How the Environmental Protection Agency became the fossil-fuel industry’s best friend.
By
Margaret Talbot
One of the engineers said that it might take a while to “rebuild capacity” after Pruitt. But it would be done. The public, he reminded everyone, “is expecting us to protect the planet.” He said, “Pruitt is a temporary interloper. We are the real agency.”
One afternoon last April, Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, travelled to the Harvey Mine, in Sycamore, Pennsylvania, to declare that the agency had a new direction, which he called “Back to Basics.” It was an unusual place for the nation’s chief steward of clean air, land, and water to set out a policy agenda. Consol Energy, the owner of the Harvey facility, which is part of the largest underground coal-mining complex in North America, has been fined repeatedly by the E.P.A. for violations; in 2016, it had to pay three million dollars for having discharged contaminated wastewater into the Ohio River and its tributaries. Past E.P.A. administrators have spoken of creating jobs as a welcome potential by-product of the agency’s work, especially if they are green jobs, but creating or protecting energy jobs is not supposed to be the mission—protecting human health and the environment is. As the speech that Pruitt gave at the mine demonstrated, he seems to have these priorities reversed.
Pruitt, who is forty-nine, looked cheerful, as he generally does at public appearances. (He declined my requests for an interview.) Unlike many people who have joined the chaotic Trump Administration, he seems unconflicted about his new role, his ideological and career goals fitting together as neatly as Lego blocks. The former attorney general of Oklahoma, Pruitt ascended politically by fighting one regulation after another. In his first year at the E.P.A., he has proposed repealing or delaying more than thirty significant environmental rules. In February, when the White House announced its intention to reduce the E.P.A.’s budget by twenty-five per cent—one of the largest cuts for any federal agency—Pruitt made no objections. His schedule is dominated by meetings and speaking engagements with representatives of the industries he regulates. He has met only a handful of times with environmental groups.
At the Harvey mine, Pruitt wore a solid-red tie and, on his lapel, an American-flag pin; he briefly put on a white hard hat inscribed with the phrase “Make America Great Again.” He delivered his remarks in a sterile, fluorescent-lit room, a contrast with the audience, which was filled with miners in coal-dusted uniforms. He spoke in a precise staccato that was softened by the light Southern accent of his native Kentucky. In the speech, which Pruitt gave before touring the mine, he said, “I’m looking forward to puttin’ on those suits you’ve got on, goin’ down, and checkin’ it out and havin’ fun doing so.” He joked that whoever said you can’t have your cake and eat it, too, didn’t know “what you’re supposed to do with cake.” He insisted that you could, in fact, roll back regulations on industries like coal while taking care of the environment. But he did not point out that, as many economists have indicated, the availability of cheap natural gas has done more to eliminate coal jobs than environmental regulations have. (A month earlier, Bloomberg News had
reported that Consol planned to sell off, or otherwise terminate, its coal businesses, in order to focus on extracting natural gas.)
It’s an open secret in Washington that Pruitt would like to become Attorney General if President Trump fires Jeff Sessions, and at the E.P.A. he often sounds like he’s trying out for that post, repeating a set of talking points, honed in conservative legal circles, about the dangers of “federal overreach.” In Pennsylvania, Pruitt told the miners, and a contingent of corporate executives, that “the days of our agency declaring war on your industry are over.” He went on, “It’s not right for government to do that.” Many of his comments that day sounded like rallying cries. “You guys are a handsome crew!” he declared. “The cavalry’s on the way!”
In June, Pruitt joined Trump in the White House Rose Garden as Trump announced that the United States was
withdrawing from the Paris climate accord. Although there is a consensus among scientists that human activity is causing climate change, Pruitt is skeptical of this view; unlike Trump, who has called global warming a “hoax” created by the Chinese, Pruitt expresses his dissent with deliberate mildness. Last March,
he told CNBC, “Measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do.” He went on, “I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue to debate, continue the review and analysis.” The E.P.A., he has said, will commence a “red team–blue team” review of climate-change science that puts “experts in a room and lets them debate.”
At an event hosted by the Federalist Society in November, Pruitt said, “I’ve been asking the question lately, ‘What is trueenvironmentalism?’ . . . From my perspective, it’s environmental stewardship, not prohibition.” He added, “We have been blessed, as a country, with tremendous natural resources.” Previous E.P.A. administrators, he said, had promoted an inflexible philosophy of “Do not touch.”
