EPA Pick Scott Pruitt Shows Trump Is Serious About Shredding Obama’s Climate Change Regs
President-elect Donald Trump is delivering on his campaign promise to reign in environmental regulations and bring coal miners back to work by selecting Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Pruitt’s nomination goes hand and hand with Trump’s energy policy that seeks to unleash domestic energy production by reducing regulations and expanding natural resource development.
The Oklahoma AG is a vocal critic of the EPA’s regulatory overreach and disagrees with the claim that global warming science is settled. Instead, he believes the relationship between man’s activities and global warming needs vigorous debate.
The selection of Pruitt should allay any fears that Trump was softening his stance on reversing President Obama’s climate change regulations by recently meeting with former Vice President Al Gore.
Key to Trump’s pledge to bring back coal mining jobs, Pruitt is a critic of EPA’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) rule which serves as the foundation of Obama’s climate change agenda.
The CPP seeks to cut carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants and it also serves as the regulation that would deliver the U.S emissions targets promised as part of the United Nations Climate Change Paris Agreement.
Pruitt strongly opposed the EPA’s plan to regulate carbon dioxide. He was one of the leaders of a state attorneys general coalition legal fight against the CPP that led to the Supreme Court decision to block the regulation.
The immediate fate of the CPP now rests at a lower court. Regardless of the pending decision, odds are the legality of the rule will be argued again before the Supreme Court.
As head of the EPA, Pruitt — if confirmed by the Senate — would be in a great position to undo or significantly alter the CPP. (For more from the author of “EPA Pick Scott Pruitt Shows Trump Is Serious About Shredding Obama’s Climate Change Regs” please click HERE)
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