Scott Pruitt on a mission to change the culture of the EPA

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt isn’t just dismantling the Clean Power Plan and other high-profile environmental programs of the Obama era. He’s on a mission to re-engineer the agency’s culture by returning power to states and away from the Washington bureaucrats and coastal elites he said have led it astray. The EPA, for example, is doing away with the “sue-and-settle” approach that Pruitt said improperly allowed the Obama administration to circumvent laws by rewriting regulations behind closed doors with friendly environmental groups who filed lawsuits. The agency also has rewritten membership rules for the agency’s advisory boards, so that both industry advocates and academics from Midwestern and Mountain states — which Pruitt said were under-represented — have greater influence when counseling agency leaders on new rules. And he’s adopted a “red team/blue team” model designed to challenge climate change assumptions that global warming is occurring and humans are the primary cause — a view endorsed both by the vast majority of scientists and by a massive federal report the White House issued earlier this month. Pruitt, who challenged the Clean Power Plan as Oklahoma attorney general, said he’s plowing ahead with the rollback of the rule designed to curb carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants despite the report’s conclusions. And he said the red team/blue team approach that promotes “curious inquiry and continued analysis” is integral to the rigorous self-analysis he believes the EPA has been lacking in recent years...more