Scott Pruitt’s crimes Against Nature
Trump’s EPA chief is gutting the agency, defunding science and serving the fossil-fuel industry
By Jeff Goodel
July 27, 2017
Rolling Stone
Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, wants you to know that he was responsible for persuading President Trump to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. Pruitt has never said that explicitly, of course – he understands that if he wants to keep his job, he needs to pretend that the decision was Trump's alone. But Pruitt did everything he could to telegraph to the world that he thought Paris was a bad deal for America, and urged Big Coal executives to make their views known to the president as well. Trump, who has dismissed climate change as a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, was lobbied equally hard by major business leaders and some of his own advisers, including his daughter Ivanka and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, to stay in the agreement. But Pruitt, aligned with White House chief strategist and populist provocateur Steve Bannon, won the fight. And when Trump announced the decision to withdraw from Paris in the White House Rose Garden on June 1st, Pruitt was the only Cabinet official who spoke at the ceremony. "We owe no apologies to other nations for our environmental stewardship," Pruitt said in a strikingly defiant tone.
In the following days, Pruitt was all over the media, taking bows on Fox News and sparring with Jake Tapper and Joe Scarborough. He argued that the agreement would slow the U.S. economy by hindering America's God-given right to mine, export and burn fossil fuels, even suggesting the agreement was part of a plot by European leaders to weaken America. "The reason European leaders . . . want us to stay in is because they know it will continue to shackle our economy," he said on CNBC. At one press conference, he claimed that 50,000 new coal jobs had been created by the Trump administration since the beginning of the year – a fake fact he refused to correct. (There are only about 51,000 miners in the entire coal industry; according to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 1,000 new jobs have been created in the coal industry this year as of June.)
Pruitt also dodged questions about whether he and the president actually believe that climate change is a hoax. "All the discussions that we had through the last several weeks have been focused on one singular issue," Pruitt said. "Is Paris good or not for this country?" It didn't matter that solar and wind energy are creating American jobs at a rate 12 times faster than the rest of the economy, or that 61 percent of Americans disagreed with the decision to pull out of Paris, because Pruitt was not talking to America. "He wanted all his pals in the fossil-fuel industry to know, 'Hey, I did this for you. I got this done. I'm the man,' " says Jeremy Symons, associate vice president of climate political affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund. "This was Scott Pruitt's victory lap."
While the rest of the Trump administration has been mired in scandal or incompetence (or both), and the media has been distracted by the Republican health care debacle and daily revelations about the Trump family's involvement with the Russians, Pruitt has been quietly tearing down decades of environmental progress. "If there was ever an example of the fox guarding the henhouse, this is it," says Michael Mann, a noted climate scientist at Penn State University. "We have a Koch-brothers-connected industry shill who is now in charge of climate and environmental policy for the entire country."
The mission statement of the EPA is simple: "to protect human health and the environment." It says nothing about promoting economic development or energy security or the glory of fossil fuels. But Pruitt has already carried out an impressive list of corporate favors: He rejected the advice of EPA scientists and approved the use of millions of pounds of a toxic pesticide that causes neurological damage in children; in a gift to Big Coal, he delayed tougher ozone air-pollution rules; he plotted to kill Obama's signature climate accomplishment, the Clean Power Plan, designed to put America on track to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 32 percent by 2030; he rescinded the Clean Water Rule, allowing countless streams and rivers to be exempted from pollution controls; he undermined regulations on the release of mercury, a potent neurotoxin, from power plants and other sources; and he submitted a budget that would wipe out more than a third of the funding for the agency, including cutting money for scientific research in half.
"Scott Pruitt is not secretary of commerce," says a former top Obama administration official. "His job is not to protect the fossil-fuel industry. It's to make difficult decisions, based on science and risk-reward analysis, that protect the environment and the health of the American people. And he's not doing that." Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota, who opposed Pruitt's confirmation, says that having a guy like Pruitt in charge of the EPA is evidence of the "dangerous, bizarro world we now live in."
In the past, EPA administrators have understood their role as the tough cop on the beat. "You say yes to things that protect public health and the environment while growing the economy," explains Gina McCarthy, EPA administrator during Obama's second term. "But it's often about saying no – 'No, you can't dump that pollutant into the river. No, you can't run that coal plant without a scrubber.' " The EPA is an enormous agency, with ten regional offices and 15,000 employees around the country; only about 80 of them are political appointees. The rest are civil servants, many of whom joined the agency because they believe deeply in its mission. The administrator, as a member of the president's Cabinet, reflects the political priorities of the administration: Anne Gorsuch, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s (and was the mother of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch), is remembered for her anti-regulatory zeal; Gina McCarthy is best known for her role in shaping climate policy. But the job has never been a launchpad for political ambition. In fact, no administrator in the 47-year history of the agency has ever gone on to higher office.
