7 Misleading Things EPA Chief Scott Pruitt Said In His Interview With Time
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s tense look broke into a toothy grin at the end of a 22-minute interview with Time Magazine when the reporter called his response to a question “good, but lawyerly.”
“Lawyerly, huh?” the former Oklahoma attorney general said. He furrowed his brow for two seconds, then began to chuckle. “Well, really? Well, thank you!”
The interview ― one of only a few granted by Pruitt to a mainstream media outlet in recent months ― focused largely on his proposal last week to scrap the Clean Power Plan, a set of Obama-era regulations aimed at reducing carbon emissions from electrical utilities. Pruitt has served as the speartip of President Donald Trump’s deregulatory agenda, helping to eliminate or review most of the 52 environmental rules the administration has tackled since taking office.
“We’ve achieved a lot with the president’s leadership,” Pruitt said.
He also seems to have adopted this president’s characteristic disregard for facts. Here are eight assertions he made during the interview that don’t add up.
1. “I don’t spend any time with polluters.”
During his first few months in office, Pruitt spent more time meeting with fossil fuel executives than environmental and public health advocates, calendars released in June under a Freedom of Information Act request showed. Since then, he’s spent less than 1 percent of his time with environmentalists. To argue, as Pruitt later did, that fossil fuel companies don’t pollute is to ignore the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found that carbon dioxide posed a threat to human health, to say nothing of the millions of barrels of oil spilled per year. Just last week, an underwater pipeline burst in the Gulf of Mexico, spewing what may be the largest leak of oil in the region since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill.
2. “I prosecute polluters.”
Pruitt said this just moments later. While it’s technically true, it obscures the fact that prosecutions of polluters are way down. The Trump administration’s Justice Department collected 60 percent less in civil penalties from polluters than the past three administrations over the same period, according to an analysis released in August by the Environmental Integrity Project.
At the EPA, the amount of money charged in “injunctive relief” ― how much violators are expected to spend to install and maintain new equipment needed to clean up pollution or comply with environmental standards ― has plummeted. By the end of July, the Trump administration estimated that injunctive relief required in 10 cases reporting such data would total $197 million, compared with $710 million in 16 cases under President George W. Bush and more than $1.2 billion in 22 cases under President Barack Obama during the same amount of time. The EPA did not begin compiling this data until the late 1990s, the report said, so comparable estimates were not available for the Clinton administration’s first year.
3. “The Clean Power Plan rule is deficient because it’s been questioned by the U.S. Supreme Court and the stay has been issued.”
The Supreme Court decided in February 2016 to intervene to halt the implementation of the Clean Power Plan following what the Obama EPA called “extraordinary and unprecedented” requests for a stay. Pruitt, then Oklahoma’s attorney general, led that charge after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously refused to grant a stay a month earlier. The Clean Power Plan’s legality rests on the argument that the EPA has authority to regulate greenhouse gases under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act. The Supreme Court’s five conservative justices questioned whether that was the case and therefore temporarily blocked the Clean Power Plan but did not rule as to whether that interpretation is wrong. Repealing the Clean Power Plan before this question can be settled is a procedural decision that demonstrates Pruitt’s belief that the rule is not constitutional and so must be eliminated, but the court simply ruled that the legality had yet to be determined.
4. The creation of the endangerment finding “happened in months … this agency doesn’t build a record within months with respect to these kinds of issues.”
First, some background: In 2007, the Supreme Court found that the EPA is obligated to regulate any type of air pollution that “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare” under the 1970 Clean Air Act. The Bush administration’s EPA determined that greenhouse gases were, in fact, a danger but decided not to do anything about it. The Obama administration’s EPA took the issue up shortly after taking office and, in December 2009, issued its conclusion, commonly called the endangerment finding, which compelled the agency to start regulating those emissions. That finding forms the basis of regulations to reduce emissions, such as the Clean Power Plan, and cannot be overturned unless Pruitt could prove in court that greenhouse gases don’t cause climate change.
But, back to his point, to say that the endangerment finding was crafted in mere months is demonstrably untrue.
5. The endangerment finding is based on the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
During the interview, Pruitt said the finding “represents, and this is the first time in history this has ever occurred, this agency took work product of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and adopted it, transferred it to this agency and used that as the basis, underpinnings, of the endangerment finding.”
That claim appears to be a dog whistle to nationalists, suggesting the legal mandate for the federal government to address climate change is rooted in fulfilling some demand from an international body.
