numerous sites around the country, posing "great risk" to citizens in those areas.
"[There is] a site outside of St. Louis called Westlake that's taken the EPA 27 years to make a decision," said Pruitt. "Not to clean it up, but to make a decision on what should be done to clean it up."
In addition, "almost 40 percent of the country" has areas that don't meet federal air quality standards, affecting some 120 million people, said Pruitt.
"We had Gold King in Colorado, Flint in Michigan with water, Superfund sites across the country," said Pruitt. "We are very focused on East Chicago, a site that has lead."
Pruitt said that while much of the talk in Washington now surrounds the president's controversies with the FBI, Trump is "providing leadership in so many areas, but it gets lost in the Washington D.C. malaise."
Meanwhile, taking decades to make a decision is "unacceptable," said Pruitt. "Get St. Louis cleaned up."
There is funding available for the cleanup efforts, said Pruitt, and there are people responsible for getting the work done.
"It's not a matter of money," he said. "It's a matter of leadership and attitude and management. We need to do it much better."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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