ThinkProgress

Fox News host calls on Trump to fire Scott Pruitt

But President Trump still has full confidence in Pruitt.

Natasha Geiling       April 23, 2018

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt speaks to the press at a news conference at the EPA on April 2, 2018 in Washington, D.C. Credit: Jason Andrew/Getty Images

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt is facing more friendly fire after this weekend, as a fourth Republican representative along with a Fox News host called on Pruitt to resign following a barrage of scandals.

On Sunday, in response to a question on Twitter, Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ) said that Pruitt “should resign” and that he was the “wrong fit from the start for [sic] agency dedicated to protecting our environment.”

Frank LoBiondo: Yes EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt should resign. Wrong fit from start for agency dedicated to protecting our environment. #EarthDay2018 reinforces our need to promote pristine planet via clean air & water, leaving it better for future generations. Requires leadership & balance. https://twitter.com/buckeye1960osu1/status/987829657096654853

LoBiondo is the fifth Republican lawmaker, and fourth Republican representative, to call for Pruitt to resign. In the House, Reps. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY) have all called for Pruitt to step down. In the Senate, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) remains the only Republican to call for Pruitt’s resignation, though a number have expressed concern with Pruitt’s apparent various ethical lapses.

Last week, 170 lawmakers — all Democrats — from both the House and the Senate introduced a resolution calling for Pruitt to resign.

170 lawmakers sign resolution calling for Scott Pruitt’s resignation, including zero Republicans

But Pruitt is also facing fire from outside of the halls of Congress. On Sunday, former adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron and L.A.-based Fox News host Steve Hilton called for Trump to fire Pruitt, arguing that the EPA administrator has become a walking example of the kind of “swampy” mentality that Trump promised to end.

“What we need is for President Trump to take the lead, fire Scott Pruitt, and throw out the lobbyists from his administration,” Hilton said.

Hilton’s call for Pruitt’s resignation isn’t the first time that Fox News has taken an antagonistic position towards the administrator’s growing canon of scandals.

In early April, Fox News reporter Ed Henry pressed Pruitt on whether he approved raises for two political aides despite the White House not approving those pay increases. Pruitt denied he had knowledge of the raises, but later reporting revealed that Pruitt was privy to the details.

The growing chorus calling for Pruitt’s resignation comes as new information broke late last week about Pruitt’s dealings with a lobbyist couple from whom he rented a room in Washington.

In early April, ABC News reported that for a six month period during his first year as administrator, Pruitt rented a luxury condo on Capitol Hill from the wife of Steven Hart, a prominent D.C. energy lobbyist. Pruitt paid just $50 a night for the condo, and his daughter stayed there for a period of time during the summer while she was interning in D.C. — leading ethics experts to question whether the agreement constituted a gift from the lobbyist family.

Everything we know about Scott Pruitt’s infamous Capitol Hill apartment

Pruitt and Hart maintained that neither engaged in any business between the EPA and any of Hart’s clients while Pruitt was staying in the condo. On Sunday, however, the Guardian reported that Pruitt and Hart did indeed meet at the EPA in July of 2017 (while Pruitt was staying in Hart’s wife’s condo) to discuss efforts to preserve the Chesapeake Bay.

Also on Sunday, White House legislative director Marc Short told NBC’s Chuck Todd that President Trump still has full confidence in Pruitt.

“Scott Pruitt is doing a phenomenal job and the president is happy with him,” Short said on “Meet the Press.”

On Friday, Hart announced that he would be stepping down from his role of chairman at Williams & Jensen, a D.C.-based lobbying firm that represents companies like Exxon and Enbridge.

The Guardian

Pruitt promised polluters EPA will value their profits over American lives

Dana Nuccitelli, The Guardian            April 23, 2018 

Pruitt is one of TIME’s 100 most influential people for his efforts to maximize polluters’ profits 

President Trump listens to EPA Administrator Pruitt after announcing decision to withdraw from Paris Climate Agreement in the White House Rose Garden in Washington. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

TIME magazine announced last week that Trump’s EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is among their 100 most influential people of 2018. George W. Bush’s former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman delivered the scathing explanation:

If his actions continue in the same direction, during Pruitt’s term at the EPA the environment will be threatened instead of protected, and human health endangered instead of preserved, all with no long-term benefit to the economy.

