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EPA’s Scott Pruitt: The Great Disruptor

EPA’s Scott Pruitt: The Great Disruptor

Reprinted with permission fromAlterNet.

On January 17, a congressional hearing to confirm Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s chosen appointee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, was held in Washington, D.C. Now, anybody who knows anything about fracking or oil well drilling knows that wherever there’s a roomful of well-dressed executives, oil probably ain’t far behind. So, I figured there was going to be a lot of oil people in that room just listening to themselves talking to each other. I also thought they needed a little education from someone who knows a lot about oil from a somewhat different perspective: namely, me.

Wearing a BP (British Petroleum) jumpsuit and a white hard hat, with a black rubber hose slung over my shoulder, I entered the confirmation hearing. I used yellow crime tape to mark off my dirty oil claim, and then I attempted to set up a fracking operation within the hearing.

While I succeeded in disrupting the congressional hearing of Scott Pruitt to become the head of the EPA, I didn’t get very far. I was arrested and taken to jail while Pruitt went on to be confirmed to lead the very agency he has spent years trying to dismantle.

A few days after Pruitt’s February 17 confirmation, over 6,000 pages of his emails were made public. They prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the new head of the EPA has been working hand-in-glove with big oil and gas producers, electric utilities, and political groups with links to the billionaire Koch brothers to gut environmental regulations.

For me, this affront is personal. I am a fourth-generation shrimper, born and bred in a small Texas fishing village. For the last 25 years, I have been tracking the comings and goings of the oil and petrochemical industries impacting my small Calhoun County.

In 1989, Calhoun County was number-one in the country, as documented by the EPA Toxic Release Inventory, for industry generated toxic waste. My county had half the toxic waste in Texas—more specifically, in a landfill near Lavaca Bay. A couple of years later, Matagorda Bay (adjoining Lavaca Bay) was considered the largest underwater mercury Superfund site in the United States. Alcoa’s personal internal documents reported approximately 1,200,000 pounds of mercury was “lost” to the environment.

In 2001, Texas A&M studies documented DNA damage in the local oysters and the cattle downwind of our petrochemical industry. In the interim years, an entire community was bought out by a petrochemical giant, and my own fishing community that once supported five fish houses and 120 shrimp boats was reduced to two shrimp boats and zero fish houses.

The devastation wasn’t limited to Calhoun County. Similar sacrificial communities on the Gulf Coast have been inundated by the chemical and oil industries.

Try to wrap your mind around these sobering facts: Occupational Safety and Health Administration reported 4,800 Americans are killed every year by industrial accidents, and another 55,000 die from occupational diseases. In addition, the U.S. has about 90 facilities—including chemical factories, refineries and water-treatment plants—that in a worst-case scenario, would pose risks to more than one million people. About 400 other facilities could pose risks to more than 100,000 people.

Now, this is a lot of trust to place in an EPA head who doesn’t see the value of regulations and who used most of his energy as Oklahoma’s attorney general fighting the very agency he is now leading. He repeatedly sued the EPA during the Obama administration, challenging the agency’s legal authority to regulate toxic mercury pollution, smog, carbon emissions from power plants, and the quality of wetland and other waters. He has proudly described himself as a “leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.”

I have no illusions about Pruitt doing the right thing. I may have disrupted his hearing, but he has consistently used his power to disrupt and destroy our communities and the environment. Thanks to all the senators who are beholden to Big Oil, Pruitt is now poised to do even more damage. It will take a lot more citizen disruptors to stop him. Who’s with me?

Diane Wilson is a fourth-generation shrimper, environmental activist and peace advocate from the Texas Gulf Coast.

IMAGE: Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma speaking at the 2016 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Gage Skidmore/Flickr

In A Nod To The Energy Industry, Pruitt Says EPA Can Also Be Pro-Jobs

In A Nod To The Energy Industry, Pruitt Says EPA Can Also Be Pro-Jobs

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The new head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday that America need not choose between jobs and the environment, in a nod to the energy industry, as the White House prepares executive orders that could come as soon as this week to roll back Obama-era regulation.

“I believe that we as an agency, and we as a nation, can be both pro-energy and jobs, and pro-environment,” Scott Pruitt said in his first address to staff. “We don’t have to choose between the two.”

Critics of the agency have complained that regulations ushered in by former Democratic President Barack Obama have killed thousands of energy jobs by restricting carbon emissions and limiting areas open to coal mining and oil drilling.

Democrats, environmental advocates, and many of the EPA’s current and former staff worry President Donald Trump’s appointment of Pruitt signals a reversal in America’s progress toward cleaner air and water and fighting global climate change.

Both Trump and Pruitt have expressed doubts about climate change, and Trump vowed during his 2016 presidential campaign to pull the United States out of a global pact to fight it. The Republican president has promised to slash environmental rules to help the drilling and mining industries, but without hurting air and water quality.

Pruitt sued the agency he now leads more than a dozen times while attorney general of Oklahoma to stop federal rules. He did not mention climate change in his 12-minute speech at the EPA’s headquarters in Washington.

He struck a conciliatory tone in the address, saying he would “listen, learn, and lead” and that he valued the contributions of career staff.

