You might already know Elliott Negin, whose writings I worked into with Dance with the One that Brought You — BERNIE! on NPR’s red-baiting of Bernie, and Scott Pruitt’s Doublespeak Clarifies Him, on yet another disastrous industrial strength Trump appointee hellbent on ransacking the environment. If not, it’s never too late. You can catch other writings by Elliott at the Union of Concerned Scientists, where Elliott is a senior writer, and at a number of other publications including The Huffington Post.

Elliott’s guest post below underscores that corporate behemoth Exon-Mobile, the world’s fourth-largest oil company and largest that is investor-owned, takes top honors among the world’s phonies. While its public relations people now fret about climate change and claim support for the Paris climate agreement, it continues to pour money into outfits that undermine public awareness of man’s role in global warming and that derail efforts to regulate energy and the environment. While claiming to support a carbon tax, it greases climate denying legislators who oppose it. Does Exxon-Mobil have any connections to the Dark Money sloshing about Washington? Who knows, but I’d bet on it. Recall that Exxon’s scientists warned its executives about the critical impacts of man-made climate change over forty years ago and that their scientists have since been cutting edge in climate science, their knowledge just not shared with the public.

No one is short on cynicism these days, but it’s worth considering such corporate phonies now, as Amy Coney Barrett is catapulted onto the Supreme Court with an irrevocable corporate fix. Her father was a lawyer for Shell Oil for decades and a major player in the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying entity for 600 oil and gas corporations. Why focus on a parent? Because when Barrett was asked about climate change her reply, given while swaths of the American West were aflame, was that she had “no firm views” and couldn’t “offer any kind of informed opinion” on the causes of global warming. Most fourth-graders could best that know-nothing answer. So it sounds like Barrett will be another oil and gas tentacle, at a time the API and affiliates, including Shell, have a lot of skin in the game in cases coming before the Supreme Court.

Elliott describes other tentacles below. — Skip Kaltenheuser

ExxonMobil Claims Shift on Climate But Continues to Fund Climate Science Deniers
Courtesy of Elliott Negin, senior writer

After decades of public denial, ExxonMobil now acknowledges that “the risk of climate change is real” and says it is “committed to being part of the solution,” at least according to the company’s website and statements. To that end, the largest investor-owned oil company in the world claims it supports a federal carbon tax and the Paris climate agreement.

But the company’s recently released grantmaking report shows that it has not ended its two-decade-long campaign to stymie government efforts to address climate change. By ExxonMobil’s own accounting, it gave $690,000 to eight climate science denier groups in 2019, a 10 percent drop from 2018. In addition, it continued to fund federal lawmakers who oppose a carbon tax, despite its supposed longtime support for the idea. Forty percent of the nearly $1 million it has contributed so far to congressional incumbent campaigns during the 2019-20 election cycle has gone to 115 of the 150 climate science deniers still in office.

Sixty percent of ExxonMobil’s 2019 donations to climate obstructionist groups for “public information and policy research” went to the US Chamber of Commerce, while another 30 percent was split between the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute, which have been receiving annual grants from the company since it began financing climate disinformation 22 years ago. All told, ExxonMobil has spent more than $37 million on climate science denier organizations from 1998 through 2019, more than any individual funder besides Charles Koch and his brother, the late David Koch, the billionaire owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries. Koch-controlled foundations spent more than $145 million on many of the same groups over roughly the same time period.

Did the top three recipients of ExxonMobil grants for climate science denier groups in 2019 toe the company’s publicly stated line on climate? The short answer is no. If actions speak louder than words, the donations call into question ExxonMobil’s commitment to seriously address the climate crisis and deserve a closer look.

The US Chamber still opposes carbon pollution standards

The US Chamber of Commerce has been a major player in blocking action on climate change going back to the 1990s, when the business lobby and Exxon were members of the Global Climate Coalition, a consortium of corporations and trade associations opposed to government policies that would cut carbon emissions.

