THE NEW FACE OF THE EPA
Scott Pruitt’s selection to head the Environmental Protection Agency was one of president-elect Trump’s first appointments. I first heard of Pruitt last spring, when I traveled to Oklahoma to research Harold Hamm for my forthcoming book “Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” One of America’s wealthiest citizens, Hamm had made his fortune pioneering the fracking of natural gas, while covering up that thousands of earthquakes were being triggered in the process. Hamm would speak at the Republican Convention, by which time he’d become candidate Trump’s chief energy advisor. In 2013 Hamm also chaired the re-election campaign in Oklahoma for Scott Pruitt, for his second term as the state’s Attorney General.
Here’s what Pruitt had to say about climate change early last year, in an article for the National Review: “Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged – in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress.”
Pruitt must have been talking about the one percent. No surprise there. The other 99 percent of scientists are on record as stating that climate change is very real indeed.
The way Pruitt sees it, the U.S. also needn’t concern itself with climate change because the other biggest emitter, China, will never agree to control its own. That’s simply not true. If anything, China is leading the world in moving to wind and solar as primary energy sources.
Pruitt made a name for himself nationally by enticing Republican Attorneys General in more than twenty other states to join in federal lawsuits challenging the Obama administration’s anti-pollution and climate regulations. Above all suing the EPA – the very agency he’s now been put in charge of – in an attempt to block the Clean Power Plan on carbon emissions from power plants, along with trying to gut new rules on oil-and-gas methane emissions (a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2).
The new administration’s press release on Truitt’s appointment quoted Trump that “for too long, the Environmental Protection Agency has spent taxpayer dollars on an out-of-control anti-energy agenda that has destroyed millions of jobs.” But rest assured Pruitt “will reverse this trend and restore the EPA’s essential mission of keeping our air and our water clean and safe.” That apparently didn’t seem a contradiction.
Even George W. Bush’s first EPA chief, Christie Todd Whitman (2001-03) said of Pruitt’s being named: “I don’t recall ever having seen an appointment of someone who is so disdainful of the agency and the science behind what the agency does.”
What’s next? Will Pruitt, as our environmental “steward,” move to reverse EPA’s finding in 2009 that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare? This man is a puppet of the fossil fuel industry. And EPA is about to redefine itself as “Every Polluter’s Ally.”
I placed a call to a longtime friend, Hugh Kaufman, who’s been with the EPA since its beginnings in 1970 under another Republican, Richard Nixon. Hugh has seen it all as part of the agency’s hazardous waste division. He was responsible, during the Reagan years, for uncovering a scandal that forced the president to dump administrator Ann Burford and her assistant, Rita Lavelle. Hugh ended up going to court and winning a harassment case against his EPA employer, the judge declaring that he could never be fired unless egregious misconduct was discovered. It never was, and Hugh kept right on blowing the whistle and holding his superiors to account. In recent years, he led the battle to prove how the air quality after 9/11 proved deadly to many involved in the clean-up who were never warned about the danger.
“I might retire,” Hugh told me, “depending on who they bring in to head toxic waste or emergency response. They can make civil servant’s lives miserable, and I’m in my mid-seventies.”
But Hugh, I countered, who’s going to be left to do what you do?
“It’s time on all these issues for the next generation to step up and fight for what they think is right,” he responded. “Us old-timers will fight where we can, in a transfer to the next generation. We can still educate, give speeches, even get in the streets. But America has to reaffirm itself. It’s scary, but in some ways necessary – to reaffirm civil rights, human rights, the environment.
“Basically I’m an optimist,” Hugh continued. “I think we’ll move up again. Remember with Hillary – even though a lot of millennials didn’t vote and there was voter suppression and the Russians trying to stop her – even so, she got the most votes of any winner in years except for Obama in 2008. More votes than Obama in 2012, and Trump got less votes than [Mitt] Romney. To me, that bodes well. I think it’ll be some fight for the EPA job. Some of the Republicans may cross the aisle to join the Democrats and block Pruitt.
“Eventually the good guys are gonna win – and we’ll still be fighting.”