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SCOTT PRUITT - AN AMERICAN SCUMBAG
• REMOVED FROM OFFICE   

• EPA CABINET ASS KISSER, BUTT LICKER, SCREW UP, TRAITOR, LIAR AND SHOULD  BE EATEN ALIVE IN THE WOODS... BY THE ANIMALS HE KILLS...

• 14 FEDERAL INDICTMENTS MISUSE OF FUNDS CROOK

RESIGNED 07/05/2018 DUE TO “ BAD PRESS”

• HOLDER OF 14 Congressional Investigations ( A Record )

•  Most Dangerous to the Environment Winner  2015 to 2018
• “Best Verbal Ass-Kissing Speech” Contender 2017
• “Best Bull-shitter about Conservation” 2017
•  Killer of the Environment” 2017,  a useless hero for the Coal Industry 
•  Most controversial abuser of position in the history of cabinet officials and should be buried alive in one of those polluted coal mines or drowned in the polluted rivers he created.

HE IS QUITE POPULAR IN THE SENATE (Help from CNN)
A steady stream of negative headlines involving Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt in recent weeks and months has official Washington wondering whether the embattled agency chief can hold onto his job. Well, he can’t and had to resign. He is still under investigation on fourteen separate counts and trials which he is responsible for and can be charged.

DESTROYING THE ENVIRONMENT
During his time at EPA, Pruitt has worked to carry out key elements of President Donald Trump’s agenda, overseeing a rollback of Obama-era environmental regulations.  He has destroyed and endangered more than he did good.

EQUAL IN F•CK-UPS TO TRUMP
But he has also been caught up in a series of unfolding controversies over everything from first-class travel, security expenses, and a decision to rent a room in Washington, DC, tied to an energy lobbyist.

A RECORD OF F•CK-UPS
When Pruitt took up his post at EPA, he was already a controversial figure. As Oklahoma attorney general, he sued the agency he now leads over environmental regulations and suggested that the debate over global warming is "far from settled." 

• The $43,000 the EPA spent to purchase and install a soundproof booth in Pruitt's office violated federal spending law, according to the Government Accountability Office. The EPA was required to notify Congress before spending more than $5,000 on office improvements, GAO found, although EPA disputed that requirement applies to the privacy booth. 

• The EPA chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, signed on Pruitt's behalf the authorization of large raises to two close aides, internal documents show. Pruitt has maintained he was unaware of the raises and planned to reverse them, although the agency's Inspector General found no evidence the raises have been rescinded. The Atlantic has reported that Pruitt defied the White House to grant the raises. 

• The EPA Inspector General is probing Pruitt's travel practices. The review began following reports Pruitt would frequently travel home to Oklahoma on the taxpayers' dime. The IG twice expanded the probe, first as the agency acknowledged Pruitt used both a private plane and military jet to travel four times instead of flying commercial -- at a price of $60,000 -- and again to include all of Pruitt's travel from 2017. 

• Multiple senior EPA officials, including a career official and political appointees, were sidelined or demoted after they raised concerns or pushed back on the amount of money Pruitt has spent as EPA chief on expenses such as travel as well as his management of the agency, two sources confirmed to CNN.  An EPA spokesman has disputed the claims, calling the employees in question "disgruntled." 

• Pruitt lived for about six months in a Capitol Hill condo owned by a health care lobbyist whose husband has lobbied the EPA and payed below the market rate, according to reports by ABC News and Bloomberg. A former deputy chief of staff told congressional investigators the energy lobbyist, J. Steven Hart, called Pruitt's chief of staff to complain that Pruitt was behind on rent, and a separate source told CNN the couple eventually evicted Pruitt by changing the condo lock code. 

CNN has reported that White House officials are exasperated by the housing controversy. 

• Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse sent a letter to the inspector general of the EPA that said Pruitt's constant security included even personal trips to Disneyland and the Rose Bowl.

