"Among Donald Trump's cabinet nominees awaiting Senate confirmation, few are expected to face tougher scrutiny than Scott Pruitt, the president-elect's pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency. The Oklahoma attorney general is a relentless adversary of that agency and its regulations, and he has deep ties to the fossil fuel industry he would be charged with overseeing."
To help keep tabs on the newly seated 115th Congress and its gate-keepers of energy and environment law, the latest TipSheet offers a checklist of committee leadership. Plus, a closer look at three key Senate panels, likely agendas and new leadership, such as Senate Energy Committee Chair John Barrasso, R-Wyo. (shown in photo).
"A 2000 treaty committed the two nations to study and conserve their polar bears. Even as political tensions rise, climate change and other pressures make their work more necessary than ever."
"WAUKESHA, Wis. — This city has become the battleground for one of North America’s fiercest water wars, one that is taking the Great Lakes region into more uncharted legal territory in 2017."
"More than 60 percent of Americans would like to see the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's powers preserved or strengthened under incoming President Donald Trump, and the drilling of oil on public lands to hold steady or drop, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Tuesday."
"William K. Reilly, who was head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H.W. Bush, is blunt in his assessment of the climate change deniers and anti-regulatory hawks who have been nominated to fill many of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s top environmental posts. Reilly, a Republican, looks with special alarm upon Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, nominated to run the EPA."
"In his successful runs for state senator in Montana and then for Congress, Representative Ryan Zinke has promoted his 23-year career in the Navy SEALs as one of his main credentials, going so far as to put the SEALs’ Trident symbol on his campaign bus."
"The state Department of Natural Resources recently scrubbed language from an agency web page on the Great Lakes that said humans and greenhouse gases are the main cause of climate change."
"While many U.S. states have mandates and incentives to get more of their electricity from renewable energy, Republican legislators in Wyoming are proposing to cut the state off from its most abundant, clean resource—wind—and ensuring its continued dependence on coal."
"A legal fight to clean up tons of chicken manure fouling the waters of Oklahoma’s bucolic northeastern corner — much of it from neighboring Arkansas — was in full swing six years ago when the conservative lawyer Scott Pruitt took office as Oklahoma’s attorney general. His response: Put on the brakes."
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