Pruitt may be different. After only six months running the EPA, he has elevated the power and influence of the job to a new level, inspiring speculation within the Beltway that he sees the position as a steppingstone to bigger things. Given Pruitt's unabashedly pro-fossil-fuel agenda, it helps that he's working for a president who generates such chaos that worrying about ozone levels in the air we breathe seems like a quaint concern. Pruitt also has the support of White House advisers like Bannon, who famously vowed to fight every day for "the deconstruction of the administrative state." But now Pruitt's political ambitions will be measured against the future prospects of the planet – and the health and welfare of the people who live on it. "The appointment of Scott Pruitt as EPA administrator is as serious a threat to our environment as we've ever faced," says Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. "Pruitt's entire career represents the exact opposite of the EPA's mission, which is to protect us from the reckless polluters and the disastrous consequences of climate change."
EPA headquarters is only a few blocksfrom the White House, in a grand building with a curved stone facade that now overlooks, of all things, the Trump International Hotel. After a contentious seven-hour confirmation hearing in early February, Pruitt took his seat in the administrator's wood-paneled office on the third floor and immediately got to work. In interviews with conservative media, he touted a "back to basics" approach at the EPA, which was Pruitt's way of saying he was going to gut Obama's progressive environmental legacy and give polluters a free pass. "He's not just going after climate, he's going after all the rules," McCarthy says. "Air, water, chemical safety. He's not going back to basics, unless the basics mean the 1960s."
To help with his cause, Pruitt brought in a team of experienced EPA-bashers and climate-change obstructionists, many of whom have worked for Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the most notorious and flamboyant climate denier in Congress. (Inhofe once brought a snowball to the Senate floor as evidence that global warming isn't real.) Pruitt's favored pick for deputy administrator, Andrew Wheeler, worked for Inhofe early in his career, then became a lobbyist for coal magnate Bob Murray, among others. Ryan Jackson, Pruitt's chief of staff, was formerly Inhofe's chief of staff. "He brought in the climate-denial all-stars," says Frank O'Donnell, head of Clean Air Watch, a climate and anti-pollution advocacy group in Washington, D.C.
Many of the career staffers looked on in shock and disbelief. "Most people who work at the EPA do it because they believe in the mission of the agency," says one EPA manager, who insists on anonymity – like nearly everyone I talked to at the agency. "The people Pruitt brought in made it clear they had no interest in pursuing that mission." Within the first week, Pruitt alienated many of the rank and file with an uninspiring introductory speech about the importance of civility and how "regulators exist to give certainty to those that they regulate." He did not say a word about public health or the environment. That same week, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he said that those who want to eliminate the EPA are "justified" in their beliefs. "I think people across the country look at the EPA the way they look at the IRS," Pruitt said. As one EPA staffer commented later, "Could he have been more insulting?"
Previous EPA administrators spent their first months meeting with environmental groups, public-health organizations and industry. "We wanted to meet with as many stakeholders as possible," says Matt Fritz, McCarthy's chief of staff. "We thought engaging in dialogue with these folks would help us gain a range of perspectives on the issues and challenges facing the country and the world, frankly." In Pruitt's first months, he met with almost no one from public-health or environmental groups. But for the fossil-fuel industry, he was wide open. One month after taking office, he hosted BP's U.S. chairman at his office. The next day, he met with two top executives from Chevron Corporation to discuss regulatory reform. The day after that, he spent two hours mingling with 45 CEOs from oil-and-gas companies at Trump's D.C. hotel. On March 9th, Lynn Good, chief executive of the utility giant Duke Energy, got 45 minutes with Pruitt to discuss "policy priorities." On March 28th and 29th, Pruitt had a pair of 30-minute meetings with Bob Murray, the coal baron and Trump confidant whom HBO's John Oliver recently called "a geriatric Dr. Evil" in a segment about a 2007 collapse at a Murray Energy-owned mine in Utah that killed nine people.
Some events seemed orchestrated to demoralize the agency's staff. Trump invited coal miners into the Rachel Carson Room to witness the dismantling of Obama's Clean Power Plan. "Inviting the miners to come over to the EPA for the signing was such an invasion," one EPA staffer says, noting the rollback took place in the very room where McCarthy had signed the Clean Power Plan. "They knew exactly what they were doing – it was staged to be totally in-your-face." Posters of Pruitt shaking hands with miners now adorn the halls of the agency.
