President-elect Donald Trump reportedly has nominated Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
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Having Scott Pruitt in charge of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is like putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires.
In an article co-authored with Alabama attorney general Luther Strange for National Review earlier this year, Mr Pruitt wrote: “Backed by green-energy interests and environmentalist lobbying groups, the coalition has promised to use intrusive investigations, costly litigation, and criminal prosecutions to silence critics of its climate-change agenda”.
The 48-year-old Republican also denies the overwhelming scientific evidence that the Earth is warming and that man-made carbon emissions are to blame.
An ally to the fossil fuel industry, Pruitt has aggressively fought against environmental regulations, becoming one of a number of attorneys general to craft a 28-state lawsuit against the Obama administration’s rules to curb carbon emissions.
This doesn’t effect Pruitt’s stance on the environment, but it’s worth taking a quick look at some of his other controversial views.
“To put him in charge of the very agency he has worked to undermine is an affront to all Americans who care about the health of our air and water and the very real threat we face from climate change”, Hoyer said.
And according to Fox News, Pruitt stands in opposition to the EPA’s abuse of the Clean Water Act, which has been a known method for the agency to disregard property rights of United States citizens.
I applaud President-elect Trump’s appointment of Scott Pruitt as head of the EPA.
Terry Branstad, now the governor of Iowa, has been chosen to serve as the USA ambassador to China, the country with which Mr Trump has all but promised a trade war.
Scott Segal, an energy industry lobbyist at Bracewell LLP called Pruitt “a measured and articulate student of environmental law and policy” who helped “keep EPA faithful to its statutory authority and respectful of the role of the states in our system of cooperative federalism”.
Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii said Wednesday he could not support Pruitt because he is a “denier of climate science”.
During his presidential campaign, Trump declared that if he was was elected he would “scrap the Clean Power Plan”, which he described as a “war on coal and the war on miners”. If confirmed by the Senate, Pruitt would work to dismantle EPA regulations which Trump has declared as job killers during his campaign.
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“Mr. Pruitt led Oklahoma’s legal challenges to the EPA, Obamacare, executive actions on illegal immigration, Dodd-Frank and President Obama’s repeated attempts to bypass Congress”, said Trump spokesman Jason Miller. The first is a clear signal from the incoming Trump administration that environmental regulations, especially as they apply to the production of energy, are set for fundamental reform.
