EPA changes should be welcomed by public

ONE sign former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt is making much-needed change as head of the Environmental Protection Agency is the level of hysteria he inspires from the radical left.

Consider a recent Rolling Stone article claiming Pruitt had “alienated” EPA bureaucrats by discussing “the importance of civility and how ‘regulators exist to give certainty to those that they regulate.’” Supposedly, this left EPA hacks routinely “crying at their desks.”

To most Americans, the rationales underlying Pruitt’s comments are self-evident. In the world of environmental extremism, they sent people into convulsive shock.

It’s welcome news the EPA is slowly being forced to live up to its mission and protect the environment in compliance with federal law. Too often in the past, the agency was more devoted to destroying businesses and often ignored genuine environmental challenges.

An example is Superfund, the federal program established in 1980 to clean up sites contaminated with hazardous substances. The EPA’s neglect of those sites is a decades-long scandal.

In a meeting with The Oklahoman’s editorial board, Pruitt noted one site near St. Louis includes uranium and has been on the Superfund list since 1990.

“Twenty-seven years later, as we’re sitting in Washington, D.C., the agency still has not made a decision on how to clean up the site,” he said. “Not remediate it. Not clean it up. Just decide do we excavate or do we cap?”

The great change at the EPA is that officials are being prodded to act — and to comply with federal law when doing so. Imagine that.

“We’re trying to do things and do things timely, do it within the statute, and actually really focus on rulemaking,” Pruitt said.

The agency is required by law to solicit comment during its rule-making process and respond to concerns raised by critics. Yet the EPA has seldom taken that requirement seriously. Agency officials have even invited activist lawsuits to generate out-of-court settlements that impose new regulations, evading legally required processes.

As Pruitt points out, the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan and Waters of the U.S. rules have been blocked by courts because the agency failed to follow federal law. That dysfunction is one reason the EPA’s role in environmental improvement is often marginal, while the private sector independently does the heavy lifting.

When the United States opted out of the Kyoto climate agreement in 2001, environmentalists predicted apocalyptic doom. Yet the sky never fell.

“From the year 2000 to 2014, we reduced our carbon footprint by over 18 percent,” Pruitt said. “And we did it through hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling — conversion to natural gas. We’re at pre1994 levels right now.”

Thanks to replacing coal with gas in generation of electricity, Pruitt noted, the United States is “leading the world” in reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Fringe groups have threatened to file endless lawsuits to block the reforms now underway. Pruitt isn’t concerned. So long as the agency complies with federal law and meets all required timelines, “you mitigate most of the litigation that can occur.”

There’s no reason environmental improvement, regulatory certainty and EPA compliance with the law cannot occur simultaneously. If achieving those goals leaves some bureaucrats beside themselves with disappointment, so be it.