In May, Trump's budget director, Mick Mulvaney, who openly mocks funding for climate science, released the White House's 2018 budget proposal. It aims to cut EPA funds from $8.2 billion to $5.7 billion – the 31 percent reduction would be the largest of any federal agency. Climate science is a big target: The program for reporting on greenhouse-gas emissions would be zeroed out, and the office responsible for drafting climate regulations would see its funds cut by nearly 70 percent. Even programs Pruitt says he supports, such as Superfund, which cleans up land contaminated by toxic waste, would be whacked by 30 percent. Pruitt, who developed the budget in consultation with Mulvaney, argued that states would pick up the slack, but then failed to point out that the budget also cuts a set of state grants by 45 percent. "This wasn't just penny-squeezing," one EPA staffer tells me. "It was just a giant fuck you to our mission."
As long as the House and Senate remain in Republican control, Pruitt has few checks on his power. And that includes the press, too. Except for his victory lap after Paris, he mostly avoids mainstream media. (Pruitt's office refused numerous requests to interview him for this story.) And despite his often-professed belief in "the rule of law," he has steadfastly resisted and evaded Freedom of Information Act requests for e-mail records and other public documents. He's so good at operating in the shadows, in fact, that he was recently given the Golden Padlock Award by investigative journalists, which recognizes the most secretive publicly funded person or agency in the United States.
Even within the agency, Pruitt remains an almost invisible presence. Of the dozens of agency staffers I talked to, only two had spoken to him directly, and none had received an e-mail from him. "He spends plenty of time traveling around the country and meeting with industry folks, but he's completely uninterested in building any relationship or trust with the people who actually work here," one staffer says. There's also a new level of secrecy and paranoia within the agency. Unlike previous administrators, Pruitt has round-the-clock Secret Service protection, and has prohibited people from bringing phones into sensitive meetings out of fear that what he says may be surreptitiously recorded. "It's been six months," another EPA staffer says, "and people are still crying at their desks."
If you had to guess what Pruittdid for a living just by shaking his hand, you might guess tax accountant or school-board president. He is 49, balding a little on top, and stout. Outside the office, he dresses conservatively in khakis and plaid shirts or fleeces, and is unfailingly polite, remembering your name even if he has met you just once, and offering to get you a cup of coffee if he's getting one for himself. Pruitt and his wife, Marlyn, have two college-age kids, and back home in Oklahoma attend services at First Baptist Church in the town of Broken Arrow, where Pruitt is a deacon. Nick Garland, the head pastor, knows Pruitt well and says he displays "a tremendous amount of Christian character."
Pruitt was born in Danville, Kentucky, a small town about an hour south of Lexington, where his father ran steakhouses. The oldest of three kids in a devout Baptist family, Pruitt grew up listening to Ronnie Milsap, attending church and playing baseball (second base). He earned an athletic scholarship to the University of Kentucky, where he met his future wife. As one of his roommates recalled, he "definitely wasn't a guy that went out and screwed around much." One of his teammates called him "the possum," although it's unclear if the nickname referred to his night-creature-like eyes or his crafty nature.
Pruitt eventually transferred to Georgetown College, a small Baptist school nearby, and then moved to Oklahoma to attend the University of Tulsa's law school. For most of the 20th century, Tulsa was known as the "oil capital of the world." Until the 1930s, Oklahoma was tied with California as the largest oil-producing state in the country (it's now the sixth-largest oil producer in the nation). Fossil-fuel pride runs deep here: The Golden Driller, a 75-foot-tall statue of an oil worker, adorns the fairgrounds, and the big houses on the city's rolling hills are a legacy of the black gold that came gushing out of the ground.
Pruitt's first job out of law school was at a small legal practice he founded in Tulsa – Christian Legal Services – that focused on religious-liberty cases. In 1998, as President Clinton's impeachment melodrama riled up the religious right, Pruitt ran for state Senate as a 30-year-old God-fearing Christian and won easily. In office, he introduced legislation requiring a pregnant woman to notify the father before getting an abortion and was one of only four senators to vote against an early-childhood-development bill targeted at helping low-income, at-risk children.
But on the campaign trail, Pruitt didn't possess much charm. In 2001, he got trounced in a special election for the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2006, he gave up his seat in the state Senate to run for lieutenant governor and lost the Republican nomination. He spent the next few years licking his wounds and building a network among the state's upper crust as co-owner of the Oklahoma City RedHawks, a Triple-A baseball team. "It was always clear that Scott had big political aspirations," former Oklahoma Gov. David Walters tells me. "But after losing twice, it looked like he had run too much and was out of the game."