The technical support document on the endangerment finding references more than 100 published scientific studies and cites peer-reviewed syntheses of climate research by the White House’s U.S. Global Change Research Program, the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the IPCC, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.
6. A red-team, blue-team debate on climate change will foster a “robust, meaningful discussion.”
The science behind human-caused global warming is largely settled, despite what so-called skeptics like Pruitt argue. Only 3 percent of peer-reviewed scientists have found that climate change is either not a risk or not exacerbated by humans. And a research review published last November found flaws in the methodologies, assumptions or analyses used in those studies that, when corrected, put their findings in line with the 97 percent of scientists who say climate change is a major, manmade threat.
Yet Pruitt said in June he plans to assemble a red team and a blue team to debate the merits of climate science.
“That’s actually an exercise that was used during the 1970s into the ’80s in the intelligence community to assess the Soviet threat and to help formulate the response to the Soviet threat,” he said in the Time interview. “This is a robust, meaningful debate, discussions, about what do we know and what don’t we know, and let the American people be consumers of that, so that we might be able to see consensus around this issue.”
Yet the premise here is based on the idea that the peer-reviewed process that every major scientific paper on climate change has already gone through is somehow flawed. And giving equal weight to skeptics of the existing consensus skews Americans’ perception of the scientific findings, according to U.S. National Academy of Sciences atmospheric scientist Benjamin Santer, MIT atmospheric science professor Kerry Emanuel and Harvard history of science professor Naomi Oreskes.
“Such calls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate,” the trio wrote in The Washington Post in June. “They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science.”
7. “The states, they’ve been very, very thankful that we’ve engaged with them and been proactive in how we do work together to achieve good environmental outcomes, and also see economic progress. That’s not something that should be taken for granted, because it didn’t happen in the past administration.”
In August, 16 states sued the EPA to stop Pruitt from delaying the implementation of a smog rule. Last week, hours after Pruitt announced his proposal to scrap the Clean Power Plan, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said he’d sue to defend the regulations against the Trump administration’s “persistent and indefensible denial of climate change.” Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey also said she would sue. On Friday, Trump forced Pruitt to backtrack on proposed changes to the nation’s biofuels policy after lawmakers in corn states such as Iowa, Nebraska and Illinois protested over concerns that the new rules would hurt demand for ethanol.
Yet the real bogus claim here is that the Obama administration didn’t engage with the states affected by its regulations.
Just consider North Dakota. In 2014, then EPA chief Gina McCarthy visited the oil-producing state as a “listener and a saleswoman,” saying she had to be “everywhere” because “people have to have a relationship with me.” Months later, then-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz toured the state and held public talks about future policy and the quivering price of Bakken crude oil. Unlike Pruitt, who toured the state but kept out local journalists, those officials made themselves accessible to the public.
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He has threatened to undermine protections for air and water.
Since taking office as Oklahoma’s attorney general in 2011, Pruitt has sued the Environmental Protection Agency on multiple occasions in an effort to overturn rules limiting air pollution from power plants -- including the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, which curbs power plant emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, and the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which place limits on the amount of mercury, arsenic and other toxic pollution.
As Elliott Negin, a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists, explained in January, those are both life-saving regulations: “Taken together, they are projected to prevent 18,000 to 46,000 premature deaths across the country and save $150 billion to $380 billion in health care costs annually. In Pruitt’s home state, the two regulations would avert as many as 720 premature deaths and save as much as $5.9 billion per year.”
Pruitt sued the EPA in 2015 over the Waters of the United States rule -- which, in a piece co-written with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), he called the “greatest blow to private property rights the modern era has seen.” The rule, which is currently tied up in the courts, extends EPA protection to tens of millions of acres of wetlands and millions of miles of streams, including those that 1 in 3 Americans rely on for drinking water.
Pruitt also sued the EPA over its 2015 regulation strengthening the national health standards for ground-level ozone or smog pollution.
Several of these lawsuits are still ongoing, and environmental advocates have called on Pruitt to recuse himself from decisions related to the regulations he’s challenged in court. Legal experts told Bloomberg, however, that they knew of no rules in place that would compel such an action on Pruitt’s part.
“Every American should be appalled that President-elect Trump just picked someone who has made a career of being a vocal defender for polluters to head our Environmental Protection Agency,” Trip Van Noppen, president of Earthjustice, said in a December 2016 statement. “He has fought Environmental Protection Agency pollution limits on toxic substances like soot and mercury that put us all at risk for increased cancer, childhood asthma and other health problems. He falsely claims that fracking doesn’t contaminate drinking water supplies.”
