Other than the man squatting in the Oval Office, Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt is proving to be the griftiest of the Trump regime’s grifters. His roster of ethical violations has grown longer than the list of lawyers who have told Trump they won’t be joining his legal team as Special Counsel Robert Mueller edges ever closer to the subject-not-a-target of his investigation.
A good portion of Pruitt’s offenses are just plain-old sleaze: cheap rent, luxury travel, giant pay raises that circumvent the rules, a 19-member Praetorian guard with 19 vehicles, using phones other than his own to avoid generating call logs and written records that could trigger Freedom of Information Act filings, a $43,000 cone of silence to keep his phone calls secret even from his staff and demotions or reassignments of career staff who raised questions about his spending.
But as the Pruitt-as-grifter story keeps unfolding, it’s good to remember his worse actions, the ones whose consequences will not only outlast his tenure at EPA, but could also outlive every person now breathing.
Justin Gillis at The New York Times reminded us of just that in an op-ed Monday. He writes that Pruitt has been trying to “foist a colossal” lie on the nation. That lie is a version of the latest iteration of the climate-science deniers, essentially arguing that the climate is always changing, but we can’t accurately measure this, and we don’t know enough to take ameliorative action:
This is not just any old white lie that Mr. Pruitt has been telling. This is a civilization-threatening lie, a lie that will kill people and destroy small nations, if not some large ones. Future generations will see him as a man guilty of a major historical crime, along with his enablers in Congress and their puppet masters in the fossil-fuel industry. [...]
Why do I claim that Mr. Pruitt is lying, rather than just deluded? You can tell by the way he words his statements, all that fine salami slicing about the need for more “precision” before we can do anything. The truth is that the science you need to know we have a problem was published 30 years ago, and it has already stood the test of time.
I think Mr. Pruitt knows that, too. But he found a fast, easy path to national prominence by becoming an errand boy for the most retrograde of the coal and oil barons. The way to understand the sleazy condo deal, the careless use of taxpayer money and all the rest is that these ethical lapses are just symptoms of the main disease.
The good news regarding Pruitt is that his efforts to roll back Obama era environmental rules are running into trouble. Just like most of the 14 lawsuits he initiated against the EPA when he was attorney general of Oklahoma, these rollbacks are likely to be losers.
That’s in part because Pruitt and his team (the entire White House team, in fact) seems to be clueless about how rules are made. While the original idea for a rule may arise at a weekend party or get-together over coffee, the creation of a rule requires deep study, technical analyses, assessment of public comments, and a plethora of meetings with stakeholders.
For instance, the fuel-efficiency rule for automobiles the Obama administration signed off on six years ago generated a 1,217-page report filled with comprehensive data and explanations. Pruitt’s recently released document to dilute this rule is 38 pages mostly filled with data-poor quotations from automobile makers and other entities that typically hate environmental rules on general principle. Naturally, this kind of approach begets litigation. And in this instance, those lawsuits could take years to wind their way through the courts. Sooooo … hurrah for incompetence.
But even though there’s a likelihood the courts will toss out Pruitt’s move to reverse the Obama era efficiency rule, the EPA-hated EPA chief’s lies contribute to the delay in dealing with the climate crisis. And delay is denial.
Thanks to the failure to take seriously the testimony to Congress of James Hansen one June day in 1988, we have delayed taking the needed actions for decades. Which makes the urgent sense of now an existential matter.
While Pruitt, et al., may not, because of the courts, make much headway in dismantling climate-related laws, programs, and rules already on the books, they can keep us from making the necessary federal headway to keep climate change from being even worse. Until Pruitt, Trump, and the rest of the gang of liars, grifters, profiteers, and civilization threateners are ejected from their federal perches, we’ll have to depend on leaders in a hundred or so forward-looking cities and a dozen or so states to make progress. And, let’s be frank, while these local programs and actions are welcome indeed, they won’t be nearly enough.
What we need is a titanic shift on climate matters. That will, of course, take more than dumping Scott Pruitt and his minions. It will require a thorough makeover of climate policy at the federal and state levels. Just winning elections in 2018 and 2020 will not by themselves be enough. A new president, a new Congress and new majorities in state legislatures will only make a difference if those new leaders do what far too few of past leaders in both parties have taken seriously so far.
Every Democrat running for office this year ought to be questioned in detail about how serious they are about climate policy. None of them should get away with answering with mush, with mealy mouthing, with hemming and hawing. Delay is denial.