This story was originally published by the New Republic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Later this week, the Senate is expected to hand over control of the Environmental Protection Agency to environmentalistsâ worst nightmare. Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general, has spent his career waging legal battles against clean air, climate, and water regulations. He has sued the EPA more than a dozen times, participating in what The New York Times described as âan unprecedented, secretive allianceâ with fossil fuel companies to fight Obama-era environmental regulations. He has helped collect millions in political donations from the very industries he will be tasked with regulating. Heâs called climate science a âreligious belief,â and his official biography even boasts that heâs âa leading advocate against the EPAâs activist agenda.â
Given all this, liberals ought to be as furious about Pruitt as they were about Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, two other cabinet picks whose expressed ideologies are at odds with agencies they were chosen to head. (DeVos, who is in charge of Americaâs public education system, is best-known for her support of private school vouchers; Sessions, whose job it is to protect Americansâ civil rights, has spent much of his career disenfranchising voters in the name of non-existent voter fraud.) And yet, in terms of public interest and outrage, Pruitt has not risen to the level of his controversial cabinet colleagues.
This observation is apparent to anyone who regularly consumes political news, and Google Trends backs it up. Pruitt spiked only once, on Dec. 8, when President Donald Trump announced his nomination:
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Pruitt didnât even spike on Jan. 18, the day he testified before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Perhaps this is because he survived the hearing largely unscathed. Contra Trump, he acknowledged that climate change was not a hoax, though he did question the degree of humansâ responsibility for it. Or perhaps his hearing got little attention because, in a hearing a day earlier, DeVos made her infamous remark about schools needing guns as protection from grizzly bears.
Environmental advocates lament the lack of DeVos-scale opposition to Pruitt. Ken Kimmel, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), said his organization and others have made opposition to Pruittâs nomination a top priority over the last few months. âItâs certainly not for lack of issues, or lack of trying,â he said. âThereâs been press releases, TV ads, letters to the editor … Weâve been doing outreach to a targeted group of Republican senators in the hopes that we can turn this around.â
The failure of this campaign to gain traction could be related to a longstanding challenge that green groups face on a national scale: how to make climate change a personal matter. While some Americans do live in areas directly impacted by sea-level rise and other climate-related maladies, âmost people go through their whole lives never having any interaction with the Environmental Protection Agency,â said John Coequyt, director of Sierra Clubâs climate campaign.
That, along with a Trump-saturated news media environment, is why anti-Pruitt messaging has struggled to break through, Coequyt says: âPeople want a strong EPA, but they donât know about it the way that they know about the Department of Justice and their childrens’ schools.â Thus, climate change is perceived as a less immediate issue than DeVosâs threat to their kidsâ education or Sessionsâ threat to their voting rights.
UCSâs Kimmel disagreed with that premise and instead criticized the press — particularly what he described as a lack of media attention on Pruittâs close relationship with the fossil fuel industry. He cited dismal coverage of a pending court case against Pruitt that seeks more than 3,000 emails between Pruittâs office and numerous fossil fuel companies and conservative groups. Those emails were requested by the liberal watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) two years ago. Pruittâs office has only provided 411 of those 3,000 emails, and has not yet explained why.
CMD Research Director Nick Surgey, who filed the lawsuit against Pruitt and has been tracking his fossil fuel industry ties for more than two years, said heâs seen âa triplingâ of media interest in the email controversy over the last week. But otherwise, heâs been disappointed in the reaction to Pruittâs nomination. âI donât think it has been covered adequately,â he said. But thatâs not necessarily the mediaâs fault, he added. Pruitt has âeffectively closed the doorâ on information about his ties to the industry by refusing to comply with CMDâs and othersâ records requests, and failing to answer questions from the media over the course of the nomination process.
âSo even though that tells a story of a person who doesnât want to talk about that record — and that should tell reporters something — he has really starved the media from having oxygen on this,â Surgey said. âItâs pretty concerning to have someone who would basically be the worldâs top environmental regulator who doesnât want to talk about the relationship heâs had to an industry heâd regulate.â