Operation Oklahoma: The Pruitt Emails
This week, thousands of emails to and from the office of Scott Pruitt, the former attorney general of Oklahoma who became the director of the Environmental Protection Agency, were released. In an email dated July 16, 2013, one Aaron Cooper made this announcement: “This week I began my new job as director of public affairs at the attorney general’s office” in the state of Oklahoma. Cooper quoted from an article in the Weekly Standard, which said Pruitt
was a state senator and co-owner of the Oklahoma RedHawks TripleA [sic] baseball team before his election as AG. He took the lead in suing the federal government over the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill on the ground that it jeopardizes state pension funds. Ten AGs have joined the suit. He and Abbott succeeded in voiding a dubious EPA rule that claimed air pollution from Texas and Oklahoma was harming Granite City, Illinois.
Cooper, as the new director of public affairs, wrote that “it’s a great story and one I thought OCPA [the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs] would possibly want to share via blog, social media or other avenues of communication.” On July 24, 2013, the OCPA received a newsletter from Freedom Flash, whose subject line read “Attorney General Scott Pruitt battling EPA’s environmental cronyism.” The email, written by one James Hall, asked,
“Has the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) colluded with some of the left’s favorite environmental groups in an effort to skirt state policymakers and pass some of the strictest environmental regulations to date? Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt and 11 of his colleagues have been asking the EPA that question for months.” Hall’s message added that Pruitt “is leading a multistate effort to push back against what he alleges is the EPA’s latest encroachment on the Constitution.”
In an email dated May 3, titled “Article on AG Letter,” Bill Whitsitt wrote to Clayton Eubanks, who worked for Pruitt at the Office of the Attorney General (OAG). Whitsitt, who was executive vice president for public affairs at Devon Energy, shared an article by Nick Juliano in E&E Reporter, whose website says it “provides essential news for energy and environment professionals,” that thirteen “attorneys general — mostly Republicans from energy-producing states such as Oklahoma, North Dakota and Texas — worry EPA will agree to regulate methane to avoid a threatened lawsuit from seven states including New York and Connecticut.” Farther down the article (“State AGs urge EPA to resist calls for methane regs”), Juliano writes,
Estimates of how much methane — a greenhouse gas that traps far more heat than carbon dioxide — is emitted during natural gas production vary widely, and both environmentalists and industry groups agree better data are needed. … EPA used data submitted by natural gas companies through a voluntary program to establish a methane emissions estimate that industry said was overstated by several orders of magnitude. The data dispute has been raging for more than a year and led one company, Devon Energy Corp., to withdraw from the voluntary program in March.
Employees at Devon Energy contributed $5,000 to Pruitt in 2014, according to donor records at the Center for Responsive Politics. Employees at Koch Industries contributed another $5,000. In the latest campaign cycle as Oklahoma attorney general, Pruitt received a total of $17,501 from employees at firms such as Alliance Coal, Exxon Mobil, and other energy firms, excluding the contributions from Devon and Koch.
On October 7, 2013, the assistant attorney general, Melissa Houston, forwarded an email from Cooper sharing an opinion piece by Stephen Moore in the Wall Street Journal, which argued that the administrative regulation known as “sue and settle” — in which the EPA settles “with interest groups in litigation over … regulatory practices,” according to a May 6, 2015, article in the Harvard Environmental Law Review — amounts to “a giant tax on the economy brought to you by the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund with little or no input or oversight from Congress.”
Moore wrote, in a section set in bold, that Pruitt, “on behalf of his fellow attorneys general,” was “‘very worried that under Obama sue and settle will be used by the EPA to issue new regulations on fracking.’ This could kneecap the oil and gas boom in Western states.”
In a letter emailed July 10, 2013, Whitsitt, the public affairs official at Devon Energy, wrote, “We believe it is important to note that states — not the federal government—are best equipped to design, administer and enforce laws and regulation related to oil and natural gas development.” Whitsitt continued, “States have an excellent record of protecting the environment and public health, while simultaneously facilitating oil & natural gas development and promoting economic growth.”
On July 30, Howard “Bud” Ground, who formerly worked for American Electric Power, emailed Melissa Houston, who worked for Pruitt’s office, a “Capitol Beat Story” written by Patrick McGuigan, that cited the heroic effort of “a citizen activist group … continuing to fight the controversial regional haze standard that could require Oklahoma power plants to switch fuels to offset sulfur dioxide emissions.”
Henry Butler, a law professor at George Mason University, emailed on March 31, 2014, with the subject line reading “Panel Discussion on ‘Collateral Damage in the War on Carbon,’” observing, “For purposes of our discussion, please assume that there is a war on carbon and that there are some benefits to the reduction in carbon emissions.” Butler noted that Pruitt “will open with a broad discussion of the impact of current policies on federalism, jobs, the rule of law, etc.” A later speaker, Shawn Regan, discussed “his research on the adverse consequences of current policies for Native Americans.”
Farewell to the Environmental Protection Agency, and so long to the very idea of environmental protection.