• The Environmental Integrity Project obtained heavily redacted documents from the EPA that showed the agency spent more than $30,000 on security for Pruitt's 2017 trip to Italy. 

• A report from The Washington Post in mid-March said documents the EPA provided to Congress outlined further travel expenses from Pruitt, totaling about $68,000 and including a nearly $20,000, four-day trip to Morocco and a series of first class flights.

• CNN reported in early March that Pruitt was one of four Cabinet-level officials the White House scolded in February over stories about questionable ethics at their agencies. 

• In February, questions over Pruitt's travel prompted House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, a Republican, to announce an inquiry into Pruitt's practices, and in response to the committee's request for documents, the EPA did not appear to turn over travel waivers granted to Pruitt for first-class travel. 

• Sen. John Barrasso, the Republican who leads the Senate committee overseeing EPA, has asked Pruitt to provide a list of the agency email accounts he uses after Senate Democrats said they believe Pruitt uses four email accounts and were unsure if the agency searches all four accounts when asked to produce public records. 

• Pruitt defended his first-class travel in February by saying it was for security purposes, citing the "toxic environment" in politics and implying he was less likely to face threats in a first-class crowd. 

• EPA documents reviewed by CNN in February showed attorneys for Pruitt's office justifying a series of charter flights last summer, including some $14,000 expended on travel around Oklahoma. 

• EPA is fighting a lawsuit from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility that alleges the Pruitt administration is deliberately avoiding creating written records of meetings and decisions (so that there are no documents subject to leaking or FOIA) and that Pruitt “ ses phones other than his own to deal with important EPA-related matters so the calls do not show up in his call logs.

STAUNCH TRUMP SUPPORTER ON BLOW-JOB TEAM

“On Paris Accord, BEST BLOW JOB 2017

June 1, 2017 - Thank you, Mr. President”
Your decision today to exit the Paris Accord reflects your unflinching commitment to put America First. And by exiting, you are fulfilling yet one more campaign promise to the American people.   Please know that I am thankful for your fortitude, courage and steadfastness as you serve and lead our country.

America finally has a leader who answers only to the people – not the special interests who have had their way for much too long.  In everything you do, you are fighting for the forgotten men and women of America.  You are the champion for hardworking citizens all across this land who just want a government that puts their needs first.

You have promised to put America First in all aspects of your Administration. And you have done that in any number of ways – from trade – to national security – to protecting our border – to right-sizing government here in Washington, D.C.

And today, you have put America First with regard to international agreements and the environment. This is a historic restoration of American Economic Independence – one that will benefit the working class, the working poor, and working people of all stripes.  With this action, you have declared that people are the rulers of this country once again.

It should be noted that we as a nation do it better than anyone in the world in striking the balance between growing jobs and our economy – while also being a good steward of our environment.  

TRUTH vs. FLAT BULLSHIT
After all, before the Paris Accord was ever signed America had reduced its CO2 footprint to levels of the early 1990s. 
In fact – between the years 2000 and 2014, the United States reduced its carbon emissions by more than 18 percent and this was accomplished largely by American innovation and technology from the private sector rather than government mandate. 

For that reason you have corrected a view that was paramount in Paris that somehow the United States should penalize its economy  be apologetic lead with our chin while the rest of the world does little. Other nations talk a good game, we lead with action not words. 

Our efforts should be on exporting our technology and innovation to nations who seek to reduce their CO2 footprint  to learn from us. That should be our focus versus agreeing to unachievable targets that harm our economy and the American people

Mr. President – it takes courage and commitment to say no to the plaudits of men while doing what’s right by the American people.  You have that courage And the American people can take comfort because you have their back.

The Environmental Protection Agency administrator came into office promising to discard his predecessor’s “overreaching” focus on climate change and concentrate on what he called the agency’s real mission: cleaning up the air, water and land.

Pruitt has rolled back or stalled environmental protections, given the fossil fuel and chemistry industries more sway over public health decisions and taken steps that critics fear will undermine work on pollution cleanups, according to a POLITICO analysis of what he’s accomplished to date. 