But in 2009 — the same year ExxonMobil first announced its support for a carbon tax in a cynical attempt to derail cap-and-trade climate legislation — the Chamber’s united front began to crack. A handful of Fortune 500 companies — including Apple, Exelon Corporation and Pacific Gas & Electric — quit the Chamber over its opposition to the cap-and-trade bill while two other high-profile companies — Nike and Johnson & Johnson — retained their membership but rebuked the business lobby for the same reason. Since then, at least a dozen Chamber members, including Hewlett-Packard, General Mills, Mars, Nestlé and Unilever, have headed for the exits.

By contrast, ExxonMobil not only retained its Chamber membership, but it also pledged $5 million in annual installments to help pay for the Chamber’s $250-million renovation of its Washington, D.C., headquarters. In 2019, the company donated $400,000 for the building rehabilitation and another $15,000 to the Chamber’s Corporate Citizenship Center, bringing its total contributions since 2014 to $4.8 million.

What does ExxonMobil get for its money? Among other things, the business lobby goes to bat for it in court by filing lawsuits against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and in the court of public opinion by funding misleading climate-related reports. A prime example is the Chamber’s widely debunked 2017 report that grossly exaggerated the cost to the US economy of complying with the Paris climate agreement. President Donald Trump cited that report as his primary rationale for ignoring the US commitment to the accord, and he has vowed to officially pull the United States out in early November.

However, in 2019, the Chamber seemed to take a 180-degree turn, declaring on its website: “Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option.” Although one could quibble with the assertion that human activity is merely contributing to climate change when in fact burning fossil fuels is the main cause, it was a far cry from when the organization maintained in comments submitted to the EPA in 2009 that “a warming of even 3 [degrees Celsius] in the next 100 years would, on balance, be beneficial to humans.”

But the Chamber’s turnabout was not complete. Although it now concedes the reality of human-caused climate change, it is still pushing private-sector innovation as the solution to the climate crisis rather than much-needed government regulation, which historically has driven technological advances.

So, while the Chamber supports government funding for research and development of advanced nuclear reactors, utility-scale batteries, and carbon capture and storage technology, it backed the Trump administration’s rollbacks of the Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan, which would have reduced power plant carbon emissions, and its 2015 “Waters of the United States” rule, which would have protected small streams, wetlands and groundwater from toxic chemicals.

More recently, the Chamber supported the Trump administration’s weakening of the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act by limiting public input in the infrastructure project approval process and rescinding a requirement that federal agencies consider a proposed project’s impact on the climate.

Unlike ExxonMobil’s professed support for a carbon tax, the Chamber has no official position, but if carbon tax legislation ever made it to the Senate or House floor, it presumably would oppose it given its dim view of government regulation.

Likewise, the Chamber’s avowed support for US compliance with the Paris climate accord includes a major caveat. Dan Byers, vice president for policy at the Chamber’s Global Energy Institute, told Politico in August 2019 that it is “absolutely important for the US to remain in the Paris climate agreement” but added that the “Obama administration’s pledge was unrealistic, [and] was going to have a negative impact on our economy. And so we’d like to see that revisited.” In other words, the Chamber would like the United States to remain a party to the agreement so that it could lobby to weaken the US commitment to it.

American Enterprise Institute still downplays the climate threat

In 2019, ExxonMobil gave the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) $110,000, bringing its total since 1998 to $4.76 million — more than any other of its climate science denier grantees. The 82-year-old, free market think tank also receives generous funding from other climate disinformation network supporters, including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation.

What does ExxonMobil get for its money from AEI? A cheerleader for fossil fuels, economist Benjamin Zycher, who — contrary to the company’s professed climate positions — argues that a carbon tax would be “ineffective” and has called the Paris agreement an “absurdity.”

In March, Zycher published a report arguing that “any plausible policy” to curb carbon emissions “would yield trivial effects while imposing large costs.” Instead, he recommended the federal government adopt a policy of “watchful waiting, adaptation over time, and ongoing investment in resilience against the future effects of climactic [sic] changes.”

How could Zycher recommend “watchful waiting” given the large costs climate change is already imposing right now? Granted, he published his report before this summer, when heat waves and wildfires burned up the West Coast and hurricanes slammed the Southeast. But last summer was not that different, and climate change-related disasters have been racking up considerable damage over the last few years. From 2017 through 2019, there were 44 unique extreme weather and climate-linked events across the country causing damages of $1 billion or more, collectively costing more than $460 billion.