He doesn’t think the EPA is the “nation’s foremost environmental regulator.”
“The states,” he said, “were to have regulatory primacy.”
As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt created a “federalism unit” with the specific aim of opposing federal protections and safeguards, including the Affordable Care Act and environmental regulations.
Under Pruitt, the EPA will likely witness “an increasing effort to delegate environmental regulations away from the federal government and towards the states,” Ronald Keith Gaddie, a professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, told The New York Times.
Though states may be best equipped to regulate certain industries, some experts have stressed that environmental protection is one area that needs more federal oversight.
“Pollution doesn’t respect state boundaries,” Patrick A. Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law School, told the Times. “States have limited ability to regulate pollution from outside the state, and almost every state is downstream or downwind from other pollution.”
He doesn’t believe in climate change.
“Climate change is happening,” the agency said on its website, adding that the EPA is “taking a number of common-sense steps to address the challenge” of warming, such as developing emissions reduction initiatives and contributing to “world-class climate research.”
Pruitt, like most of Trump’s Cabinet picks, is a climate change denier. Ignoring the overwhelming scientific consensus on the matter, Pruitt wrote last year that the debate on climate change is “far from settled.”
Gina McCarthy, the previous EPA chief, warned in November that denying the facts about climate change would undermine the United States' success both domestically and internationally. Other countries “are wondering if the U.S. will turn its back on science and be left behind,” she said.
“The train to a global clean-energy future has already left the station,” McCarthy added. “We can choose to get on board — to lead — or we can choose to be left behind, to stand stubbornly still. If we stubbornly deny the science and change around us, we will fall victim to our own paralysis.”
He’s a close ally of the fossil fuel industry ...
![… and their relationship has observers deeply concerned.<br /><br />Since 2002, Pruitt has received <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/08/scott-pruitt-trump-administration-epa-oil-gas-environment" target="_blank">more than $300,000</a> in contributions from the fossil fuel industry, including from political action committees connected to Exxon Mobil, Spectra Energy and Koch Industries. The New York Times reported in 2014 that he and other Republican attorneys general had formed an “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/us/politics/energy-firms-in-secretive-alliance-with-attorneys-general.html" target="_blank">unprecedented, secretive alliance</a>” with major oil and gas companies to undermine environmental regulations. One of the firms, Oklahoma’s Devon Energy,<strong> </strong>drafted a letter for Pruitt to send to the EPA in 2011. Pruitt <a href="http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/green-life/meet-scott-pruitt-man-picked-lead-epa" target="_blank">printed the document on state letterhead</a> and sent it off, almost verbatim, to Washington.<br /><br />As attorney general, Pruitt also filed several lawsuits with industry players, including Oklahoma Gas and Electric and the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, a nonprofit group backed by major oil and gas executives. In May 2016, Pruitt joined then-Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange in writing an opinion piece defending Exxon Mobil and other energy groups, after the oil giant <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-30/oklahoma-alabama-support-exxon-mobil-in-ny-led-climate-probe" target="_blank">came under scrutiny</a> for allegedly failing to disclose its internal research on climate change.<br /><br />The Times asked Pruitt in 2014 whether he’d been wrong to send letters to the federal government written by industry lobbyists, or to side with them in litigation. Pruitt was unapologetic. <br /><br />“The A.G.’s office seeks input from the energy industry to determine real-life harm stemming from proposed federal regulations or actions,” his office said in a statement. “It is the content of the request not the source of the request that is relevant.”<br /><br />Opponents, however, say Pruitt is a <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/donald-trump-administration/2016/12/oklahoma-ag-pruitt-epa-chief-232319" target="_blank">Big Oil ally</a> — someone who, as EPA administrator, could <a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/01/13/mapping-epa-nominee-scott-pruitt-many-fossil-fuel-ties" target="_blank">prioritize industry interests</a> over the health of the environment and the American people.<br /><br />“This is a frightening moment,” Harvard University professor Naomi Oreskes said at a rally <a href="https://eos.org/articles/fearful-of-trump-hundreds-in-san-francisco-rally-for-science">in December</a>, referring to Trump's Cabinet picks. “We have seen in the last few weeks how the reins of the federal government are being handed over to the fossil fuel industry.”