The Unscrupulous Critics of Scott Pruitt

They can’t rest until the EPA goes back to the regulatory philosophy of Al Armendariz.

George Neumayr May 11, 2018

Under Obama, the EPA and the Sierra Club might as well have shared offices. EPA staffers would routinely hatch plots to cripple business in the name of this or that “scientific” scam. Al Armendariz, one of Obama’s regional EPA administrators, let the cat out of the bag in 2010 when he admitted that the agency regulated businesses with arbitrary severity. He bragged about this bullying regulation in a speech, likening the EPA’s regulatory regime to that of brutal Roman despots:

 I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting, but I’ll go ahead and tell you what I said. It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them. Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.

Armendariz quit after these remarks triggered a backlash. But he soon found employment at the Sierra Club. He became a spearhead of its “Beyond Coal” program. Naturally, he is one of Scott Pruitt’s staunchest critics.
 

“Texans should be worried,” he said to Houston Public Media, referring to Pruitt’s proposed cuts to the EPA budget. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some polluters see this as an opportunity to cut corners, to look for loopholes, to try to take shortcuts.… Because they know the environmental cops are not going to be on the beat anymore.”..........To Read More.....