He says he will be tough on environmental crimes, but his agency is also easing up on enforcement and collecting far less in penalties than previous administrations, according to agency watchdogs.

Pruitt is the most unorthodox EPA administrator in decades, an avowed critic of the agency who has alienated much of his career staff. He’s spent heavily on travel to meet with business executives and GOP leaders, who want to see a much weaker EPA and could back Pruitt in a future political campaign. 

He has declined to disclose his daily schedule, spent 9000 taxpayer dollars to make sure his office wasn’t bugged, employs a large entourage of bodyguards and built a “privacy booth” for communications in his office. He has questioned manmade climate change and kicked respected scientists off his advisory boards, replacing them with representatives from the businesses and the states he regulates.  Obviously, he thinks he is a target.  I wish all sides well...

THE REDEEMER HOPEFULLY WILL INTERCEDE
Still, Pruitt, who regularly references his Christian faith, says God wants people to be stewards of the earth.  In that case   OK...  GOD will drop a tree on his car for ruining the environment.  Hopefully a large dead tree that he killed with his incomprehensible lack of compassion for the environment.  If not take a tree he killed and make a cross with it...

Make that a tree followed by a mudslide, bury him in those coal tailings he thinks won’t bother the streams and rivers of this country that was initiated by T-Hump for the Coal vote.

And an agency spokesman said that so far, Pruitt has visited more than 25 states, taken action on major Obama-era regulations and the nation’s most-polluted sites, and increased the number of EPA enforcement agents, which had declined under the previous administration. And abused travel and wasted a lot of voter’s money on his extravagant life style and blowing federal funds left and right.  But the damage that will be done will either not be repairable and will hurt the environment. “We’re only 10 months on the job and eight years from today, Americans will be impressed with how President Trump and Administrator Pruitt were able to protect the environment and American jobs,” said EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox. If we have any environment left.

But Judith Enck, a New York-based regional EPA administrator under former President Barack Obama, said Pruitt’s rhetoric doesn’t match his record.  Most consider his rhetoric BULL- SHIT.

One afternoon last April, Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, travelled to the Harvey Mine, in Sycamore, Pennsylvania, to declare that the agency had a new direction, which he called “Back to Basics.” 

It was an unusual place for the nation’s chief steward of clean air, land, and water to set out a policy agenda. CONSOL Energy, the owner of the Harvey facility, which is part of the largest underground coal-mining complex in North America, has been fined repeatedly by the E.P.A. for violations; in 2016, it had to pay three million dollars for having discharged contaminated wastewater into the Ohio River and its tributaries.

Past E.P.A. administrators have spoken of creating jobs as a welcome potential by-product of the agency’s work, especially if they are green jobs, but creating or protecting energy jobs is not supposed to be the mission—protecting human health and the environment is. As the speech that Pruitt gave at the mine demonstrated, he seems to have these priorities reversed.

Pruitt, who is forty-nine, looked cheerful, as he generally does at public appearances. Unlike many people who have joined the chaotic Trump Administration, he seems unconflicted about his new role, his ideological and career goals fitting together as neatly as Lego blocks. The former attorney general of Oklahoma, Pruitt ascended politically by fighting one regulation after another.

In his first year at the E.P.A., he has proposed repealing or delaying more than thirty significant environmental rules. In February, when the White House announced its intention to reduce the E.P.A.’s budget by twenty-five per cent—one of the largest cuts for any federal agency—Pruitt made no objections. 

His schedule is dominated by meetings and speaking engagements with representatives of the industries he regulates. He has met only a handful of times with environmental groups.

At the Harvey mine, Pruitt wore a solid-red tie and, on his lapel, an American-flag pin; he briefly put on a white hard hat inscribed with the phrase “Make America Great Again.” 

