Thursday, December 8, 2016

Another Fox Guarding The Chicken Coop

Via the New York Times:

President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a close ally of the fossil fuel industry, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, signaling Mr. Trump’s determination to dismantle President Obama’s efforts to counter climate change — and much of the E.P.A. itself.

Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the president-elect’s comments during the campaign. Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to “cancel” the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr. Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a “war on coal.”

Mr. Pruitt has been in lock step with those views.

“Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind,” he wrote in National Review earlier this year. “That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.”

No, dissent is not a crime.  But poisoning our air, water, and soil is and there will be generational consequences when the Everglades turn into strip mines, the Great Lakes become a sewer, and the earth literally trembles in Oklahoma — his home state — from fracking.

So far Trump has nominated an attorney general who is against equal rights, a Secretary of Education who is opposed to public schools, a HUD secretary who is against fair housing, and now this.

Well, maybe this is part of his genius plan to fix immigration: make the country so uninhabitable that no one wants to come here.

3 barks and woofs on “Another Fox Guarding The Chicken Coop

  1. Is there any hope, any glimmer of a sense of responsibility to the citizens of this country living or still to be, on the part of the representatives in Congress who will be voting to approve these terrible choices? Or, more likely, are the people Trump wants to “drain the swamp” exactly what Republicans want of him and they’ll sweep aside Bernie’s fellow Democrats’ objections with barely a twitch?

  2. Faithful Correspondent: As long as Trump rubber stamps any bill that crosses his desk (and he will), both houses of Congress are free to do what they please. With the Supreme Court Vacancy, I’m sure anything they do will be Constitutionally legal, too. So this is the Banana Republican Republic they’ve been dreaming of, and claiming for decades what will make the US empire respected around the world (as long as we project military force against those we see as ‘against us’, or have resources we* want).

    *i.e.; lobbyist, personal business interest, or just good for TV and/or poll ratings.

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