How the New Acting E.P.A. Chief Differs From Scott Pruitt

How the New Acting E.P.A. Chief Differs From Scott Pruitt

A few weeks after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Murray, who contributed $300,000 to Mr. Trump’s inauguration fund, presented the president with a wish list of regulations that he wanted to see lifted from the coal industry. In particular, Mr. Murray has pushed Mr. Trump to undo President Barack Obama’s regulations designed to curb planet-warming pollution from coal-fired power plants, a leading cause of global warming. Mr. Trump then assigned Mr. Pruitt to roll back those rules.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Inhofe and Mr. Pruitt, Mr. Wheeler has questioned the established science of human-caused climate change. In 2010, Mr. Wheeler criticized the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading scientific authority on global warming, writing in a blog post that it has “has functioned more as a political body than a scientific body.”

However, some Democrats have offered at least modest praise of Mr. Wheeler — as he himself noted in another email exchange with Mr. Jackson.

After his November confirmation hearing, Mr. Wheeler emailed Mr. Jackson. “Everyone seemed to think I did a really good job, including Inhofe, Capito and Mr. Murray. Carper and Cardin both said really nice things about me,” he wrote.

He was apparently, referring to Democratic Senators Thomas Carper of Delaware and Ben Cardin of Maryland, both of whom are advocates of strong environmental regulations, and Senator Shelley Moore Capito, the Republican from West Virginia, who is one of Washington’s strongest advocates for the coal industry.

In a statement at Mr. Wheeler’s confirmation hearing, Mr. Carper said, “As a longtime staffer for the senior senator from Oklahoma, Mr. Wheeler was someone with whom we didn’t always agree on each and every policy, but he did prove to be one with whom we were able to work together on policies that we did agree on.” However, Mr. Carper did eventually vote against Mr. Wheeler’s confirmation to his position as deputy.

(Original source)