The agency was established in 1970, by President Richard Nixon. William Ruckelshaus, its first administrator, who also led the E.P.A. under Ronald Reagan, told me, “My principal concern is that Pruitt and the people he’s hired to work with him don’t fundamentally agree with the mission of the agency. They seem more concerned about costs associated with regulations.” Myron Ebell, a climate-change skeptic who headed Trump’s transition team for the agency, praised Pruitt for concentrating on “the E.P.A.’s statutory responsibilities” and for “dropping many discretionary activities that have taken up more and more of the E.P.A.’s budget and staff time in recent years.” Pruitt argues that every E.P.A. action should be specifically grounded in a federal statute such as the Clean Air Act—fifty-four-year-old legislation that was last amended in 1990.
Pruitt and his admirers call this approach “E.P.A. originalism”—a nod to the late Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia, and his reading of the Constitution. The idea is that Pruitt is sticking to “traditional” priorities, such as cleaning up Superfund sites and contaminated drinking-water supplies, rather than focussing on newer and broader environmental threats, such as climate change... (NYer,
continues)
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Mail:
Pruitt vs. the E.P.A.
Margaret Talbot’s article about Scott Pruitt paints a scathing picture of his assault on the Environmental Protection Agency (“Dirty Politics,” April 2nd). I was the first, and then the fifth, administrator of the agency. The environment is far healthier today than it was forty-seven years ago, when the E.P.A. was created, precisely because of the science-based standards that the agency implemented. Pruitt is systematically attacking both the E.P.A.’s budget and its scientific framework. If he is successful, the very reason for the E.P.A.’s creation—illness and disease from pollution—will reëmerge, and we will have to start from square one. The country must challenge the Trump Administration’s war on science. Otherwise, as a result of actions taken by Pruitt and this Administration, the uncontrolled pollution that we have greatly reduced in the past five decades will return.
William D. Ruckelshaus
Seattle, Wash.
Pruitt is not, as he claims, an E.P.A. originalist. Nor is he a science-denying Neanderthal. He is merely a servant to wealthy corporate interests. He is not there to protect the country’s clean air. He does not care about the long-term damage that a mountaintop mining operation can do to our drinking-water supplies and to our fishing habitats. He is not looking out for the well-being of future generations. Science is knowledge, and Pruitt’s denial of knowledge makes him unfit for government service. It is also the reason that career scientists are overwhelmingly abandoning the E.P.A. under his leadership. Pruitt did not fight Trump’s proposed twenty-five-per-cent cut to the E.P.A.’s budget. He says that he is sticking to “traditional” priorities, such as cleaning up Superfund sites, but he has been co-opted by the very industries that he is responsible for regulating. This cleanup uses current taxpayer money to remedy past damage that should have been corrected by the offending private industries. Essentially, Pruitt wants to privatize profits from businesses while socializing their expenses. Unfortunately, that attitude will only produce new Superfund sites for future taxpayers to deal with.
Richard Dickinson
Richmond Hill, Ga.
I wept after reading Talbot’s article about Pruitt’s dismemberment of the E.P.A. My life’s work has been environmental protection. In the nineteen-sixties, I helped Interior Secretary Stewart Udall define the scope of a new approach to conservation, which included both cities and wild places. Then, as the White House assistant for conservation and beautification, I helped the Johnson Administration create new national parks, like the North Cascades and Redwood, and bring more trees and parks to neighborhoods in cities like Washington, D.C. In the eighties, I worked with the E.P.A. to develop a policy that required the agency to solicit balanced participation from industries, environmental organizations, and local citizens. For many years since, my work has focussed on how citizens and officials alike can be good neighbors to great rivers. Now, at the age of eighty-one, I have neither the strength nor the years ahead to fight against the mindless damage that is being done to our country—and to our planet—by Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, and their colleagues in the Trump Administration. Many of the hard-won achievements of my life are in tatters. Although I am distraught, I know that thousands of well-educated, committed individuals will pick up the pieces and rebuild. Because they have to.
Sharon F. Francis
Charlestown, N.H.
