In conciliatory and welcoming tones, Scott Pruitt did his best to introduce himself yesterday at the Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters. The urbane environmentalists in Washington, D.C. must have thought their new boss from Oklahoma quite quaint.
One employee summed up the opinion of the agency after the speech, telling E&E News that Pruitt actually “thinks that you can still save the environment, yet have economic growth.”
In doing so, that faceless bureaucrat perfectly described the challenge facing the new EPA administrator. Conservative environmentalists must figure out how to police polluters without endangering industry.
Pruitt first did battle with the EPA as Oklahoma’s attorney general, suing the agency to block the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan and the Waters of the United States rules. Now President Trump expects him to overhaul the EPA to ease the regulatory burden on business. Obviously, that’s easier said than done.
Under the last president, the EPA felled entire forests for the paper needed to print nearly 4,000 regulations on 33,000 pages in the Federal Register. After eight years, the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power concluded Obama’s EPA regulations added an average of $50 billion dollars in regulatory cost each year. That regulatory burden, according to the American Action Forum, costs upwards of $800 billion for business.
Now chief of the EPA, Pruitt must help that EPA start making nice with industry. Clearly, he thinks that environmentalism and capitalism can coexist. But the real question is whether EPA employees think that’s possible.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
