Good
New Yorker article here on Scott Pruitt that emphasizes him ripping off taxpayers for tens of thousands of dollars isn't his most serious infraction.
In his relatively brief time in office—he’s headed the E.P.A. for just over a year—he has announced his intention to undo just about every major environmental regulation enacted over the past decade. The list of planned rollbacks is so long it’s impossible to include here; among the highlights—or, if you prefer, low-lights—are the following:
• Pruitt has announced his intention to revoke the Clean Power Plan, the Obama Administration’s signature effort to combat climate change. The plan was supposed to cut carbon pollution from power plants, and, in the process, avert some ninety thousand childhood-asthma attacks.
• He has initiated a “review” of a rule requiring utilities to reduce emissions of toxic mercury. The rule was expected to prevent up to eleven thousand premature deaths each year.
• The E.P.A. announced that it was halting the implementation of a rule requiring oil and gas companies to locate and repair leaks of methane, an extremely powerful greenhouse gas. In climate-change terms, the rule was expected to accomplish the equivalent of taking eight million cars off the road. (In this case, environmental groups successfully sued, and the rule remains in effect pending further litigation.)
Meanwhile, Pruitt has been doing his best to undermine the E.P.A.’s very raison d’etre, which is to use science to protect the public. Based on thinking so convoluted only the most ardent congressional Republicans could fall for it, he’s attempted to purge the agency’s science advisory boards of actual scientists, and replace them with industry insiders. He’s trying to ban the use of certain kinds of studies in the rule-making process, ostensibly to make the process more transparent, but this will just serve to make it more difficult for the agency to issue new regulations. All the while, he keeps repeating Fox News’ favorite scientific untruths, insisting, to cite the most dangerous example, that the connection between carbon-dioxide emissions and global warming remains unproved.