Scott Pruitt

Scott Pruitt

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Persons of interest

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Scott Pruitt is a Republican activist most known for his time at the EPA, where he was the director of the organization from the start of Donald Trump's term until July 2018.

Who thought that was a good idea?

Pruitt was not somebody who anybody with any desire to make the EPA a serious organization would have allowed within a mile of the organization, let alone made the person running the thing. As Attorney General of Oklahoma, he challenged the EPA fourteen times and was infamous for how frequently he took the fossil fuel industry at their word and allowed them to call the shots.

It's clear that Trump was also not a fan of the EPA, saying it had an "anti-energy agenda that has destroyed millions of jobs" with the implication that Pruitt would reverse this and essentially change the agency in whatever ways Trump felt were needed.

Tenure

Unsurprisingly, the man who had historically favored big business continued to do so while in his position. In 2018, one study said "that the Pruitt-led EPA has moved away from the public interest and explicitly favored the interests of the regulated industries." Commonly, he would attempt to rollback regulations in an unusually hasty manner (one highlight being when he submitted a legal briefing that was only thirty-eight pages and that was primarily made up of direct quotes from a handful of lobbyists) that several of them were later struck down by courts. However, although he was not successful at attempting to repeal existing rules, he did weaken the enforcement of them which allowed those in the industry to basically do whatever they want without fear of punishment.

Climate change failures

In March 2017, Pruitt said he did not believe carbon dioxide was "a primary contributor to the global warming that we see," adding "measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact." Of course, this is utterly nonsensical as scientists (ninety-seven percent of whom believe in human caused climate change) have a variety of ways of proving that climate change is caused by carbon dioxide released by humans. Pruitt went on to remove websites controlled by the EPA which backed up the idea of human caused climate change, including ones that had been cited against him when he made the incorrect statement above.