As a perfect example of those actions, the Daily Caller recently reported that at a gathering at the fossil fuel-funded Heritage Institute, Pruitt announced that the EPA and federal government will soon end two important science-based practices in evaluating the costs and benefits of regulations.

Regulating pollutants has “co-benefits,” like saving lives

When the EPA regulates pollutants, the practice often yields what are called “co-benefits.” For example, limiting allowable mercury pollution can force dirty coal power plants to install pollution-control equipment or shut down. Since coal plants produce other pollutants like soot, the regulations not only reduce mercury levels, but also particulate matter in the air. The latter isn’t an intended consequence of the regulations, but creating cleaner air and healthier Americans are unintended “co-benefits” of limiting another pollutant.

In doing cost-benefit analyses, the EPA accounts for all direct benefits and indirect co-benefits of its regulations. Certain industry groups and conservative pundits don’t like that approach, because they care more about polluter profits than they do about clean air and healthy Americans. However, during the George W. Bush administration in 2003, the Office of Management and Budget issued a guidance saying that it’s important to consider co-benefits:

Your analysis should look beyond the direct benefits and direct costs of your rulemaking and consider any important ancillary benefits and countervailing risks. An ancillary benefit is a favorable impact of the rule that is typically unrelated or secondary to the statutory purpose of the rulemaking (e.g., reduced refinery emissions due to more stringent fuel economy standards for light trucks)

Pruitt wants to disregard this Bush-era guidance and instead consider only the costs and benefits of regulating the “targeted pollutant” (mercury, in our example). They want to ignore the lives saved by also incidentally reducing particulate matter pollution. To be blunt, this makes no sense, unless your goal is to protect polluters at the expense of public and environmental health.

As a backup argument, industry groups argue that the EPA overestimates these co-benefits because particulate matter (specifically, PM2.5) isn’t harmful to human health below a certain threshold value. Not coincidentally, Pruitt’s EPA hired a scientist who has argued that American air is “a little too clean for optimum health.” However, EPA looked at the associated science and issued a memo in 2012 concluding:

Studies demonstrate an association between premature mortality and fine particle pollution at the lowest levels measured in the relevant studies, levels that are significantly below the [National Ambient Air Quality Standards] for fine particles. These studies have not observed a level at which premature mortality effects do not occur. The best scientific evidence, confirmed by independent, Congressionally-mandated expert panels, is that there is no threshold level of fine particle pollution below which health risk reductions are not achieved by reduced exposure.

The bottom line is that when considering all effects, the benefits of EPA pollutant regulations often far outweigh their costs. However, the American public sees the benefits in the form of cleaner air and water, better health, and avoided premature deaths, while industries bear the costs of complying with the regulations by reducing their pollution. Hence industry groups and their allies in the Pruitt EPA are trying to cook the books to favor profits over public health. It’s worth reflecting on the disparity between the president’s claims that EPA’s goal is to achieve “record clean Air & Water” and its apparent actual goal of maximizing polluter industry profits.

Climate costs get a similar treatment

At the Heartland Institute gathering, Pruitt also promised that the Trump administration will stop using the ‘social cost of carbon’ – an estimate of how much carbon pollution costs society via added climate damages – in crafting regulations. The Obama administration first started using the social cost of carbon in cost-benefit analyses of various government regulations. For example, when the Department of Energy considers stricter energy efficiency standards for appliances, it will account for the benefits of slowing climate change by reducing electricity consumption. Industry groups challenged that policy in court, but the Obama administration won.

Under Trump and Pruitt, the EPA has started engaging in bogus accounting to deflate the estimated social cost of carbon, and now Pruitt has promised they’ll stop using it altogether. It’s simply another way for the EPA to put industry profits above public health benefits.

