Yesterday, E&E News published the recusal of EPA air chief Bill Wehrum, who like Andy Wheeler, was a lobbyist until joining the EPA. Wehrum’s clients included Exxon, Koch, Chevron, API, Pfizer, and many more. As NRDC’s John Walke pointed out, Wehrum, despite his recusal, still met with many of his former clients to brief them on upcoming EPA rollbacks, which just so happens to look a lot like what he pushed for as their lobbyist.
How is any of this legal, or proper, given his supposed recusal? The loophole is that apparently you’re allowed to meet with former clients, so long as more than five other people are there too. That way, it can be described as a general meeting, and therefore there’s no way anything shady can happen. It’s not like 10 oil and gas giants are going to ask anything improper of an EPA official who only officially lobbied for one or two of them, right?
Sadly, the EPA is hardly the only agency that’s been sold off to fossil fuels. Over at the Department of Interior, Secretary Ryan Zinke has basically admitted to selling out America to oil and gas.
Outside Magazine recently presented just such an argument in reporting on Zinke’s “Great Public Lands Wholesale.” This year, the Trump administration is offering up 4 million acres of public land--land that taxpayers own--to lease to the fossil fuel industry.
And like all things Trump, it’s not being done in a careful and studied manner. Instead, the DOI is rushing review processes and otherwise circumventing best practices. That means that while some of the acres of America put up for sale have found buyers, other whole auctions receive no bids at all. And unfortunately, some of the land getting bids are plots that shouldn’t have been put up in the first place, like land that includes Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park.
It’s not just fossilized trees representing millions of years of untouched nature that’s at stake. In other places, it’s at-risk species like the greater sage grouse, or untouched wilderness, or perhaps most offensively, the land around Bear’s Ears National Monument, considered sacred to Native Americans.
But Zinke doesn’t think the government should serve Americans, Native or otherwise. No, in his view, the government is simply a tool to serve the oil and gas industry.
This is not hyperbole. This is a quote. Secretary Ryan Zinke told the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association (at an event closed to press) that "Our government should work for you, the oil and gas industry."
We’ve known from the start that a Trump administration would serve the fossil fuel interests who paved the way for his post-truth propaganda, and who then stocked his administration with its cronies.
Even though his record as a Navy SEAL was blemished by a “pattern of travel fraud” for inappropriately using government funds for travel, as a former soldier, Zinke ostensibly knows the honor, dignity and integrity that comes from serving the American people.
Which makes his admission of who the government should work for all the more revealing.
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