Tag Archives: EPA

They’re All Nuts

The other day, I spotted a bumper sticker that really says it all: “Any Sane Adult: 2020.”

It isn’t just our demented President. It’s his whole sorry crew.

Initially, I thought Scott Pruitt was just corrupt–bought and paid for by the fossil fuel companies he used to represent. And he certainly is corrupt, but the sleaze is only part of the problem. It appears he is as delusional and grandiose as Trump.

A recent profile of Pruitt in Mother Jones is chilling.

Pruitt’s quieter style masks the extent to which his approach to governing is the practical implementation of the president’s wrecking-ball rhetoric. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to “get rid” of the EPA “in almost every form.” In just his first year in office, Pruitt has already made stunning strides in that direction. He’s dismantling the Obama administration’s landmark Clean Power Plan, which imposed greenhouse gas limits on fossil-fuel-fired power plants. He has slashed enforcement efforts against polluters and tried to repeal rules meant to safeguard drinking-water supplies. He has threatened to roll back fuel economy standards. He’s moved to weaken new rules for smog, coal ash, and mercury pollution, poorly enforced a new toxic-chemical law, and refused to ban the dangerous pesticide chlorpyrifos. He’s taken aim at dozens of lesser-known rules covering everything from safety requirements for replacing asbestos to emergency response plans in hazardous chemical facilities.

Pruitt has chased away longtime EPA staff and dismantled scientific advisory boards. He has put representatives of fossil fuel companies in charge of key environmental decisions.

Pruitt has been almost cartoonishly contemptuous of the EPA’s work, pushing draconian cuts to the agency’s science, climate, regulatory, and enforcement offices. Meanwhile, in just his first year, he has reportedly expanded his around-the-clock security detail at a cost of at least $2 million annually. He spent $25,000 on a secure phone booth inside his office, at least $12,000for flights around the country between March and May (each of which included a leg in Tulsa), $58,000 on chartered and military flights over the summer, and nearly $40,000 on a trip to Morocco to promote natural gas exports. His frequent first-class trips with his security detail have added more than $200,000 to that tally.

Pruitt cites his evangelical Christianity to justify his environmental positions, especially his climate-change denialism.

But his biblical references are not restricted to climate change. Pruitt’s two guiding stars—evangelical faith and political zeal—sometimes seem interchangeable. In October, when he announced a controversial new “conflict of interest” policy barring researchers who receive EPA grants from serving on the agency’s science advisory boards, he quoted the Book of Joshua: “Choose this day whom you’re going to serve.”

The GOP is filled, of course, with politicians who twist biblical references to advance whack-a-doodle positions.

Pruitt evidently sees no conflict between his brand of Christianity and unethical behavior. Recently, there have been revelations about a sweetheart deal for a room in a Washington condominium owned by an energy lobbyist. One reporter noted that taking what look very much like bribes from energy lobbyists “is just par for the course for Pruitt.”

Pruitt wanted the EPA to purchase a “time-share” in a jet airplane for his personal use (and was evidently miffed when he was told it would be prohibitively expensive). He disregarded rules to give large raises to personal cronies he’d brought on staff. Newsweek reports that Pruitt uses high-ranking EPA investigators– who are supposed to be delving into environmental crimes– as his personal security detail.

“This never happened with prior administrators,” a former official of the agency’s Criminal Investigations Division told The Washington Post, which first reported the news. “These guys signed on to work on complex environmental cases, not to be an executive protection detail.” The Post report suggested that the EPA would spend $800,000 for “the security detail’s travel expenses” this fiscal year.

The corruption and grandiosity are appalling, but those pale in comparison to the damage he is doing to the environment. CNN recently obtained a secret memo detailing Pruitt’s new control over enforcement of the Clean Water Act.

In a new directive, Pruitt says he–and he alone– will make final decisions under the Act.

Pruitt has explicitly stripped authority from his staff and regional administrator and turned himself into America’s Water Czar. By secret fiat. If anyone wants to open a coal mine, pesticide plant, or factory farm, they no longer have to show that their actions won’t damage local streams, rivers, lakes and aquifers. They just need a nod from Pruitt.