Environmental groups are ready to take Pruitt to court

Pruitt hasn’t yet made good on these promises to the polluting industries, but if he does, environmental groups are confident they can beat him in court. David Doniger, senior strategic director of the National Resource Defense Council’s climate & clean energy program told me:

If Pruitt finalizes the Clean Power Plan repeal or any other rule by revising consideration of co-benefits in this way, or dropping them entirely, you can be 100% sure that we and others will sue, probably in D.C. Circuit challenges to his actions. We are confident the courts will hold this reversal of practice arbitrary and capricious. The only sound way to assess the benefits of a rule, and to weigh them against costs when that is allowed, is to assess all the benefits that can be reasonably expected to come from the action. 

It’s worth remembering that “The mission of EPA is to protect human health and the environment.” The mission of the Pruitt EPA seems to be maximizing polluting industry profits at the expense of human health and the environment.

It’s also important not to let Pruitt’s rank corruption and scandals distract from the damage he’s doing to EPA’s mission. As Christine Todd Whitman noted, the whole world is worse for Trump having nominated and the Senate GOP having confirmed Scott Pruitt to lead the EPA into a new era of maximizing industry profits and pollution at the expense of public and environmental health.

EcoWatch

5 Environmental Victories to Inspire You This Earth Day

Olivia Rosane       April 20, 2018

Planet Earth is at a crisis point. Researchers say we have to begin reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 if we want to meet the temperature goals outlined in the Paris agreement and avoid catastrophic climate change.

The work to be done can seem overwhelming. A survey published this week found that only 6 percent of Americans think we will succeed in reducing global warming.

But Earth Day weekend is no time to give up! History has shown that when human beings come together to face environmental challenges, we are capable of making the planet a healthier, happier place for humans and non-humans alike.

Here are five environmental victories to inspire you this Earth Day.

1. The First Earth Day Creates a Movement

Before the first Earth Day in 1970, polluted rivers in the U.S. sometimes caught fire, and industry polluted the air without worrying about consequences. Then Sen. Gaylord Nelson decided to launch a “national teach-in on the environment,” drawing on the tactics of the anti-war movement to unite different struggles against pollution, oil spills and wilderness depletion under a single green umbrella. Twenty million Americans participated in the first Earth Day and it led to major legislative victories, such as the formation of the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, which set out to make all U.S. rivers swimmable and fishable again, and insured they would no longer be flammable.

As hard as it might be to believe in today’s political climate, that first Earth Day was a bi-partisan affair. Nelson reached out to Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey to act as the day’s co-chair, in a model of the kind of bipartisan collaboration we need to tackle today’s environmental challenges.

2. The U.S. Saves Its Symbol

One of the factors that raised environmental consciousness in the U.S. in the decade leading up to the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. In the book, Carson explained how the widely-used pesticide DDT entered the food chain, killing many more insects than targeted and harming the birds who feasted on the insects, including bald eagles.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), a year after Carson’s book was published, there were only 487 nesting pairs left in the country. But the U.S. acted to save its national bird. In 1972, the nascent EPA banned DDT, and, in 1978, the species was listed as endangered, five years after the passage of the Endangered Species Act. In 2007, the FWS announced that the bald eagle had entirely recovered.

3. International Collaboration Closes the Ozone Hole

As insurmountable as global climate change seems at times, there is precedent for nations coming together to solve an environmental problem. When a hole in the ozone layer, which protects the Earth from the ultraviolet rays that cause skin cancer and harm plants, was discovered in the 1980s, nations came together and finalized the Montreal Protocol in 1987.

The protocol banned ozone-depleting products such as chlorofluorocarbons that were used in refrigerants and aerosol sprays. And it worked. A 2018 NASA study found that the reduction in ozone-depleting chemicals had resulted in 20 percent less ozone depletion since 2005.

4. The Green Belt Movement Plants More Than 50 Million Trees

Prof. Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her role in founding the Green Belt Movement. Fredrick Onyango

In the 1970s, Prof. Wangari Maathai listened to the complaints of women in rural Kenya who told her that they had to walk further for fuel, their local streams were drying, and their food supply was more precarious. Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1972 to encourage them to plant trees in order to improve the soil, store rainwater, and provide fuel and food. Tree planting led to grassroots activism as the women realized the deterioration of their land was also the result of government policies. Overall, the movement has planted more than 51 million trees since its founding.

