Trump's EPA pick is climate denier, friend of dirty air

[Updated] Donald Trump's pick for US EPA administrator is Scott Pruitt, a corporatist, anti-environmental and anti-Obama co-litigant with Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel - - an appointment which couldn't be worse for clean air, clean water and fair play for citizens.

More, here.

Schimel, by the way, has imitated Pruitt's operation in Oklahoma by setting up within the Wisconsin Attorney General's office a new unit of hard-right lawyers under the supervision of a grandiosely-titled Solicitor General, to sue the federal government.

The pick will make it easier for Scott Walker's 'chamber of commerce mentality' Department of Natural Resources to further ease back on clean air and water enforcement, knowing that Trump's corporate-obeisant EPA will forego regulation and green light more private control of these common resources.

President-elect Donald Trump is planning to pick Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to run the EPA, putting one of the agency's most hostile critics and a skeptic of climate change science at its helm, sources close to the transition said Wednesday...

Pruitt has also been a leading critic and challenger of the Obama administration’s controversial Waters of the U.S. rule, also known the Clean Water Rule, which has drawn fierce attack from energy, agricultural and development interests. Trump has cited that regulation, which increases the number of streams and wetlands protected under the Clean Water Act, as one of his top targets when he takes office...

His LinkedIn biography boasts that he is “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda,” and says that as chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association he “led the charge with repeated notices and subsequent lawsuits against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for their leadership’s activist agenda and refusal to follow the law.” 

Pruitt has also been a critic of the Renewable Fuel Standard, the law put in place by Congress a decade ago that requires oil refiners to blend corn ethanol and other biofuels into the nation’s fuel supply. EPA implements the rule.

This isn't putting the fox in the hen house. It's hiring the fox to burn it down:

Trump names Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma attorney general suing EPA on climate change, to head the EPA

Because, as Trump told us, he wanted to reduce the agency to "tidbits."

in March, Trump kissed off the whole deal and said he'd do exactly what he's done with the Pruitt pick.