Week 40: Why Scott Pruitt Death Threats Are Bad for the Environment
Published by the Natural Resources Defense Fund
Welcome to our weekly Trump v. Earth column, in which onEarth reviews the environment-related shenanigans of President Trump and his allies.
Photo of Scott Pruitt via Gage Skidmore
The Pruitt Protection Agency
You don’t like Scott Pruitt. I don’t like him, either. He’s arguably the worst administrator in the history of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He’s a puppet for the country’s biggest polluters, and he’s trying to disassemble our environmental protections brick by brick.
But if you’re calling in death threats against Pruitt, please stop.
It’s wrong to threaten to kill anyone (even someone who puts public health in jeopardy for personal and political gain). If you don’t care about that, consider this: Every time Pruitt feels threatened, the agency diverts more of its dwindling budget away from enforcing environmental laws and toward his personal security detail.
Patrick Sullivan, EPA assistant inspector general, told CNN this week, “We have at least four times—four to five times the number of threats against Mr. Pruitt than we had” against his predecessor, Gina McCarthy. As a result, the agency is now hiring 12 additional guards, bringing Pruitt’s full-security squad to 30. In just three months, protecting the EPA chief cost the agency more than $800,000—and that’s before the detail increased by 67 percent. Now we’re looking at $2 million annually in salaries alone. Officials formerly responsible for enforcing environmental laws have been reassigned to protecting their boss.
That’s not all. Pruitt is so worried about his safety that the EPA recently spent almost $16,000 to install a card reader and an alarm at headquarters to notify agents of an intruder. The agency is considering adding biometric identification to its office-security system. And a Pruitt aide must now let the cleaning staff in, because they aren’t allowed to have their own access cards.
When asked how her cleaners accessed the office when she ran the agency, former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman answered, “I guess they entered once I was gone,” presumably with a shrug.
This situation is bad for everyone: the environment, the cleaning staff, the lowly aide who has to be at work by 7 A.M., and especially the security guards who have to spend their weekends with Scott Pruitt.
Something’s Fishy
Puerto Rico’s state-owned utility company has hired Whitefish Energy to restore its electrical grid after the devastation of Hurricane Maria. As a headline, this doesn’t sound so strange. But there are many things about this decision that will raise eyebrows from San Juan to Washington, D.C., to Flathead County, Montana.
Whitefish is a peculiar choice for this job, a massive undertaking that will cost at least $300 million. Puerto Rico’s grid was already crumbling before the hurricane, and the project will require hundreds of people working around the clock. Whitefish has just two full-time employees, and the company is only two years old.
Traditionally, when a utility is in distress, it activates “mutual aid” agreements with utilities in other areas. The other power providers can quickly swoop in to restore service after a storm. “The fact that there are so many utilities with experience in this and a huge track record of helping each other out, it is at least odd why [the utility] would go to Whitefish,” Susan F. Tierney, a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy and state regulatory agencies, told the Washington Post. “I’m scratching my head wondering how it all adds up.”
Scratch no more: Whitefish Energy is named after its hometown, Whitefish, Montana, which also happens to be the hometown of U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. The company’s chief executive, Andy Techmanski, knows Zinke, and one of Zinke’s sons spent a summer working on one of Techmanski’s construction sites.
At present, both Techmanski and Zinke deny that Zinke played any role in the assigning of the Puerto Rico contract to Whitefish Energy. However, it doesn’t look good that there was no formal bidding process on this enormous contract, which is well beyond anything the company has handled in the past.
Congress has begun to examine the deal, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Congress’s track record of holding the Trump administration accountable is, let’s say, смешанный.
No Oil Left Behind
The Interior Department announced this week that in March “all available un-leased areas on the Gulf’s Outer Continental Shelf” will be open for bidding to the offshore oil and gas industry. The newly available territory totals 77 million acres, which is about the size of New Mexico. This would be the largest group of oil and gas leases in U.S. history.
The Interior Department’s counselor for energy policy, Vincent DeVito, says we need these leases because “Americans do not want to be dependent on foreign oil.” I have good news for Mr. DeVito: We’re not dependent on foreign oil. The United States produced 75 percent of the oil we consumed in 2016, in net terms. In recent years, we have reached a nearly five-decade low in our dependence on foreign oil. Of course, we shouldn’t be celebrating oil production, even if it is domestic (because it leads to more climate change), but these leases solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
The Interior Department also assures us that the offshore oil drilling will be “safe and environmentally sound.” You may have heard that one before. In fact, President Obama also fell for the oil industry’s bogus assurances. On April 2, 2010, he told a town hall that “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills.” Just 18 days later, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank, killing 11 people and spewing more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the course of 87 days. It was the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Drilling-safety improvements have still not been fully implemented, and yet, the oil industry and its political pals continue to make the outrageous claim that offshore spills won’t happen.
Opening the entire drillable area of the Gulf of Mexico to oil rigs is an invitation to disaster. Of course, since it will take years before the drilling begins, President Trump and Ryan Zinke probably won’t be around to take responsibility when there is an accident. Not that they would.
Obstructin’ Liz
The EPA press office used to answer questions about environmental quality and the enforcement of public health standards. Now they just insult people. This week, Inside Climate News described the agency’s worrying, if unsurprising, new communications strategy.
When asked about the EPA’s diminishing regulation of toxic chemicals, spokesperson Liz Bowman accused a New York Times reporter of writing “elitist clickbait.” The agency also accused an Associated Press reporter of having “a history of not letting the facts get in the way of his story” in a highly unusual ad hominem attack from a government agency. (Not to mention, the AP story was accurate.)
One wonders if President Trump himself has coached the agency’s communications staff.
onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
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