It seems that Donald Trump’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, took a personal interest in the scrubbing of the EPA’s climate websites after taking control of the agency in 2017. Pruitt is the veritable fox running the henhouse, having spent most of his career protecting oil and gas companies from their misdeeds in Oklahoma, and he’s taken his brand of craven greed to the EPA, using it to begin the process of climate change obfuscation that has served the Republican Party and their overlords so well for decades. Inside Climate News reports that new documents released by the EPA show how much of Pruitt’s fingerprints were on the process to manipulate reality—specifically the deletion of Clean Power Plan information on EPA websites.
The newly released internal documents consist of emails among EPA's communications team, including staff and contractors responsible for the website.
On April 5, 2017, Lincoln Ferguson, Pruitt's senior advisor for public affairs, wrote to staff at the public affairs office asking when the Clean Power Plan changes to the website would go live.
At 12:15 p.m. on April 5, Ferguson wrote, "The Administrator would like it to go up ASAP. He has made several other changes that need to take place."
Four hours later, Ferguson again wrote, "Just asking because he is asking ..."
President Obama’s Clean Power Plan was lauded by many for being the country’s biggest step taken in the fight against climate change. Conservative states trying to block the environmentally positive plan had found no relief through judiciary channels. This all ended with the election of Donald Trump.
Some of Pruitt’s most recent work aimed to deregulate toxic chemical standards, and to rescind a necessary part of Clean Air Act policy. That’s the kind of environmental “protection” being offered up by the Republican Party these days. But even conservatives consider Pruitt’s work to go beyond the pale when it comes to propaganda.
What many of these conservatives are really responding to is the breakneck pace with which this administration is pushing through all of the things Republicans have promoted for so long. Maybe they all realize that they don’t have much time before they have to jump back into the private sector to escape the impending dumpster fire that will engulf the country.