Groups fire heavy rhetorical guns at Trump's EPA pick
Advocacy groups hostile to oil and gas fired heavy rhetorical guns at President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Environmental Protection Agency administrator.
"Having Scott Pruitt in charge of the [EPA] is like putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires," opined Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club.
For Angela Anderson, director of climate and energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, finding the Oklahoma attorney general poised to become head of EPA is "like going into the Super Bowl and discovering that your quarterback actually plays for the opposing team."
Interrupting its campaign to "stop all new fossil fuel projects," 350.org said, "You couldn't pick a better fossil fuel industry puppet."
And Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said a commitment "to safeguard public health and protect our air, land, water, and planet" represents "a litmus test" for the EPA administrator. "By naming Pruitt," she declared, "President-elect Trump has flunked."
Pruitt inspired all this poetic obloquy by having challenged the EPA's campaign to usurp state and congressional authority, restructure energy production and use, control surface water, eliminate from the biosphere anything officially construed as pollution, and generally dominate the behavior of otherwise free people.
Environmentalists increasingly treat the environment and Constitution as incompatible. Is domination their real agenda?
"Scott Pruitt has built his political career by trying to undermine EPA's mission of environmental protection," complained Environmental Defense Fund Pres. Fed Krupp, ignoring-like most of his colleagues in the cause-the legal issues raised by EPA's appalling expansionism of the past 8 years.
To pressure groups, law seems not to matter except as a tool of manipulation.
"By putting fossil fuel toadies and climate deniers like Pruitt in positions of power," said Greenpeace spokesperson Travis Nichols, "Trump is taking American further away from climate solutions and the global clean energy revolution and toward planetary disaster."
Any nomination that provokes Greenpeace and its kin into such overcooked nonsense must be adroit.
Score one for Trump-and liberty.
(From the subscription area of www.ogj.com, posted Dec. 9, 2016; author's e-mail: [email protected])
Bob Tippee | Editor
Bob Tippee has been chief editor of Oil & Gas Journal since January 1999 and a member of the Journal staff since October 1977. Before joining the magazine, he worked as a reporter at the Tulsa World and served for four years as an officer in the US Air Force. A native of St. Louis, he holds a degree in journalism from the University of Tulsa.