Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Trump’s EPA choice has Democrats crying foul
Oklahoma’s top legal official is a supporter of oil industry.
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump picked Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to run the Environmental Protection Agency, signaling the president-elect will deliver on his vow to disassemble President Barack Obama’s landmark effort to fight climate change.
Pruitt, 48, an ally of the fossil fuel industry, has taken a lead nationally in resisting Obama’s environmental agenda. He is an architect of the multistate legal effort to block the administration’s sweeping national mandates for cleaner-burning power plants, a linchpin of its program to combat global warming.
“Attorney General Pruitt has great qualifications and a good record,” Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said in response to protests from environmentalists and others over the pick.
She said Trump interviewed several candidates for the post.
Pruitt disputes the mainstream scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet at an alarming rate and that world governments must act aggressively to limit emissions if they are to avoid catastrophic consequences.
He has also fought EPA anti-pollution rules.
“Pruitt could be the most hostile EPA administrator toward clean air and safe drinking water in history,” said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group.
Pruitt would not be empowered to cancel the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which sets goals for states to meet in reducing their carbon pollution. But he could decline to defend the plan in court or attempt to slow its implementation. The emissions rules are unlikely to be effective if enforced by an EPA chief who opposes them.
Major environmental groups and Democrats responded to Trump’s pick of Pruitt with alarm. They vowed a spirited confirmation fight.
“For the sake of the air we breathe, the water we drink and the planet we will leave our children, the head of the EPA cannot be a stenographer for the lobbyists of polluters and Big Oil,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “Pruitt has brazenly used his office as a vehicle for the agenda of big polluters and climate deniers in the courts — and he could do immense damage as the administrator of the EPA.”
Pelosi’s comments referred to a 2014 New York Times report that found energy lobbyists drafted letters for Pruitt to send to federal agencies and Obama, outlining the hardships of federal regulations. Several opponents cited the letters in charging that Pruitt is unqualified for the EPA post.
Pruitt co-authored an article in May for National Review with Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange that insisted the climate debate is “far from settled.”
“Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind,” the attorneys general wrote.
Trump campaigned as an unflinching crusader for fossil fuels. He has called climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese and pledged repeatedly to scrap the global climate treaty the United States signed last year in Paris with 195 other nations.
Also Wednesday, Trump picked Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad as the next ambassador to China, tapping a Republican with long ties to Beijing less than a week after the president-elect’s controversial phone conversation with the president of Taiwan.
Branstad was chosen because he was Iowa’s “longest-serving governor” who had a “tremendous understanding of China and the Chinese people,” said Jason Miller, a spokesman for Trump’s transition team.
The naming of Branstad, 70, an early and fierce loyalist to Trump, indicated interest in keeping good relations with China. Branstad has had ties to Beijing through numerous agricultural trade deals, and he has known Chinese President Xi Jinping for years.
In 1985, Branstad, during his first stint as Iowa governor, met with a midlevel Chinese bureaucrat on an agricultural trade mission who spoke little English and had barely traveled outside China.
The next time that Chinese official visited Iowa was 2012, and he was about to become China’s president and general secretary of its Communist Party. Xi hadn’t forgotten the warm reception he received during the two-week trip 27 years earlier.
The Trump transition team announced another selection for the Cabinet, adding former wrestling executive Linda McMahon as leader of the Small Business Administration.
McMahon, 68, and her husband, Vince, built World Wrestling Entertainment from a regional company run by Vince’s father into a publicly traded entertainment giant.
She also poured $100 million of her fortune into unsuccessful bids for a U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut and has become an influential GOP donor — including to the Trump campaign.