He insisted that you could, in fact, roll back regulations on industries like coal while taking care of the environment. But he did not point out that, as many economists have indicated, the availability of cheap natural gas has done more to eliminate coal jobs than environmental regulations have.

In Pennsylvania, Pruitt told the miners, and a contingent of corporate executives, that “the days of our agency declaring war on your industry are over.”   In June, Pruitt joined Trump in the White House Rose Garden as Trump announced that the United States was withdrawing from the Paris climate accord. 

Although there is a consensus among scientists that human activity is causing climate change, Last March, he told NBC “Measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do.” He went on, “I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.

From my perspective, it’s environmental stewardship, not prohibition.” He added, “We have been blessed, as a country, with tremendous natural resources.” Previous E.P.A. administrators, he said, had promoted an inflexible philosophy of “Do not touch.”

Pruitt argues that every E.P.A. action should be specifically grounded in a federal statute such as the Clean Air Act—fifty-four-year-old legislation that was last amended in 1990.

One problem with “E.P.A. originalism” is that neither our scientific knowledge nor the environment itself remains static. Rivers no longer catch fire, as the Cuyahoga, in Ohio, did repeatedly in the fifties and sixties; the skies over Los Angeles are no longer choked with brown smog; acid rain is no longer the threat it was to rivers, lakes, and wildlife; gasoline for cars is no longer made with lead, which damages children’s brain development.

This progress was achieved, in no small part, because of the discretion that the E.P.A. has used to interpret laws as new ecological challenges, and new scientific understandings, arise. Every year, advancements in toxicology, technology, and epidemiology suggest new remedies. 

Ruckelshaus told me that it is self-defeating to insist on binding all environmental policy to the science of the past. He said, “We’ve cleaned up a lot of pollution—the air is much better, though we have three times the number of autos on the road. 

WHO IS BULLSHITTING WHO MR. PRUITT - THE DAN RIVER SPILL
Under Pruitt, even the dirtiest forms of pollution are getting a reprieve. On February 2, 2014, as much as thirty-nine thousand tons of coal ash began spilling into the Dan River from a Duke Energy power plant in Eden, North Carolina. Like many utilities, the Dan River Steam Station had recently transitioned from coal combustion to natural gas, which is cheaper.

But the plant still had waste ponds containing more than a million tons of coal ash; the ponds were separated from the river by an earthen dam. When a guard made his rounds that day, he noticed that the water level in the ponds was rapidly dropping, as though someone had opened a bathtub drain.

A sixty-year-old pipe leading under the ponds to the river had collapsed. By the time Duke Energy engineers sealed the pipe, nearly seventy miles of the Dan River had been fouled with coal ash laden with arsenic, lead, mercury, and selenium. The river, ordinarily a greenish-brown color, now resembled milky tea, and a drab sludge slathered its banks. Amy Adams, an organizer with a group called Appalachian Voices, who went down the river in a kayak after the spill, recalls navigating through “oozing sandbars of slag.”

The Dan provides the drinking water for half a dozen communities in North Carolina and Virginia. According to the E.P.A., pollutants in coal-ash wastewater can cause “severe health and environmental problems in the form of cancer and non-cancer risks in humans, lowered I.Q. among children, and deformities and reproductive harm in fish and wildlife.”

Coal ash is one of the most prevalent forms of industrial waste. Although it can be recycled to make concrete and other products, or stored in landfills far from waterways, it is more typically mixed with water to create a slurry, then sluiced into holes in the ground. The holes are often unlined and adjacent to rivers, because steam electric plants need to be near bodies of water. Frank Holleman, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said, “It’s about the most primitive way you can imagine, to deal with industrial waste.”

The Dan River spill was the result of neglect: Duke Energy engineers had recommended installing video cameras, at a cost of twenty thousand dollars, to monitor pipe corrosion, but they were ignored. In 2015, Duke Energy subsidiaries pleaded guilty to nine misdemeanor violations of the Clean Water Act, including the unlawful discharging of coal ash, and paid a sixty-eight-million-dollar criminal fine, plus thirty-four million to fund environmental conservation.

