Can Scott Pruitt Win His Battle Against the Green Blob?
5th April 2018
Scott Pruitt is the greatest-ever Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. To be fair, though, the competition was never exactly stiff. The bar was set low right from the start, under the Nixon-era administrator William Ruckelshaus.
Ruckelshaus is best known for his decision to ban the use of the insecticide DDT in the US. This, in turn, led to a near-global ban which deprived the world of its most effective prophylactic against the malarial mosquito, arguably causing millions of unnecessary deaths.
But what was perhaps most shocking about Ruckelshaus’s decision was that it ran roughshod over science and due process. At the time, the EPA had just finished a seven-month hearing under Judge Edmund Sweeney concluding in a 9,000-page document that DDT was essentially harmless to humans and wildlife. Ruckelshaus decided to go with the green activists rather than the scientific evidence and banned it anyway.
This puts into perspective the liberal media’s vendetta against the EPA’s current administrator, Trump-appointed Scott Pruitt. If you believe the New York Times, for example, Pruitt is trying to “muzzle the scientific inquiry that for years has informed sound policy at an agency he seems determined to destroy.”
Perhaps there’s an element of truth in the last part. Since Nixon founded it in 1970, the EPA has grown into a mighty behemoth with more than 17,000 employees – many of them hardcore green activists opposed to the very notion of free markets and industrial civilization.
Say what you will about how much the Democrats have damaged this country, RINOs have been almost as bad.