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5 Things You Must Know About Scott Pruitt (FiveThirtyEight; 1/19/17)

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From FiveThirtyEight | "What We Learned (And Didn’t) About Scott Pruitt At His Confirmation Hearing"

  1. He accepts that climate change is happening, but is unwilling to take the position that humans are primarily responsible. He also believes that more debate is necessary.
  2. He sued the EPA 14 times - because, according to his testimony on Wednesday, he believes the EPA wasn't upholding the organization's rules and regulations correctly.
  3. He believes that states should take a larger role in regulation. “The states are not mere vessels of federal will,” he said. “They don’t exist simply to carry out federal dictate from Washington, D.C.” 
  4. We don't know whether he'll support or oppose states with stricter regulations. 
  5. He hasn't laid out any plans for how he intends to balance environmental and economic interests, but past behavior indicates that he has no qualms supporting the coal and gas industry even when it might diametrically oppose conservationist efforts.

Excerpts

"Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt made a name for himself by suing the Environmental Protection Agency and fighting against its regulatory power. That work has also made him a contentious choice for EPA administrator, drawing comparisons to President Ronald Reagan’s first EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch Burford, who cut the agency’s enforcement budget by more than 45 percent and was ultimately forced to resign after being found in contempt of Congress. Burford’s legacy could be felt in how the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works approached Pruitt in his confirmation hearing Wednesday — Republicans praised Pruitt for fighting federal overreach and regulatory madness, while Democrats voiced serious concerns that Pruitt would be working for the good of industry, rather than the good of the environment and Americans’ health."
"Pruitt once opposed the Chesapeake Bay project that he praised Wednesday. In the hearing, he downplayed his prior opposition, explaining that he now supported it because the EPA’s role in the project changed. That role, however, is in direct opposition to previous interpretations of what the EPA’s job should be. In The Baltimore Sun, Eric Schaeffer, a former EPA official who served under President Clinton and both Presidents Bush, said the EPA was meant to aggressively enforce federal law, not “provide lunch and coffee and name tags [while] states would sort of work it out.” Meanwhile, senators repeatedly brought up California’s vehicle emissions standards, which are stricter than federal standards — the state is allowed to set its own rules thanks to a decades-old waiver from the EPA, which must be renewed annually. And it was renewed every year, wrote Stuart Leavenworth in The Charlotte Observer, except for 2008, the last year of President George W. Bush’s administration. The waiver was reinstated the following year by the Obama administration. Pruitt told both California Sen. Kamala Harris and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey that he would review this exemption and could not promise that it would be renewed. That would depend on the process, Pruitt said, and it wouldn’t be reasonable to make a promise before the process had played out."