Scott Pruitt’s departure from the Environmental Protection Agency is worth celebrating. His resignation isn’t a Democratic victory, it’s a genuine victory for democracy. Little “d.” The good news out of Scott Pruitt’s resignation is that there is still some level of corruption that generates sufficient public outrage to merit dismissal. The bad news is that it's a lot of corruption. But efforts to turn Pruitt’s departure into a cautionary “Be careful what you wish for” story, or to suggest that in watching Pruitt pack up his cone-of-silence and slip back to Oklahoma Democrats should cry over lost political leverage are not just wrong, they're complicit. No one should be mourning the departure of a man who so openly used his sycophancy to Trump as an excuse to conduct a corruption Superbowl.
But that doesn't mean that Pruitt's replacement at the EPA won't be a nightmare for the environment. He is. He will. He already has been.
Andrew Wheeler wasn’t in the second chair at the EPA because he worked his way up the ranks. He was already there as Trump’s hand-picked enforcer. He’s the guy who doesn’t just know how to work the system, he’s the guy who knows how to keep his head down and get things done, where “things” means genuinely doing what Pruitt set out to do: Erase decades of environmental policy and destroy the EPA from within.
Wheeler is a former staffer for Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK). And not just any staff member. He was the man who provided Inhofe with false information, the sloganeering, and the assault on science. You may think you hate Inhofe slamming a snowball down on the Senate floor and laughing about climate change, but what you really hate is Wheeler’s words coming from Inhofe’s lips.
After leaving his post with Wheeler, Wheeler became a professional climate change skeptic for the coal industry. And Wheeler didn’t just work for anyone in the industry. He was the lobbyist for Bob Murray—squirrel whisperer and the man who provides genuine “you will go if you want to keep your job” coal miners to Donald Trump’s rallies and photo ops. Murray is also the guy who got nine people killed at Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah because he was pulling roof support pillars in an attempt to maximize profit. Murray would be the worst person in the world if Don Blankenship didn’t already exist.
That’s who Andrew Wheeler is: The guy who provided the words for Inhofe. The guy who did the marketing for Murray. Trump’s whole policy of destroying the Clean Power Plan and eliminating limits on coal waste is built on Wheeler’s work. And now, Wheeler gets to do it directly.
Wheeler isn’t a fringe player in the coal industry. He’s the vice-president of the Washington Coal Club. This organization isn’t in the news as often as some other energy groups, but it’s the core lobbying group that explicitly pushes coal, rather than fossil-fuels-including-coal. As fracking has made natural gas cheaper and more available, many coal executives have felt that their participation in broader-based energy councils was actually becoming harmful. So the WCC has become more powerful as the desperate, last-gasp, coal-only platform pushing strategies like requiring energy producers to have “site security” and “resource on hand.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s the policy that Trump has been trying—first through the Energy Department, and more recently through the application of emergency executive power unused since the Truman administration—to use in protection of coal. That’s a policy promoted by Andrew Wheeler, and it’s one he’s managed to push through other departments, even while he’s been seated at the EPA. The policy that Rick Perry was promoting last year, one that says solar and wind and even gas are not safe, that only coal is safe … that’s also a product of Andrew Wheeler. It’s another example of just how closely Wheeler is tied in with the industry, and how much sway he holds with Trump.
Odds are, Andrew Wheeler won’t be in the news every hour, or day, or even week. He won’t be building ludicrous sound-proof booths in his office, investigating bulletproof desks, or trotting off to Morocco for … whatever the reason Pruitt went to Morocco. Instead, Wheeler will hunker down and get to work on not just tearing down environmental regulations, but salting the earth of the EPA so that it will take years, and a determined administration, to make the agency relevant again. Much of what Scott Pruitt did was disastrous—from dropping protections on almost every body of water in the nation to keeping deadly pesticides on the market against the unanimous vote of the EPA’s own review board—but many of those actions by Pruitt represented the agency-equivalent of executive orders. Pruitt was capricious and damaging, but many of his actions ran shallow. They would be readily reversed by an administrator with a crumb of environmental consciousness, or simple honesty. But Wheeler is more likely to do the long-term work, going through years of reviews and boards necessary to cement in place regulations and rules that are much harder to root out, and much longer lasting.
Pruitt has already laid out the framework for much of what Wheeler will attempt to accomplish: Destroy the Clean Power Plan, deregulate coal mine waste, permit more coal ash in streams, and in general promote more coal. Though Wheeler is not entirely a one-lump pony. As the National Resources Defense Council points out, he has also made time for promoting uranium mining in national monuments.
Wheeler’s agenda is not secret. He explicitly pushes a doctrine of climate change denial, one that calls into question scientific data and scientists. Don’t expect any of the data that Scott Pruitt hid or any of the programs he canceled to return. A lack of data is essential to climate change denial. Expect a continued loosening of regulations around toxic emissions, including mercury and uranium. Expect still broader definitions of “waste” and “fill” that will allow mines of all types to clog streams and rivers. Expect an anti-science position to become baked into the EPA, right down to the core.
And don’t expect Wheeler to start doing things that make him an easy target on a personal basis. He’s an inside the beltway lobbyist whose whole practice for decades has required him to be the invisible man putting the words in the mouth of someone else. Now that someone is Trump.
Stopping Andrew Wheeler isn’t going to be about how he lives or where he flies. The fight is going to have to be on topic, on message, and directly on a policy by policy basis. Beating Andrew Wheeler will mean winning the environmental debate on facts and on message. That is not going to be easy, especially when Wheeler is genuinely the point man—the tip of the soot-berg in a multi-billion dollar industry whose deeply held interest is in misleading the public for profit.
But beating Wheeler is the real fight. The one that has to be fought, and won, not just over whether he is a paranoid skinflint with delusions of godhood, but over how the EPA should act in the defense of both America and Americans. Over the difference between ownership and stewardship. Over policy that’s just instead of merely what generates short-term profit.
Sending Scott Pruitt home was satisfying. Bringing Andrew Wheeler to a halt, it’s going to be much harder. But what happens now, inside and outside the EPA, is the real fight that will have genuine, long-term and far-reaching consequences.
Take a breath. Then fight.