Can EPA Chief Scott Pruitt Surprise Everybody?
- Submitted by: Love Knowledge
- Category: Environment
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The Feb. 22 release of thousands of pages of emails from Scott Pruitt, approved by the Senate on Feb. 17 to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), only confirms what many environmentalists feared: the Trump administration will be fossil-fuel friendly to a fault.
Indeed Pruitt, formerly Oklahoma Attorney General, had views that seemed to dovetail with Trump’s ideas about the obligations of businesses to protect the environment — none.
Case in point: When the Trump Organization asked the state of South Carolina to provide millions of dollars to clean up a polluted site there once owned by the president’s son Donald Jr., it typified Trump Sr.’s attitude toward the environment: He sought to shift the responsibility onto the state. The state rejected his plea.
That scenario sets the stage for what will become the president’s positions on global warming and on the environment — that big business’s responsibility is to make money and to create jobs, and any spillovers from those pursuits are to be dealt with later, if at all.
Pruitt is pro-business and pro-energy development and, while serving as Oklahoma’s top lawyer, was a staunch advocate for oil and gas businesses in the state.
He, in fact, has sued the EPA 14 times and has been the lead attorney taking on the carbon-cutting Clean Power Plan as well as regulations dealing with ozone air pollution and the public notification of chemicals used to frack for shale gas.
His cozy relationship with energy industries is revealed in the trove of 7,500 pages of emails, released last week by the Center for Media and Democracy, which had sued the Oklahoma Attorney General’s office to get access to them. More emails are expected by March 3, unless the Oklahoma Supreme Court grants a stay request at a hearing set for today.
“I wouldn’t read too much into Pruitt’s emails; there’s no smoking gun as far as I can tell,” says Rob Barnett, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence. “We already knew that President Trump and Pruitt were aiming to refocus the EPA and to make it more fossil-fuel friendly.”
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