Trump is expected to sign executive orders aimed at reshaping environmental policy as early as this week. Those orders would lift a ban on coal mining leases on federal lands and ease greenhouse gas emissions curbs on electric utilities, according to a report by the Washington Post.

They would also require changes to Obama’s Waters of the United States rule that details which waterways fall under federal protection, the report said.

The White House did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the Washington Post story.

Pruitt was confirmed by the U.S. Senate last week after contentious hearings that focused on his record as the top prosecutor of the oil- and gas-producing state of Oklahoma.

Democrats had sought to delay Pruitt’s confirmation over questions about his ties to the oil industry. Some 800 former EPA staff also signed a letter urging senators to reject him, and about 30 current EPA staff joined a protest set up in Chicago by the Sierra Club environmental group.

In Oklahoma, a state judge ruled last week that Pruitt would have to turn over emails between his office and energy companies by Tuesday after a watchdog group, the Center for Media and Democracy, sued for their release.

The judge will review and perhaps hold back some of the emails before releasing them, a court clerk said.

Nicole Cantello, a representative of the union that represents EPA workers, said that despite Pruitt’s record, she was hoping for the best.

“One would hope that the administrator would learn about what we do and would then not treat as lightly the EPA’s mission and accomplishments, and what it is required to do under the statutes,” she said.

The American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, said it looked forward to working with Pruitt, the administration and Congress “on policies that will keep energy affordable, create jobs, and strengthen our economy.”

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Writing by Richard Valdmanis; Editing by Alistair Bell and Peter Cooney)

IMAGE: Director of Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt is sworn in by Justice Samuel Alito at the Executive Office in Washington, U.S., February 17, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Several States Have Tons Of Sun But Rules That Prevent Harnessing Its Power

Several States Have Tons Of Sun But Rules That Prevent Harnessing Its Power

By Evan Halper, Tribune Washington Bureau

Few places in the country are as warm and bright as Mary Wilkerson’s property on the beach near St. Petersburg, Fla., a city once noted in the Guinness Book of World Records for a 768-day stretch of sunny days.

But while Florida advertises itself as the Sunshine State, power company executives and regulators have worked successfully to keep most Floridians from using that sunshine to generate their own power.

Wilkerson discovered the paradox when she set out to harness sunlight into electricity for the vintage cottages she rents out at Indian Rocks Beach. She would have had an easier time installing solar panels, she found, if she had put the homes on a flatbed and transported them to chilly Massachusetts.

“My husband and I are looking at each other and saying, ‘This is absurd,’ ” said Wilkerson, whose property is so sunny that a European guest under doctor’s orders to treat sunlight deprivation returns every year. The guest, who has solar panels on his home in Germany, is bewildered by their scarcity in a place with such abundant light.

Florida is one of several states, mostly in the Southeast, that combine copious sunshine with extensive rules designed to block its use by homeowners to generate power.

States like Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York — not known for clear, blue skies — have outpaced their counterparts to the south in the installation of rooftop solar panels.

While the precise rules vary from state to state, one explanation is the same: opposition from utilities grown nervous by the rapid encroachment of solar firms on their business.

The business models that have made solar systems financially viable for millions of homeowners in California, New England, and elsewhere around the country are largely illegal in Florida, Virginia, South Carolina, and some other Southern states. Companies that pioneered the industry, such as SolarCity Corp. and Sunrun Inc., do not even attempt to do business there.

“We get all kinds of inquiries every day” from the South, said Will Craven, spokesman for SolarCity. “People there want to be our customers.”

Florida, in particular, is known as the “sleeping giant” of his industry, Craven said. “It has a ton of sunshine, a ton of rooftops,” he said. “But there is no rooftop solar industry in Florida.”

In South Carolina and Virginia combined, only a few hundred homes have solar panels, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. New Jersey has 21,500; California, 234,600.

Under the typical business model for the solar industry, homeowners sign lease agreements with installation companies. The homeowners pay the cost of the panels over time and sell any excess power the systems generate.

Along with tax breaks and other government incentives, the lease agreements have made solar installations increasingly affordable.

States where solar thrives typically pay homeowners attractive rates for the excess power they generate and require utilities to get a considerable share of their power from renewable sources. That gives companies an incentive to promote use of solar.

Southern states, several of which cherish low electricity rates afforded by extensive use of coal, typically have far fewer solar incentives.

Several also have rules that specifically discourage homeowners from going solar. In addition to the bans and restrictions on leasing arrangements, some Southern states assess taxes and fees on solar equipment and generation that do not exist elsewhere.

When Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., installed solar panels a few years ago, for example, the local utility, Dominion Virginia Power, threatened legal action. The utility said that only it could sell electricity in its service area. The university and the solar firm it worked with had to change their lease arrangement and forfeit valuable tax credits.

Soon after, in South Carolina, objections from another utility forced the cancellation of about 80 contracts under which a solar firm had planned to provide panels free of charge to churches and school districts.

The resulting backlash forced a change in the state’s law, but a limited one. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley last week signed a bill that directed regulators to establish rules under which leasing would be permitted.

The details still need to be worked out, however, and solar firms worry the rules will be heavily influenced by electric companies that will insist on provisions to discourage installations.

