The Republican plan to give your kids cancer gets the expected reception from grateful polluters, now pulling back from past environmental promises because they know a Scott Pruitt-led EPA will have their backs.
Devon Energy, which runs the windswept site, had been prepared to install a sophisticated system to detect and reduce leaks of dangerous gases. It had also discussed paying a six-figure penalty to settle claims by the Obama administration that it was illegally emitting 80 tons each year of hazardous chemicals, like benzene, a known carcinogen.
But something changed in February just five days after Scott Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general with close ties to Devon, was sworn in as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Devon, in a letter dated Feb. 22 and obtained by The New York Times, said it was “re-evaluating its settlement posture.” It no longer intended to move ahead with the extensive emissions-control system, second-guessing the E.P.A.’s estimates on the size of the violation, and it was now willing to pay closer to $25,000 to end the three-year-old federal investigation.
If the choice is between giving the neighbors cancer, for a cost of $25,000 every so often, or not giving the neighbors cancer, for a cost of considerably more, every patriotic fossil fuel company always gravitates towards the same decision. Eventually, someone will pay the costs of that pollution. Somebody, or taken in nationwide aggregate a few million somebodies, will get cancer, or asthma, or lead poisoning, and then the same conservatives that thought it outrageous for companies to clean up the mess beforehand will grouse that we're dealing with the aftermath on the government dime and how outrageous is that, and the same executives that tossed $25,000 in the cancer's-not-so-bad pile will pay the same think tanks and politicians who helped them before to help them out with the new campaign of explaining why it's absolutely outrageous to use their tax dollars to fight those cancers because screw you, that's why.
Devon Energy, however, isn't just some random company here. They are the company who helped make Scott Pruitt who he is. When Pruitt, acting ostensibly as Oklahoma's attorney general, copied industry arguments against the EPA onto his own attorney general letterhead, Devon Energy is who he copied from. Installing Scott Pruitt, specifically, as the regulator overseeing them is a coup they could not have dreamed of.