Trump Epa Pick: 'heavy Hand Of Epa' Didn't Bring Coal's Decline

By Ken Ward Jr. Last week, when President-elect Donald Trump announced his plan to nominate Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, West Virginia political leaders - constant critics of the EPA under the Obama administration - quickly voiced their approval of Trump's pick. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., called Pruitt "exactly the type of person we need to lead the EPA during this critical time." In a press release, Capito said Pruitt, who has sued to try to block a variety of EPA rules to reduce air and water pollution, "has been a driving force behind the legal battle against President Obama's environmental policies and far-reaching regulations." West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who has likewise sued to challenge Obama's EPA, issued a statement to say he was confident Pruitt is a leader who "shares President-elect Trump's pledge to eliminate the burdensome, job-killing regulations brought on by eight years of unlawful overreach." But while Pruitt is indeed a vocal opponent of the Obama EPA's rules to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in public statements earlier this year, he wasn't exactly on board with West Virginia political leaders, who focus their blame for the ongoing decline of the state's coal industry on federal government environmental rules. "This didn't happen as a result of EPA's heavy hand," Pruitt testified during a House subcommittee hearing in May. Citing the "shift in the electricity generation mix" away from coal and toward natural gas and his own state's gas industry, Pruitt told lawmakers, "Rather, it happened because of fracking and the positive market forces that those sorts of Oklahoma innovations create." During his campaign, Trump promised a large audience of coal miners during a rally in Charleston that, when elected, he would get rid of "these ridiculous rules and regulations" so the miners could get back to work. In a Facebook post on Thursday announcing his intention to nominate Pruitt, Trump complained the EPA "has spent taxpayer dollars on an out-of-control anti-energy agenda that has destroyed millions of jobs." The post said Pruitt would "rescind all job-destroying executive actions and eliminate all barriers to responsible energy production." The Facebook post said these moves would "create at least a half-million jobs each year." Pruitt, though, offered a different version of what's likely to happen to the nation's coal industry, telling the Environment Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology that "market-driven" reductions in coal's share of the nation's energy mix are likely to continue "for years to come." "As natural gas becomes increasingly affordable, it becomes an increasingly attractive alternative to coal," Pruitt testified. Since Pruitt's nomination was announced, much of the focus has been on his views on climate change and specifically his opposition in court to the EPA's Clean Power Plan, the rule to require power plants to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.