Evidently, Pruitt doesn’t have grandchildren who will have to drink water, breathe air, or live on a ravaged planet.

I wonder where I can get that bumper-sticker……

Comments

Rejecting The Enlightenment

And here I thought Scott Pruitt was just a bought-and-paid-for member of the “mafia” wing of today’s GOP. His long history of combatting environmental regulations while representing fossil fuel industries seemed adequate to explain his (toxic) presence in the Trump Administration.

Now, however, we discover that he is also a True Believer in the Pence mold. According to Politico, Pruitt has a history of statements that would do Pence and the rest of the “cult” wing of the party proud.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt dismissed evolution as an unproven theory, lamented that “minority religions” were pushing Christianity out of “the public square” and advocated amending the Constitution to ban abortion, prohibit same-sex marriage and protect the Pledge of Allegiance and the Ten Commandments, according to a newly unearthed series of Oklahoma talk radio shows from 2005.

Pruitt, who at the time was a state senator, also described the Second Amendment as divinely granted and condemned federal judges as a “judicial monarchy” that is “the most grievous threat that we have today.” And he did not object when the program’s host described Islam as “not so much a religion as it is a terrorist organization in many instances.”

The six hours of civics class-style conversations on Tulsa-based KFAQ-AM were recently rediscovered by a firm researching Pruitt’s past remarks, which provided them to POLITICO on condition of anonymity so as not to identify its client. They reveal Pruitt’s unfiltered views on a variety of political and social issues, more than a decade before the ambitious Oklahoman would lead President Donald Trump’s EPA.

This is the man who is charged with safeguarding the nation’s air and water, the man whose agency is our first line of defense against climate change. Never before has the EPA been headed by a person who actively dismisses and ridicules science and scientific evidence.

When the taped conversations emerged, an EPA spokesman was asked whether Pruitt’s skepticism about evolution– one of the major foundations of modern science– could conflict with the agency’s mandate to make science-based decisions.

Spokesman Jahan Wilcox told POLITICO that “if you’re insinuating that a Christian should not serve in capacity as EPA administrator, that is offensive and a question that does not warrant any further attention.”

Obviously, that was not the “insinuation,” although I for one would agree that a person espousing Pruitt’s particular version of Christianity and its mandates should be kept as far away from the EPA as possible.

Some polls show that less than 30 percent of white evangelical Protestants believe that human activity is the driving factor behind climate change.

And Pruitt has echoed that sentiment, telling CNBC last year that he did not believe carbon dioxide was a primary contributor to climate change. Last week, he told the Christian broadcaster CBN News that he supports developing the nation’s energy resources, a stance that he believes aligns with Scripture’s teachings.

“The biblical worldview with respect to these issues is that we have a responsibility to manage and cultivate, harvest the natural resources that we’ve been blessed with to truly bless our fellow mankind,” he said.

To suggest that criticism of Pruitt is tantamount to saying that religion disqualifies people from heading the EPA is not only appallingly dishonest, it flies in the face of the agency’s history.

Pruitt isn’t the first EPA administrator to openly express his or her religious faith, of course. His immediate predecessor, Gina McCarthy, was a Roman Catholic who visited top officials at the Vatican in 2015 as church officials worked to write Pope Francis’ climate change encyclical. She oversaw the creation of the major climate change and water regulations that Pruitt’s EPA has started to unwind.

Comments

Scott Pruitt Is Toxic

It sometimes seems difficult to choose the worst member of Donald Trump’s cabinet–divided as that motley crew is between ignoramuses and zealots. (And yes, I realize the two categories aren’t mutually exclusive. Betsy DeVos is a case in point.)

But my vote goes to Scott Pruitt, who is genuinely dangerous because he isn’t an ignoramus. That Pruitt is in the pocket of fossil fuel interests is well known; his disregard for public health–for clean air and water–isn’t as widely recognized. And it is hard to understand why anyone, no matter how corrupt, would protect companies that produce poisonous chemicals.

Methylene chloride, N-methylpyrrolidone, and trichloroethylene are toxic. There’s no question about that. The first two are directly related to deaths from inhalation related to their use in paint strippers. The third, commonly used in dry cleaning and in making refrigerants and previously used as an anesthetic, is tied to everything from liver and kidney damage, to a variety of birth defects.

