Back before America was great again, energy companies would lobby the Environmental Protection Agency to prevent robust action on climate change. But in Donald Trump’s America, the head of the EPA is, more or less, the managing director of Big Energy’s public-sector branch — and, thus, the EPA lobbies the coal industry to oppose global climate-change agreements:
A coal mining industry group’s board of directors voted on Tuesday to press President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement — just one day after EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt met with the group’s leadership and urged them to push the issue, two sources told Politico. Pruitt personally attended a meeting of the National Mining Association’s executive committee on Monday to lay out his concerns with the Paris accord, and called for the group to publicly support pulling out, according to one source.
On Thursday, the Trump administration’s senior advisers will meet to hash out their disagreements on the international climate pact. Jared Kushner and Rex Tillerson believe that the United States should not isolate itself from the entire developed world by pulling out of an agreement that has no binding emissions requirements anyway. Steve Bannon and Scott Pruitt disagree.
Even some coal companies have expressed openness to remaining in the agreement during meetings with White House staff. Which may be why Pruitt felt compelled to give NMA’s board his two cents. After all, if you can’t even get the coal industry to support your bid to destroy humanity’s last, best hope to save the planet, what kind of dystopic caricature of a corrupt environmental regulator are you?