Other coal-ash ponds have caused even bigger calamities. In 2008, a dike at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant gave way, releasing more than a million tons of coal ash, and contaminating two rivers. The T.V.A. has spent about a billion dollars cleaning up the mess. Kenneth Kopocis, a former senior E.P.A. official, told me that it was hard to think of a more foolish policy than allowing coal-ash ponds to remain next to rivers: 

“They are going to fail. And when they do they create disasters that imperil drinking water and human health, and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up.” Even when coal-ash ponds don’t fail spectacularly, they leak toxins into groundwater. Avner Vengosh, of Duke University, uses geochemical tracers to help identify coal-ash contaminants, and a research team led by him has found evidence of leaking in all twenty-two ponds that it has examined.

Recent technological changes have caused the wastewater produced by coal-fired power plants to become even more toxic. Some of the worst wastewater is discharged by “wet scrubbers,” which remove pollutants from smokestack emissions. Holleman, the attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, said, “I like to say they’re using twenty-first-century technology to take pollutants out of the air and thirteenth-century technology to put it in the water. But someone told me I was insulting the thirteenth century.”

Coal-fired power plants are often found in rural, low-income areas, some of which rely on private wells. Walnut Tree is a predominantly African-American community near another Duke Energy power station in North Carolina. For years, coal ash from the Belews Creek Steam Station fell like snow on the town’s modest houses and back-yard vegetable gardens. Kids wrote their names in the ash that blanketed their parents’ cars and corroded the paint. David Hairston, a Walnut Tree resident turned activist, told me, “A lot of these people can’t afford to move. The resale value is no good.” A 2007 study prepared for the E.P.A. found that people living near coal-ash disposal sites face an increased risk of developing cancer.

Although utility companies know that coal-ash ponds pose enormous liability risks, they often delay removing them until they are sued by environmentalists. Last summer, after one such lawsuit, a federal district court ordered the T.V.A. to remove the ash from an unlined four-hundred-and-seventy-six-acre pond adjacent to the Cumberland River. Judge Waverly Crenshaw declared that the T.V.A. must stop covering over “decades-old mistakes.” (The T.V.A., appealing the decision, has proposed to do just that: cover the pond with concrete.)

IGNORANCE IS BLISS, AND WE HAVE PAID OFF VERY BLISSFUL POLITICIANS
Although Pruitt argues that the E.P.A. has become too hasty and radical in its responses, it agonized over the coal-ash problem for years, to the point that environmental groups sued it for inaction. 

In 2014, the agency finally issued a regulation—one that was hardly extreme. Kopocis, the former E.P.A. official, said that the agency “worked very hard to listen to industry’s concerns.” The rule did not mandate that power-plant operators close coal-ash ponds (though it specified how this could be done safely). 

Instead, it laid out requirements for lining them, monitoring groundwater, and conducting structural-stability assessments. E.P.A. regulators did not classify coal ash as hazardous waste, a step that would have triggered stricter policy, largely because they wanted to make it easier for power companies to sell the ash for recycling. The new rule didn’t apply to ponds on sites where power was no longer being produced, even though they are just as likely to leak, and it was “self-implementing,” meaning that if companies didn’t comply the only redress was a lawsuit.

This year is expected be a big one for coal-plant retirements but, as you can see below, so was 2015, and 2012, and, well, much of the past decade.

COAL IS DEAD
“Coal in the US is in a death spiral,” said Alex Gilbert, of the energy research firm SparkLibrary. “Coal’s demise is inevitable, but it can still emit significant greenhouse gas and other emissions on its way out. The main policy question now is whether the death spiral should be a decade long or decades long.”

What pushed coal power into the death spiral? In a word, fracking. A crackdown on toxic pollution and the rise of wind and solar power, too. If you look at this map of plants scheduled to open this year, it’s all renewables and gas.

“The rule was very weak,” Peter Harrison, an attorney with Earthjustice, a conservation organization, said. “Still, this industry was so far above the law that there were no federal regulations at all before 2014. It was left to states, and many of them went out of their way to exempt coal ash from their rules. In that sense, it was an improvement.” Frank Holleman told me, “E.P.A.’s rule wasn’t the most stringent, but at least it established some minimum national standards.” He went on, “Utilities are the most powerful political force in the state capitals, so state enforcement agencies are always very reluctant to require them to do anything.”

The Clean Power Plan, championed by Obama, requires states to cut greenhouse-gas emissions from electric power plants—the largest source of such emissions. Pruitt and other opponents argued that the law was based on an overly expansive reading of the Clean Air Act. As the EPA administrator, Pruitt has promised to repeal it.

In general, though, Pruitt’s track record in suing the E.P.A., which he did fourteen times, was spotty. When the agency rejected Oklahoma’s plan for reducing emissions of sulfur dioxide, a component of smog, because it wasn’t stringent enough, Pruitt sued, contending that the E.P.A. had usurped Oklahoma’s authority. An appellate court ruled against him, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. 

Half of the legal actions that Pruitt joined against the E.P.A. have been either dismissed on jurisdictional grounds or declined on substantive ones. Several of the lawsuits are ongoing. (He has recused himself from lawsuits against the agency in which Oklahoma is involved. Two of them are named “Oklahoma ex rel. Pruitt v. E.P.A.”)

Pruitt knew that the odds were against him: courts generally defer to federal agencies and their expertise. But even legal defeats could serve his political ambitions. David Blatt, the head of the Oklahoma Policy Institute, said, “In Oklahoma from 2008 to 2016, the antipathy toward the Obama Administration was so great here that just by saying you were standing up to the Administration it was going to be a victory.”

In suing the E.P.A., Pruitt and other state attorneys general usually partnered with industry litigants. Many of the corporations involved—such as Murray Energy and Southern Company—had donated to his campaigns or to affiliated super pacs. The co-chair of Pruitt’s 2014 re-election campaign was Harold Hamm, the billionaire C.E.O. of the oil-and-natural-gas company Continental Resources.

In Oklahoma, Pruitt’s obeisance to the energy industry was sometimes startling. Four years ago, Eric Lipton, of the Times, revealed that a letter Pruitt once sent to E.P.A. regulators, complaining that they had overestimated how much pollution new oil wells were producing in Oklahoma, had been copied, nearly word for word, from a draft supplied by Devon Energy. William F. Whitsitt, who then directed government relations at Devon, praised the letter as “outstanding.”

When Pruitt came to the E.P.A., he broke with agency practice by refusing to release his schedule in advance or his calendar of meetings after the fact. In response to scores of lawsuits brought by environmental and government-transparency groups, he gave in—a bit. He began posting a calendar online, but it generally did not divulge the subjects of his meetings or the names of attendees. Even this partial view of his schedule, however, revealed how radically Pruitt had tilted in a business-oriented direction. 

The administrator’s traditional array of meetings with environmental or public-health groups had been almost entirely replaced by speeches to corporate groups, such as the Louisiana Chemical Association, and private meetings with representatives of fossil-fuel companies and other regulated concerns. (Pruitt has withheld the text of these speeches.)

In private meetings, Pruitt had many opportunities to hear about how coal-ash regulations were irking some energy companies. On March 9, 2017, Pruitt met with Lynn Good, the C.E.O. of Duke Energy, at a Hilton hotel in Houston, to talk about “Duke Energy’s policy priorities.” In April, he had lunch at Equinox, a Washington restaurant, with executives from Alabama Power. In May, a month after Pruitt announced that the agency would reconsider the 2015 Effluent Limitations Guidelines rule, he had a call with Good to discuss coal ash. Immediately afterward, he met with another coal executive, and then with the Congressional Coal Caucus. Pruitt’s decision to “reconsider” the 2014 rule soon followed.