All three chemicals were fast tracked to be banned by the EPA under the Toxic Substances Control Act. “Were” is the operative term.

The EPA has announced the “indefinite postponement” of bans on certain uses of these three toxic chemicals, despite the fact that the Toxic Substances Control Act was the product of a bipartisan consensus.

The “indefinite postponement” of measures to protect public health joins all kinds of other nefarious and worrisome signals, including the hiring of manifestly unqualified people. Before he was forced to withdraw, Trump’s nominee to head the EPA chemical safety board was a lobbyist who supported manufacture of those not-banned chemicals. Pruitt himself summarily dismissed hundreds of real scientists–replacing them with people like a banking friend who’d been banned for life by the banking industry. (According to The Intercept, Pruitt had received loans from the friend’s bank.)

And then there’s Pruitt’s relentless attack on measures meant to combat climate change, reversing what had been U.S. leadership on the issue. There are daily news releases chronicling the efforts and successes of other countries; China, once the world’s biggest polluter is ramping up its pivot to clean energy. And just recently, headlines announced that Germans are periodically being paid to use energy.

Germany has spent $200 billion over the past two decades to promote cleaner sources of electricity. That enormous investment is now having an unexpected impact — consumers are now actually paid to use power on occasion, as was the case over the weekend.

Although Germany clearly leads the pack, other European countries are also producing energy that is occasionally in excess of what they require:

Several countries in Europe have experienced negative power prices, including Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

But Germany’s forays into negative pricing are the most frequent. At times, Germany is able to export its surplus electricity to its neighbors, helping to balance the market. Still, its experiences of negative prices are often longer, and deeper, than they are in other countries.

In one recent example, power prices spent 31 hours below zero during the last weekend of October. At one point, they dipped as low as minus €83, or minus $98, per megawatt-hour, a wholesale measure.

In other words, anyone who was able to hook up for a large blast of electricity at that time was paid €83 per unit for the trouble.

Of course, giving citizens relief from high power prices–and even occasionally paying them to use power–would come at a cost to the fossil fuel industry that owns Scott Pruitt.

And having a cabinet member who gave a rat’s ass about good policy, the environment or the health and welfare of his country’s citizens would be unthinkable anywhere in the Trump Administration.

Comments

Reality Doesn’t Care Whether You Believe It (Part II)

One of the defining features of our time is increasing complexity; the rapid growth and sophistication of technology, the globalization of economics, science and even governance, in short, the accelerating production of vast amounts of knowledge that no one person can hope to master (or even identify).

This complexity requires informed and thoughtful policymaking, an understanding of how the various aspects of our shared environment interact, if we are to avoid unintended and very harmful consequences.

Unfortunately, we have elected a President and numerous lawmakers who are not up to the task, to put it as delicately as possible. They are supported by voters who dismiss people who do have expertise, people who actually know things, as “elitist.”

A couple of examples: a while back, the New York Times ran an article about automation, addressing a number of likely consequences of new AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies:

A.I. products that now exist are improving faster than most people realize and promise to radically transform our world, not always for the better. They are only tools, not a competing form of intelligence. But they will reshape what work means and how wealth is created, leading to unprecedented economic inequalities and even altering the global balance of power.

It is imperative that we turn our attention to these imminent challenges.

What is artificial intelligence today? Roughly speaking, it’s technology that takes in huge amounts of information from a specific domain (say, loan repayment histories) and uses it to make a decision in a specific case (whether to give an individual a loan) in the service of a specified goal (maximizing profits for the lender). Think of a spreadsheet on steroids, trained on big data. These tools can outperform human beings at a given task.

I have posted previously about the potential consequences of AI and automation generally for job creation. The number of jobs lost to automation already dwarfs those lost to outsourcing and trade–and yet, activists on both the Right and Left continue to focus only on trade policy.

