RUTHFULLY YOURS

After eight years of torment at the hands of President Obama and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, the electoral shoe is now on the other foot, with Republican President-Elect Donald Trump preparing to take the helm in January.

The real battle to come may be fought on the ground of climate change, the sacred cow of the left. A pair of articles posted at Real Clear Politics on the nomination of Oklahoma attorney general and EPA nemesis Scott Pruitt as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) highlight the challenge for Republicans and the distress for Democrats.

The Hill recounts the “Supreme Court’s landmark 2007 climate change ruling” and the Obama EPA’s subsequent 2009 “Endangerment Finding” that carbon dioxide “threatens both public health and welfare.”

The result of the Endangerment Finding was to “pave the way for EPA to finalize the proposed greenhouse gas emission standards for light-duty vehicles,” among other actions.

Since Congress has been unwilling to intervene in the EPA’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act, the task at hand for the incoming EPA administrator, according to The Hill, is to reverse the Endangerment Finding:

As long as the Endangerment Finding stands, any EPA, including one headed by Pruitt, will be in court defending against any subsidiary attempt to halt or reverse any regulation of carbon dioxide[.] … So the Endangerment Finding must be reversed.

The Hill predicts “the scientific cat fight of our time”:

The academy is going to howl, and Washington’s science lobbies … are going to go berserk.

… In nominating Pruitt, the administration is signaling that it is clearly up to such a fight – and not just over climate change.

Personnel is policy, as they say, and despite his meeting with the High Priest of Climatology, Al Gore, president-elect Donald Trump’s pick of Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to be the new head at EPA, shows Trump is serious about pulling back the curtain to expose climate fraud, leaving climate zealots as unsettled as the alleged “science” they trumpet.

Pruitt has already fought the various unconstitutional power grabs that essentially established it as the fourth and unelected branch of government. As Tom Borelli notes in Conservative Review:

Pruitt’s concerns of EPA overreach also includes the agency’s controversial, “Waters of the U.S.” rule that significantly expanded the federal government’s regulatory reach to include ditches on private land. During the presidential campaign, Trump promised to address the regulation that he called one of the “most intrusive rules” and Pruitt could execute the new president’s goal to neuter its impact.

Every puddle in America, every creek running through a farm or ranch would become subject to regulation by the unelected bureaucrats at the EPA. Pruitt has set dead aim on this and other EPA abuses.

In an article in National Review, coauthored with fellow attorney general of Alabama, Luther Strange, Pruitt opined that climate science isn’t settled and should be subject to a vigorous debate. He argued that EPA dictates are no different than the tyranny America rebelled against in its founding, and that EPA has no justification to bypass the will of the people as expressed through its elected representatives:

The United States was born out of a revolution against, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, an “arbitrary government” that put men on trial “for pretended offences” and “abolish[ed] the Free System of English laws.” Brave men and women stood up to that oppressive government, and this, the greatest democracy of them all, one that is governed by the rule of law and not by men, is the product…..

Donald Trump had barely finished announcing his pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency before the left started listing its million reasons why Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt was the worst nomination in the history of the planet: He’s an untrained anti-environmentalist. He’s a polluter. He’s a fossil-fuel fanatic, a lobbyist-lover, a climate crazy.

Mr. Pruitt is not any of those things. Here’s what he in fact is, and the real reason the left is frustrated: He’s a constitutional scholar, a federalist (and a lawyer). And for those reasons he is a sublime choice to knock down the biggest conceit of the Obama era—arrogant, overweening (and illegal) Washington rule.

We’ve lived so many years under the Obama reign that many Americans forget we are a federal republic, composed of 50 states. There isn’t a major statute on the books that doesn’t recognize this reality and acknowledge that the states are partners with—and often superior to—the federal government. That is absolutely the case with major environmental statues, from the Clean Air Act to the Clean Water Act to the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Congress specifically understood in crafting each of these laws that one-size-fits all solutions were detrimental to the environment. Federal bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency traditionally and properly existed to set minimum standards, provide technical support, and engage in occasional enforcement. States, with their unique knowledge of local problems, economies and concerns, were free to innovate their own solutions. CONTINUE AT SITE

As Donald Trump rolls out his domestic-policy nominees, Democrats are discovering to their horror that more often than not he meant what he said. The latest evidence is the President-elect’s intention to nominate Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to run the Environmental Protection Agency.

There was a time when Republican EPA administrators were liberals in GOP power suits. Think William Reilly under George H.W. Bush or Christine Todd Whitman under George W. Bush. They more or less agreed with the left’s command-and-control model of environmental regulation, and they’d pile more costs on the private economy.

The Democratic Party’s green extremism, especially on climate change, has made such Republicans obsolete. President Obama couldn’t get his climate-change agenda through a Democratic Congress, so he ordered the EPA to impose it on the 50 states by diktat. The agency reinterpreted statute after ancient statute as its bureaucrats saw fit, daring the courts to stop them. Think of the Clean Power Plan to put the coal industry out of business, the carbon endangerment rule, grabbing authority to call any pond or puddle a “waterway,” and so much more.

Mr. Pruitt’s first job will be restoring respect for the Constitution and cooperative federalism in EPA rule-making. He knows how to do this because he led the legal charge by the states against EPA abuses, including the victory of a Supreme Court stay on the Clean Power Plan as it moves through the appellate courts. If he is confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Pruitt could order the EPA’s lawyers to inform the courts that the agency no longer stands by the legal interpretation behind the Clean Power Plan.

Democrats will attack Mr. Pruitt as a climate-change “denier,” but his only offense is disagreeing with them on energy policy. The irony is that Mr. Pruitt will probably do more for the environment than Mr. Obama ever did because he will make sure that rules issued by the EPA are rooted in law and thus won’t be overturned in court.

Donald Trump made another excellent nomination, of Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt for EPA administrator. But you wouldn’t know it by reading the mainstream media, who criticized Pruitt for being “too friendly” to fossil fuel producers in his fight against Obama energy regulations.

At the heart of Mr. Obama’s efforts to tackle climate change are a collection of E.P.A. regulations aimed at forcing power plants to significantly reduce their emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution.

They are being forced to reduce their emissions, all right – by shutting down, reducing the overall power supply available to the nation as a whole, as part of Obama’s illegal “Clean Power Plan” regulations designed to shut down coal and other fossil fuel power plants, even though we currently have nothing to replace them with.

As Mr. Pruitt has sought to use legal tools to fight environmental regulations on the oil and gas companies that are a major part of his state’s economy, he has also worked with those companies. A 2014 investigation by The Times found that energy lobbyists drafted letters for Mr. Pruitt to send, on state stationery, to the E.P.A., the Interior Department, the Office of Management and Budget and even President Obama, outlining the economic hardship of the environmental rules.

Here’s an original thought: Mr. Pruitt didn’t just ally himself with oil and gas companies; he allied himself with every consumer who uses oil and gas and wants to continue to do so at affordable prices.

Here’s what one red-green had to say about Mr. Pruitt:

“At a time when climate change is the great environmental threat to the entire planet, it is sad and dangerous that Mr. Trump has nominated Scott Pruitt to lead the E.P.A.,” said Senator Bernie Sanders. … “The American people must demand leaders who are willing to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels. I will vigorously oppose this nomination.”

Climate change is the greatest environmental threat? What about our greatest threat, period, such as radical Islam, unchecked illegal immigration, and our enormous national debt? These things will destroy us long before fictional global warming. And the American people are not demanding we move away from fossil fuels. They use more fossil fuels than ever. It is political commissars like Bernie who are making the demands.