For now, many homeowners and businesses that want to install panels are in the same predicament as Wilkerson. Finding no viable option to lease a system in Florida, she is exploring paying cash to buy one outright for three of the cottages she owns. The cost: $106,000.

Utility officials say the policies inhibiting solar installations result from more than a mere turf battle. Utilities bear the cost of maintaining the power lines, switches, and extensive computer networks that make up the electrical grid.

AFP Photo/Duane Prokop

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NRA Abandons Hunters In Favor Of Oil And Gas Corporations

NRA Abandons Hunters In Favor Of Oil And Gas Corporations

While the National Rifle Association is not best known for its environmental conscientiousness, its self-proclaimed status as “the number-one hunter’s organization in America” does give it a vested interest in preserving wildlife and its habitats. Since 2008, however, this interest has been slowly undermined by the oil and gas industry’s increasingly aggressive contributions to the NRA and other conservative sportsmen’s organizations. According to Matt Lee-Ashley’s recent report for the Center for American Progress, the NRA is joining oil and gas corporations in “reshaping American energy, land, and wildlife policy.”

Last week, Clayton Williams Energy Inc., a large oil company in Texas, made a $1 million contribution to the NRA. This large sum raised the suspicions of New York City comptroller Scott Stringer, who expressed concerns about “both the magnitude and the corporate purpose” of the donation. Stringer’s interest in the matter stems from his role as investment advisor and trustee to the $150 billion New York City Pension Funds, which have more than $3 million invested in the energy company. Given how little a group like the NRA has to do with CWE’s business, it certainly seems that there could be ulterior motives behind the money.

Last Monday, Stringer noted, “The reported contributions are extremely large for such a small company and seem intended to further the political views of its chairman and CEO rather than the interests of the company itself.” And it would appear that the political views of oil and gas companies across the nation are being furthered by their donations to sportsmen’s groups like Safari Club International (SCI) and the NRA.

In 2012 alone, six oil and gas companies — including CWE — contributed between $1.3 and $5.6 million to the NRA. In fact, CWE is the top contributor to the NRA outside of the firearms industry, and ranks as one of the top seven biggest donors overall. CWE’s generosity to the NRA continued despite their significant losses this year (the company is down $24.8 million, or $2.04 per share, according to its annual report).

As the oil and gas industry generously support sportsmen’s groups, they appear to be turning away from their constituencies in favor of the energy industry’s causes — specifically, mining, drilling, and logging in areas previously preserved for wildlife.

In 2011, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) introduced the Wilderness & Roadless Area Release Act, which proposed removing “approximately 43 million acres of Wilderness Study Areas (WSAs) and Inventoried Roadless Areas (IRAs)” from federal protection. These lands would potentially be used for “timber harvests, oil and gas development, [and] motorized recreation.” Hundreds of wildlife managers and scientists, as well as sportsmen’s groups, protested the bill, calling it “an affront to a long-standing public process and our outdoor heritage.”

But despite the NRA and SCI’s supposed dedication to the interests of these individuals, both groups lobbied for the bill.

The bill failed in 2011 and 2012, but in January Rep. Dan Benishek (R-MI) passed a similar bill out of committee (it will soon face a floor vote). Though the National Wildlife Federation called the new bill “nothing more than the sportsmen community being used as a cover to hide an attack on Wilderness, National Monuments, and National Wildlife Refuges,” Susan Recce — director of conservation, wildlife, and natural resources at the NRA — offered her support when she testified on behalf of the bill in front of Congress.

According to the website for the NRA’s lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA), the NRA-ILA is expressly involved in issues related to “hunting and access to hunting lands,” as well as “wilderness and wildlife conservation.” One would think that their involvement would be on behalf of their constituents who are interested in keeping their access to hunting lands and in conserving wilderness and wildlife, but their latest moves and lobbying efforts seem to suggest otherwise.

Hunters and anglers have demonstrated their commitment to maintaining federal lands and protecting wild animals and their habitats. A 2012 Colorado College State of the Rockies Conservation in the West poll found that an overwhelming “92 percent of sportsmen – the majority of whom identify as politically conservative or moderate — believe that national parks, forests, monuments and wildlife areas are an ‘essential part’ of the economies of these states.” Moreover, around 60 percent of respondents “also opposed allowing private companies to develop public lands.”

In a separate poll conducted by the Bull Moose Sportsmen’s Alliance, 73 percent of hunters and anglers opposed the sale of “some public lands…as a way to help reduce the budget deficit.”

In spite of their members’ continued opposition to the selling of federal lands, the NRA and CSI have failed to accurately represent their members’ needs. An April report from the Corporate Accountability International and Gun Truth Project entitled, “Bang For Their Buck: How Seven-Figure Donations From Clayton Williams Energy Are Driving the NRA to Turn its Back on Sportsmen” makes it abundantly clear that the NRA and similar organizations have departed from their purported purposes, and are no longer supporting the causes they are meant to uphold.

With the continued influx of money from oil and gas companies, it may only be a matter of time before sportsmen and women across America will no longer have lands on which to practice their sport.

Karen Bleier via AFP