5. Maori Win 140-Year-Old Environmental Court Case

In 2017, New Zealand’s parliament granted the Whanganui River, called Te Awa Tupua by the Maori, the legal rights of a person, something the local Maori had petitioned for since 1873. The move honored the persistence of indigenous activists, who are often on the forefront of struggles to protect the environment, and signals that settler governments might finally be willing to learn from a worldview that places fewer separations between human beings and the planet. The legislation included money for compensation and for improving the river’s health, and paved the way for Mount Taranaki to be offered similar legal status later that year.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

5 Ways to Make This Earth Day Really Count ›

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Earth Day 2018 | Earth Day Network ›

EcoWatch – Greenpeace

7 Things You Can Do to Create a Plastic-Free Future

By Jen Fela     April 21, 2018

We’re celebrating a huge moment in the global movement for a plastic-free future: More than one million people around the world have called on big corporations to do their part to end single-use plastics.

Now we’re taking the next big step. We’re setting an ambitious new goal: A Million Acts of Blue.

What’s an Act of Blue?

An Act of Blue is any action that helps to stop single-use plastic from being created in the first place. It’s inspired by love for our amazing blue planet and the urgent need to protect our oceans, waterways, landscapes and communities. It aims to hold corporations accountable for the plastic pollution crisis they helped to create.

Our marine life shouldn’t have to live in a sea of plastic.

Ways to create change in your community.

We’ve created a comprehensive guide to creating change in your community with several kinds of actions you can take. These range from learning and sharing your passion for this issue to passing legislation in your city. Get started today to create a plastic-free future!

1. Learn, share and join

The first step towards action is knowledge. Are you a member of a community group that is eager to learn more about how they can protect our oceans and communities? Maybe your child’s teacher is looking for ways to teach kids about environmental protection? Our toolkit has powerpoints and tips for giving a presentation—you can even host a movie night!

2. Be heard in the media

If you want to make change in your community, start with local media! Local newspapers, blogs and magazines are a great venue for getting the word out. In the toolkit, we walk you through how to write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper and how to get it published.

3. Help create plastic-free supermarkets and restaurants

Nowhere is the dominance of single-use plastics and wasteful packaging more obvious than at the local supermarket. Make waves in your community by working to get a local supermarket to reduce their use of single-use plastics.

4. Get restaurants to ditch single-use plastics

Fed up with all the plastic straws and utensils at fast food places and cafes? Join the growing movement urging establishments to get rid of throwaway plastic products.

5. Lobby for local legislation

All over the world, towns, cities and villages are standing up for a plastic-free future by implementing local bans and laws restricting the use of throwaway plastic. Be part of this movement by working with your neighbors to get your local government to do the same.

6. Organize a local cleanup and #BreakFreeFromPlastic brand audit

Everyone loves a cleanup event, so why not take it to the next level? Get your community together to clean up a local beach, park, or riverbank—but don’t stop there. Go through the single-use plastics collected and identify which companies produced them. Let’s hold corporations responsible for their plastic waste!

7. Start a community group!

You don’t have to go it alone. We have a lot of work to do, and we’ll get a lot further—and have more fun—together. Get some friends and neighbors together for a plastic-free future!

Greenpeace and MCS (Marine Conservation Society) Mull Beach Clean at Kilninian Beach with pupils from Ulver Primary School, Isle Of Mull. Greenpeace brought its ship the Beluga II on an expedition of scientific research around Scotland, sampling seawater for microplastics and documenting the impact of ocean plastic on some of the UK’s most precious marine life.

Excited to get started? Check out the full Million Acts of Blue toolkit to find out more about how you can work in your own community to end single-use plastics.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Call for a Plastic-Free Future – Greenpeace International ›

World’s First Plastic-Free Supermarket Aisle Debuts in the Netherlands ›

85,000 Petition Supermarket Giant to Open Plastic-Free Aisle ›

Scientists Accidentally Develop ‘Mutant’ Enzyme That Eats Plastic ›