Last week, likely incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi revealed that she had selected Democratic congresswoman Kathy Castor (D-FL) to chair the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, which Pelosi initially created in 2007, the GOP terminated in 2011, and Pelosi has decided to reestablish.
But The Washington Free Beacon noted that Castor has owned stock in various companies that are some of the worst polluters in America. The Beacon wrote:
When joining Congress in 2007, Castor reported owning between $15,001 and $50,000 of stock in Dow Chemical, which has consistently been labeled as America’s top water polluter by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Castor’s holdings in Dow grew throughout 2008, even as the company drew fire from the Environmental Protection Agency for allegedly violating the Clean Air Act and inadequately cleaning up dioxin contamination on the Tittabawassee River in Michigan.
The Beacon reported that in 2014, after she became more vocal in supporting alternative energy sources, Castor began selling off much of her Dow stock, the last of which was apparently sold in May 2016, but at roughly the same time, she bought between $1,001 and $15,000 in Caterpillar, Inc., which agreed to a $1 billionsettlement in 1998 for circumventing federal emission standards. The Beacon added that Castor’s “financial disclosures show that she owned stock in General Electric and the Alcoa Corporation—two of America’s top air polluters, according to PERI.” – READ MORE