Last week we learned that Pruitt’s purge of the EPA’s advisory boards is applying to all the agency’s boards, not just the three he had initially singled out. One scientist, Ohio State University professor Robyn Wilson, responded by challenged Pruitt “to officially fire me from the Board” instead of being potentially forced to choose between EPA grants or serving on the boards.
Thankfully, Senate Democrats recognized Pruitt’s decision to replace independent scientists with industry hacks as a massive red flag, and sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office last week requesting it look into this decision.
As it turns out, industry has tried this gambit before. Back in 2004, the letter notes, the Cargill v. United States decision ruled that being funded by a government agency “does not impair a scientist’s ability to provide technical, scientific peer review of a study sponsored” by that government agency. What’s more, by barring scientists who have won government grants--which are generally considered the most competitive grants that only go to top researchers--the court ruled the policy “would have to eliminate many of those most qualified to give advice.”
But in the case of Scott Pruitt’s EPA, scientists who are qualified aren’t going to let this newly pro-polluter agency get away with Pruitt’s mission of letting fossil fuel campaign donors off the regulatory hook.
If Pruitt was as respectful of the “rule of law” as he claims, then he would have thought twice before embracing William Wehrum to lead the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation-a man whose last stint at the EPA resulted in 27 policies struck down for illegally weakening protections.“Our courts have overturned regulations that Mr. Wehrum helped craft while at the EPA a staggering 27 times,” Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) said at Wehrum’s confirmation hearing. “That’s 27 times that the courts determined that the rules that Mr. Wehrum put in place did not follow the law or did not adequately protect public safety.”
Werhum is hardly the only one who is failing the public. And it’s not an accident.
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump dove deep in his Washington Post column into Trump’s Council on Environmental Quality nominee, the now-infamous Kathleen Hartnett White, refused to acknowledge not only the reality and extent of humanity’s responsibility for climate change, but even the basic fact that water expands when it warms: “Hartnett White was probably nominated to run the CEQ because she’s willing to brush aside the scientific consensus on climate change,” Bump explains, “not in spite of it.”
Ignorance, denial and pollution apologia are not bugs of Trump’s administration. They’re features. Remember, Steve Bannon admitted as much back in February when he said that Trump’s agenda is “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
At the time, it was hard to imagine just what that would look like. Now we’re starting to understand. And if you’re wondering what success looks like can take a trip to Delhi, India, where air pollution is literally off-the-charts bad.
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