Tom Jorling only worked on Capitol Hill for four years, but few congressional aides can say they had as significant an impact.
Between 1968 and 1972, Jorling played a key role in writing and passing the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, both landmark environmental laws credited with cleaning up the nation’s increasingly dire pollution.
“There was a big coal-fired power plant right on the Potomac River down the hill from the Capitol Hill,” the now-retired Jorling said in a recent interview from his retreat in the Adirondacks. “If you went outside to take a walk, you had to come back and change your shirt, because it was all grimy. All of that has changed because of the Clean Air Act.”
But Jorling — who despite calling himself a “progressive” was recruited by John Sherman Cooper, the Kentucky senator and ranking member on what was then the Senate Public Works Committee, to be the Republican’s lead counsel — has made no secret of his criticism of the Trump administration’s novel interpretations of the Clean Air Act to reduce environmental protections.