<br /><br />“From denying settled climate science to leading the opposition of EPA’s Clean Power Plan, Pruitt has sent a loud and clear message to Big Oil and its well-funded mouthpieces that <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/01/climate-deniers-coming-next-epa-chief-rescue" target="_blank">he’s their guy</a>,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who is one of the senators calling for Pruitt to disclose more details on his connection to some oil-funded groups, according to Mother Jones. “To put a climate denier at the helm of an agency working to keep our environment safe is as dangerous as it gets.” <br /><br />Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, echoed similar concerns: “The American people must demand leaders who are willing to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels. I will <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/pruitt-epa-confirmation-fight-preview-400e8a68ffc2#.ca0qfw6f4" target="_blank">vigorously oppose this nomination</a>.”<br /><br />It’s not just Pruitt’s fossil fuel connections that have raised eyebrows. A recent <a href="http://www.ewg.org/research/ewg-investigates-scott-pruitt-and-poultry-pollution" target="_blank" data-beacon="{"p":{"mnid":"entry_text","lnid":"citation","mpid":1,"plid":"http://www.ewg.org/research/ewg-investigates-scott-pruitt-and-poultry-pollution"}}">Environmental Working Group investigation</a> found that Pruitt gave a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/scott-pruitt-poultry-contributions-lawsuit_us_587960bae4b0e58057fee7bd">regulatory pass to polluters from the poultry industry</a> after receiving $40,000 in campaign donations from executives and lawyers representing poultry companies. <br /><br />“Very clearly, this is someone coming in [to lead the EPA] with an ideology to deregulate at whatever government level he finds himself,” Cook, the EWG head, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/scott-pruitt-poultry-contributions-lawsuit_us_587960bae4b0e58057fee7bd">told The Huffington Post</a>. “There’s no saying that ‘we just have a different philosophy’ about who should enforce environmental law. The philosophy, if it exists, is that environmental policy shouldn’t be enforced at a state or federal level. It is industry unrestrained.”](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/QHwf0rgUeS5o401raGlSXA--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MA--/https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/587dc4731700002e00fdf034.jpg)
Since 2002, Pruitt has received more than $300,000 in contributions from the fossil fuel industry, including from political action committees connected to Exxon Mobil, Spectra Energy and Koch Industries. The New York Times reported in 2014 that he and other Republican attorneys general had formed an “unprecedented, secretive alliance” with major oil and gas companies to undermine environmental regulations. One of the firms, Oklahoma’s Devon Energy, drafted a letter for Pruitt to send to the EPA in 2011. Pruitt printed the document on state letterhead and sent it off, almost verbatim, to Washington.
As attorney general, Pruitt also filed several lawsuits with industry players, including Oklahoma Gas and Electric and the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, a nonprofit group backed by major oil and gas executives. In May 2016, Pruitt joined then-Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange in writing an opinion piece defending Exxon Mobil and other energy groups, after the oil giant came under scrutiny for allegedly failing to disclose its internal research on climate change.
The Times asked Pruitt in 2014 whether he’d been wrong to send letters to the federal government written by industry lobbyists, or to side with them in litigation. Pruitt was unapologetic.
“The A.G.’s office seeks input from the energy industry to determine real-life harm stemming from proposed federal regulations or actions,” his office said in a statement. “It is the content of the request not the source of the request that is relevant.”
Opponents, however, say Pruitt is a Big Oil ally — someone who, as EPA administrator, could prioritize industry interests over the health of the environment and the American people.
“This is a frightening moment,” Harvard University professor Naomi Oreskes said at a rally in December, referring to Trump's Cabinet picks. “We have seen in the last few weeks how the reins of the federal government are being handed over to the fossil fuel industry.”
“From denying settled climate science to leading the opposition of EPA’s Clean Power Plan, Pruitt has sent a loud and clear message to Big Oil and its well-funded mouthpieces that he’s their guy,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who is one of the senators calling for Pruitt to disclose more details on his connection to some oil-funded groups, according to Mother Jones. “To put a climate denier at the helm of an agency working to keep our environment safe is as dangerous as it gets.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, echoed similar concerns: “The American people must demand leaders who are willing to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels. I will vigorously oppose this nomination.”
It’s not just Pruitt’s fossil fuel connections that have raised eyebrows. A recent Environmental Working Group investigation found that Pruitt gave a regulatory pass to polluters from the poultry industry after receiving $40,000 in campaign donations from executives and lawyers representing poultry companies.
“Very clearly, this is someone coming in [to lead the EPA] with an ideology to deregulate at whatever government level he finds himself,” Cook, the EWG head, told The Huffington Post. “There’s no saying that ‘we just have a different philosophy’ about who should enforce environmental law. The philosophy, if it exists, is that environmental policy shouldn’t be enforced at a state or federal level. It is industry unrestrained.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