This kind of A.I. is spreading to thousands of domains (not just loans), and as it does, it will eliminate many jobs. Bank tellers, customer service representatives, telemarketers, stock and bond traders, even paralegals and radiologists will gradually be replaced by such software. Over time this technology will come to control semiautonomous and autonomous hardware like self-driving cars and robots, displacing factory workers, construction workers, drivers, delivery workers and many others.

Unlike the Industrial Revolution and the computer revolution, the A.I. revolution is not taking certain jobs (artisans, personal assistants who use paper and typewriters) and replacing them with other jobs (assembly-line workers, personal assistants conversant with computers). Instead, it is poised to bring about a wide-scale decimation of jobs — mostly lower-paying jobs, but some higher-paying ones, too.

If Donald Trump has ever addressed this issue, or suggested that he is even aware of it, it has escaped my notice.

Richard Hofstadter’s book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life is, if anything, more relevant today than when it was written. What Hofstadter and others who have addressed this particular element of American culture failed to foresee, however, was a time in which the federal government (together with a good number of state governments–Texas comes immediately to mind) would be controlled by people who neither understand the world they live in nor know what they don’t know.

Science Magazine  recently reported on the EPA’s dismissal of 38 science advisors.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt continues to clean house at a key advisory committee, signaling plans to drop several dozen current members of the Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC), according to an email yesterday from a senior agency official.

Unlike most of Trump’s cabinet, Pruitt is proving to be effective. Unfortunately, he is proving effective in his efforts to destroy the EPA–not just by denying the reality of climate change science, but by rolling back regulations that protect air and water quality. He appears to be operating on a theory common to this administration: if a reality is uncongenial, ignore it or deny its existence. If evidence contradicts your worldview, dismiss it.

Yesterday, in a reference to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, I observed that science and reality are true whether or not you believe them.

The worst thing about giving simple and/or corrupt people the power to run a government they do not understand is that complicated realities continue to be realities, and the longer we fail to engage those realities, the worse the consequences.

Comments

Reality Doesn’t Care Whether You Believe It (Part I)

La La Land isn’t just the title of a movie. Increasingly, it’s where our government officials live.

The Trump administration is debating whether to launch a governmentwide effort to question the science of climate change, an effort that critics say is an attempt to undermine the long-established consensus human activity is fueling the Earth’s rising temperatures.

This effort is being pushed by Scott Pruitt, the truly dangerous Secretary of the EPA, but other administration troglodytes are also involved.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who once described the science behind human-caused climate change as a “contrived phony mess,” also is involved in the effort, two officials said.

At a White House briefing this week, Perry said, “The people who say the science is settled, it’s done — if you don’t believe that you’re a skeptic, a Luddite. I don’t buy that. I don’t think there is — I mean, this is America. Have a conversation. Let’s come out of the shadows of hiding behind your political statements and let’s talk about it. What’s wrong with that? And I’m full well — I can be convinced, but let’s talk about it.”…

Other agencies could include the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy and NASA, according to the official, all of which conduct climate research in some capacity.

And then there’s Florida. As CNN reports,

A new Florida law would let anyone in the state challenge, and possibly change, what kids are learning in school.

Any Florida resident can raise concerns about teaching material they find unfit for public school classrooms, according to legislation that went into effect Saturday. The bill was introduced in February by Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Naples, and was signed into law last week after passing with bipartisan support…

Supporters of the law have disputed material presenting global warming and evolution as “reality.” Others found certain reading material to be “pornographic.” And for some, US and world history textbooks seem biased and anti-American.

Impetus for the measure came from a conservative group called “The Florida Citizens’ Alliance.”  That organization  gathered testimony from “at least 25 people” (!) in favor of the legislation, and their reasoning (I use the term loosely) was predictable.

One woman took issue with evolution being taught as a “fact,” arguing that the “vast majority of Americans believe that the world and the beings living on it were created by God as revealed in the Bible.” Another person complained that history classes were making students “subservient” by teaching them about the president’s ability to issue executive orders.

Shades of Trump’s go-to response when his “facts” are challenged:  “a lot of people agree with me.” A lot of people still believe the earth is flat and that aliens landed and are buried in Roswell, New Mexico.

What’s that great Neil DeGrasse Tyson quote? Reality doesn’t care whether you believe it or not…
Comments