“The knives are out for [interchangeable white man]” has become the new Mad Lib of the Trump administration. Between Flynn, Priebus, Cohn and Kushner, internal competition is rampant, with warring factions clawing at one another until one emerges from the fray less bloodied and bruised than others, and that’s who Trump listens to. This, it has been said, is his style.
So far, no one has put Pruitt in the Mad Lib. But they soon will. The rift is growing between the Bannonites in the Trump administration, who favor literal scorched earth policies like pulling out of Paris and undoing the endangerment finding, and the more “moderate” folks who don’t want to try to tackle solid science and instead focus on promoting fossil fuels in other ways. Amazingly, Pruitt seems to be falling on the sane side, reportedly arguing against taking on the endangerment finding as part of last week’s executive order.
The torch-bearer for the Bannonites is James Delingpole, who criticized Pruitt last week and again on Sunday in light of his awful performance in an interview with Chris Wallace at Fox News.
To give credit where it’s very rarely due, Wallace’s Fox News interview of Pruitt was refreshingly hard-hitting. Wallace opened with the thousands of deaths the Clean Power Plan would prevent, and pressed Pruitt to give real answers on everything from human causation to China’s commitment to the Paris Agreement.
Pruitt, of course, didn’t. He stuck to the legalese, states-based, “we can be pro-jobs and pro-environment” script that he’s been repeating all along. This poor performance led to something that probably hasn’t ever happened before, and may never again: James Delingpole agreed with Joe Romm, saying he was “quite right” to be criticizing Pruitt.
Now, Delingpole and Romm being on the same page may well be a sign of the coming apocalypse. (Speaking of which, be sure to read this amazing message from the end of the world.)
But seriously, Pruitt’s careful positioning may be wiser than Delingpole realizes, because the EPA’s Science Integrity Office is looking into Pruitt’s climate denying statements from last month on CNBC. Although it’s unclear what will happen when the office decides whether or not Pruitt’s answer violated agency guidelines by injecting politics into science, it’s not going to look good for him.
And more importantly, that comment (as well as Trump’s tweets) could come back to haunt Pruitt in court, much like Trump’s language around the travel ban. One could easily use statements like Pruitt’s denial that are purely political and unscientific as grounds for courts to overturn the administration's changes to the Clean Power Plan.
Regardless, there will be lawsuits for years and years. And among all this, a fun fact: this week is the tenth anniversary of Massachusetts vs. EPA, in which the Supreme Court ruled the EPA can regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act if science shows it to be a pollutant.
The EPA then looked at the science, and came to the conclusion that yes, carbon pollution hurts public health and the environment. This determination, known as the endangerment finding, was published in 2009, and reaffirmed by the D.C. Court of Appeals. Undoing it would require upending not only nearly a decade of research, but also all the studies that went into the original findings.
Considering Trump’s proposed cuts to the EPA, even deeper than previously reported, would reduce the number of bureaucrats at Pruitt’s disposal and therefore make it harder for him to take on the endangerment finding, no doubt Pruitt will continue to hear the knives being sharpened behind his back.
Where all those knives end up, though, will be subject to the ever-changing game of Trump administration Mad-Libs.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories: