Big coal lobbyist now 2nd in command at EPA.

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When the foxes run the hen house.
The Senate on Thursday confirmed Andrew Wheeler, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the Environmental Protection Agency’s deputy administrator.

Every Republican and three Democrats ― Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Joe Donnelly (Ind.) ― voted to approve the nominee, a former coal lobbyist and Washington insider who sailed through his confirmation process despite his industry ties, contrarian views on widely accepted science and controversies in his past Senate dealings.

The 53-to-45 vote comes nearly two weeks after EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt began facing intense pressure to resign over accusations of corruption and wasted tax dollars, and just over an hour after a former staffer’s new allegations emerged. If Pruitt exits, Wheeler is next in line to lead the agency. The White House is already considering replacing Pruitt with Wheeler, The Daily Caller, the conservative tabloid that has lately served as a clearinghouse for the administration’s EPA news, reported Wednesday.

Technically, Wheeler would need to be confirmed in another Senate vote to become the permanent administrator, according to Bob Perciasepe, the former deputy EPA administrator who served for five months as acting administrator in 2013. But the acting rules are complicated and riddled with loopholes that give the White House leeway over who commands a federal agency in the absence of its Senate-approved chief.

“It’s like a shadow confirmation vote for the next administrator of the EPA,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said ahead of the vote. “It’s an attempt to slip by at the end of the week ... the nomination and confirmation of a man who stands for just the opposite of the credentials of a candidate to run the EPA.”

Wheeler won confirmation with more support than Pruitt did when the Senate narrowly approved his nomination in February 2017. At the time, just two Democrats, Heitkamp and Manchin, voted for Pruitt. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) voted against him.

Until mid-2017, Wheeler worked as a lobbyist for Murray Energy, the mining giant owned by coal magnate Bob Murray. Murray has been a top Trump donor and bombastic political commentator who wields staggering influence in the White House. He provided the Trump administration with an “action plan” that called for a federal bailout of coal-fired plants, repeal of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan and a challenge to the 2009 EPA “endangerment finding” that determined carbon dioxide pollution poses a risk to public health.

At a confirmation hearing in November, Democrats hammered Wheeler on his record of working for Murray. But they largely skimmed over Wheeler’s refusal to accept the overwhelming consensus among scientists that burning fossil fuels is the chief cause of climate change.

“I believe that man has an impact on the climate, but what’s not completely understood is what the impact is,” Wheeler said at his confirmation hearing when confronted with the findings of the federal government’s latest climate report.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt gives a thumbs up after President Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union address on Jan
In March 2010, Wheeler accused the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of blurring “the lines between science and advocacy” and functioning “more as a political body than a scientific body,” suggesting the EPA could “reconsider its endangerment finding without almost exclusively relying upon the IPCC,” according to remarks posted to his website. At Wheeler’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said the former lobbyist assured him privately that he “views EPA’s legal authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, which is based on the ‘endangerment finding,’ as settled law.”

Wheeler made attempts to woo critics at his confirmation hearing, calling EPA staffers “the most dedicated and hard-working employees in the federal government.”

Compared with the president’s other environmental nominees, Wheeler came off polished and a safer bet. He spent four years at the EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He later served as counsel to the Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and as an aide to Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.).

His record in Congress, and the way he later used the relationships he built there, raised concerns before his confirmation. In 2005, state air pollution regulators accused Wheeler of abusing his power to bully and intimidate them after their nonpartisan association came out against an anti-climate bill that his then-boss, Inhofe, had sponsored. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government accountability and transparency watchdog, told HuffPost in February that the 13-year-old case “raises serious concerns as to Wheeler’s judgment.”

In a speech on Thursday, Inhofe said “nothing in the article is true.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/an ... fc3192118b
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Big coal lobbyist now 2nd in command at EPA.

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bigbass4me wrote:A more fitting analogy would be when the bank robbers are operating the bank.


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As bad as Wheeler is, Pruitt is actually far worse. It isn’t just Pruitt’s utter disdain and disgust for the agency he leads, not to mention the contempt in which he holds EPA science staff, it is his hubris. He thinks that the EPA administrator can just issue regulatory decrees without any consideration of the underlying environmental laws under which EPA works (e.g., the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, etc.). Hubris of that magnitude also leads to graft, hence the large, extralegal pay raises given to the cronies that he brought with him from OK, the $50/night condo rental paid for him by EPA to an energy lobbying firm, etc. Pruitt thinks he’s the president. He’s turned EPA armed enforcement agents in EPA/OECA into his own, private 24-hr “Secret Service” detail. As poorly suited as his deputy is for the job, I would rather see Pruitt fired or arrested for malfeasance and Wheeler take over than to have to endure even another minute of Pruitt’s tenure as the nations top environmental official.


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Re: Big coal lobbyist now 2nd in command at EPA.

4
joemac wrote: Thu Apr 12, 2018 7:14 pm
bigbass4me wrote:A more fitting analogy would be when the bank robbers are operating the bank.


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As bad as Wheeler is, Pruitt is actually far worse. It isn’t just Pruitt’s utter disdain and disgust for the agency he leads, not to mention the contempt in which he holds EPA science staff, it is his hubris. He thinks that the EPA administrator can just issue regulatory decrees without any consideration of the underlying environmental laws under which EPA works (e.g., the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, etc.). Hubris of that magnitude also leads to graft, hence the large, extralegal pay raises given to the cronies that he brought with him from OK, the $50/night condo rental paid for him by EPA to an energy lobbying firm, etc. Pruitt thinks he’s the president. He’s turned EPA armed enforcement agents in EPA/OECA into his own, private 24-hr “Secret Service” detail. As poorly suited as his deputy is for the job, I would rather see Pruitt fired or arrested for malfeasance and Wheeler take over than to have to endure even another minute of Pruitt’s tenure as the nations top environmental official.


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I have to agree with you. It is just a crying shame the Orange Toddler would even pick a former coal lobbyist to be the second in command of the EPA.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

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