Scott Pruitt Brings God Back Into the EPA With "Creation" Reform
After eight years of Barack Obama’s imperial presidency, this is what real reform looks like.
Scott Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general appointed by President Donald Trump to take charge of the Environmental Protection Agency, has been a one-man wrecking ball for many of the most benighted policies put in place by the Obama administration. (A man who’s hated by New York Times columnists is generally a guy to like.)
But it’s not just his actions that should truly appeal to conservatives, but the principles behind them – and they’re just what the country, and the Trump administration, need.
In an interview with National Review’s Kevin Williamson published in December, Pruitt laid out his philosophy in terms so easy even a liberal could understand them.
And they’re enough to make conservatives cheer.
It all comes down to, Williamson writes, “stewardship” vs. “prohibition.”
“You have two different approaches, two different worldviews, two very different sets of assumptions,” Pruitt said in the interview.
“One side says we exist to serve creation. The other side says creation is there for us to use and manage to the benefit of mankind. Those are competing ideologies, and they drive decision-making. They drive regulation.”
Right there, Pruitt has turned his back on the progressive, secular-liberal Obama years. To call the world “creation” logically, and literally, requires a “Creator” — something Democrats and liberals have a real problem with. But everything Pruitt says follows from that premise.
“If you are of the side that says we exist to serve creation, then you have no trouble putting up a fence and saying, ‘Do not use.’ Even though people may starve, may freeze, though developing countries may never develop their economies. That’s something they’re comfortable doing, and I think that’s wrongheaded.”
There aren’t many sane people who would disagree with him. And those who would are entirely on the liberal side of American politics – the Hollywood celebrities who fly private jets to environmental conferences to complain about carbon footprints, the Democrat politicians who forbid safe energy development to curry favor with wealthy donors while their constituents’ economies suffer.
During the Obama administration, the crony environmentalists had their heyday, with their crooked deals like Solyndra, and their Democrat promises to destroy the coal industry (that were on the way to coming true.)
But with Pruitt at the helm of the EPA, those days are over, and since Pruitt was sworn in in February, he’s taken an approach to the job that definitely assumes that God’s creation is there for the “use and benefit” of mankind.
Or as Williamson put it, “what Pruitt is up to at the EPA isn’t just reform — it’s a Reformation.”
That’s a big word, but it’s a big job.
Basically, Pruitt is returning the government’s policy of man’s relationship with nature to the one that humans, at least in the Western world, enjoyed for thousands of years.
Long before the global warming hoax of recent decades, and before the “another ice age is coming” scare stories that came decades before that, the Western world had a pretty good understanding of where it stood in relation to nature.
Nature was there to nurture humans and humans’ responsibility was to make sure not to abuse the earth and its resources so it could keep nurturing humans to be “fruitful and multiply” for generations to come.
Scott Pruitt, a guy who, according to The Daily Caller, sued the EPA more than a dozen times in his six years as Oklahoma’s attorney general, understands that.
Making the rest of the agency understand that too is a big job considering the EPA has been bloated by eight years of untrammeled regulator power during the Obama administration.
But in the Trump administration, it’s what real reform looks like.
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