MONTHLY NEWSLETTER JULY 2018
Woods Hole Research Center A transition at EPA Dr. Philip B. Duffy President & Executive Director
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is gone, brought down by persistent and credible allegations of personal corruption and misuse of taxpayer money. These transgressions, although inexcusable, are relatively inconsequential in the panorama of human affairs—garden-variety political corruption. It’s ironic, therefore, that these improprieties caused Pruitt’s demise, while his career was advanced by the policies he promoted, whose harm is vastly more far-reaching and long-lasting. Under Pruitt, for example, EPA moved to repeal the Clean Power Plan (a cornerstone Obama climate policy), to weaken fuel economy standards for motor vehicles, to block regulation curbing methane emissions from new oil and gas wells, and to reduce the “social cost of carbon,” a measure used in rulemaking of the economic cost associated with greenhouse gas emissions.
In Pruitt's EPA, the science of climate change was not only systematically ignored, but actively obscured. In addition, information about the public-health benefits of climate policies like the Clean Power Plan were deliberately hidden, apparently at the personal direction of Pruitt. All of this directly violates EPA’s mission “to protect human health and the environment,” and its commitment to “work to ensure that…national efforts to reduce environmental risks are based on the best available scientific information.”
It is perhaps not surprising that science-defying policies should co-mingle with personal corruption, since under Pruitt those policies seem to have been a result of close ties to the fossil fuel industry. It’s not wrong or illegal, of course, to have industry contacts, but Pruitt’s secret meetings with industry representatives while EPA administrator were wrong and possibly illegal, and certainly raise questions about whose interests he sought to serve.
Under Pruitt, EPA’s Science Advisory Board was first purged of scientists receiving EPA grants, on the grounds of eliminating conflicts of interest, and then larded with representatives of regulated industries, who of course have massive conflicts. And now the board has not met in six months. All of this suggests a lack of interest in getting the best scientific advice.
Where will things go from here? Pruitt’s destructive, not-basedon-science policies will no doubt continue under his successor, Andrew Wheeler, a former EPA staffer turned coal industry lobbyist. If anything, Wheeler’s understanding of EPA will allow him to be more efficient at implementing Trump’s science-defying agenda. I would expect EPA to pay lip-service to regulating greenhouse gases, taking as much time as possible to implement the weakest possible regulations. The Supreme Court has ruled that EPA not only may but must regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, if it finds that those gases endanger the public health and welfare. EPA’s 2009 “Endangerment Finding” found exactly that, and gave Obama’s EPA wide latitude to use the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately that same wide latitude will now allow the Trump administration to do next to nothing while upholding the letter of the law. As Wheeler told the Washington Post, "As we move forward on a potential replacement for the Clean Power Plan, you're going to see us taking a hard look at what the [Clean Air Act] says and the authorities the act gives us, and we'll put something forward that follows the law.” EPA regulation of greenhouse gases, even if very weak, may also give fossil fuel companies some immunity against tort lawsuits.
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