Scott Pruitt has devoted his career to shielding and protecting big polluters from national environmental laws. That makes his appointment to head the EPA extremely suspect. He doesn’t beleive in the EPA’s mission despite his platitudes to the contrary. Pruitt is trying to butcher his agency by a whopping 31%.
"You're talking about regulatory overreach," Wallace pressed. "But the question is, there are 166 million people living in unclean air, and you're going to remove some of the pollution restrictions, which would make the air even worse."
Pruitt did not address that question directly, instead asserting that the country's air quality was not as bad as it had been in the past, and that the United States was now "actually pre-1994 levels with respect to our CO2 footprint."
The back and forth continued. Pruitt's performance on the Sunday show earned the rare distinction of being panned by both climate change advocates and skeptics alike.
"New EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt embarrassed himself repeatedly on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, who kept Pruitt on the hot seat for 14 minutes as he pressed to get past Pruitt's paper-thin talking points," Jeremy Symons of the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund wrote for the Huffington Post.
Symons went on to fact-check Pruitt's statistics, noting that while the CO2 reductions he cited were accurate, they mostly occurred during the Obama administration as a result of the former president's clean-energy plans.
"It's one thing to dodge the question, but it's especially weak to hide behind the success of Obama's initiative to justify erasing it all," Symons wrote. "Pruitt's attempting a complicated trick here — not only trying to sell a bottle of snake oil, but breaking the bottle during the pitch."