Nevertheless, Zycher insists fossil fuels are indispensable. “Opposition to fossil fuels implies a reduction in policies — education, training, health care, and the like — that add to human capital and so increase incomes and the demand for conventional energy,” he wrote. “Therefore, opposition to fossil fuels is fundamentally antihuman.”

Zycher made the same argument in a May 7 column in the Financial Times, ranting that environmentalists who aim to deprive the world of fossil fuels “hate humanity, and the planet too.”

Putting aside Zycher’s ad hominem attack on the “environmental left,” he deliberately confuses the societal benefits of energy with how it is generated. At several junctures in history, humans switched from wood to coal to natural gas to warm their homes. Likewise, they switched from whale oil to kerosene to incandescents to LEDs to illuminate their homes.

Opposition to coal and kerosene in the past or fossil fuels today is not “fundamentally antihuman” when there are better, cleaner alternatives. And it turns out the alternatives — solar and wind, specifically — are now the cheapest sources of electricity, and they could have been more widely available years ago if ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies had not stood in the way.

The Manhattan Institute is still in love with fossil fuels

The Manhattan Institute, a New York City-based libertarian think tank, received $90,000 from ExxonMobil in 2019. Since 1998, the company has given the organization more than $1.4 million.

For the last decade, the institute’s go-to energy expert has been Robert Bryce, who, like AEI’s Zycher, is no fan of a carbon tax, ExxonMobil’s supposed pet climate solution. Before he left the think tank at the end of 2019, Bryce spent much of his time bashing renewable energy and extolling fossil fuels in reports and in the pages of the National Review, New York Post, Wall Street Journal and other publications.

Bryce routinely disparages renewables without providing context. In an August 2019 column on the conservative website RealClearEnergy, for example, he maintained that the wind industry is “facing increasing opposition” at least partly because of what he insists is the major threat it poses to eagles and other birds, an assertion he has been making ad nauseum for years. In fact, the top human-caused threats to birds are climate change, buildings, power lines, misapplied pesticides, communications towers, and oil and gas industry fluid waste pits — not wind turbines.

As for wind energy’s specific threat to eagles, Dan Ashe, a former director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, debunked Bryce’s fallacious claim in a December 2016 HuffPost column. “Public attention on eagle loss in recent years has focused almost exclusively on wind energy,” Ashe wrote. “In truth, wind turbine collisions comprise a fraction of human-caused eagle losses. Most result from intentional and accidental poisoning and purposeful shooting. The majority of non-intentional loss occurs when eagles collide with cars or ingest lead shot or bullet fragments in remains and gut piles left by hunters. Others collide with or are electrocuted on power lines. Disproportionately and solely focusing on wind energy distorts public perceptions at a time when we desperately need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Cutting carbon pollution is hardly a goal that Bryce or any of his Manhattan Institute colleagues would ever publicly endorse. Doing so would certainly not please their other climate science denier benefactors, which include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Charles Koch Foundation, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer’s Mercer Family Foundation, and Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, a Manhattan Institute trustee. All have donated considerably more money to the think tank than ExxonMobil in recent years and, unlike the oil company, do not pretend to care about the climate crisis.

Maintaining the status quo in Congress

The New York Times recently ran a story pointing out that European and US oil companies are heading in very different directions when it comes to climate change. While BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and other European-based companies are beginning to sell their oil fields and invest in renewable energy, their US counterparts Chevron and ExxonMobil are betting that oil and gas will continue to make up at least 50 percent of the energy market for at least the next 20 years.

Instead of transitioning to solar and wind, the two US oil giants are spending relatively trivial amounts on unproven technologies, such as modular fusion nuclear reactors (Chevron), algae-based biofuel (ExxonMobil), and carbon capture and storage schemes (both), which so far have been costly failures. If those pipe dreams were ever demonstrated to work at the necessary scale, it would still take decades to commercialize them.

The main reason European oil and gas companies are taking baby steps to embrace renewables? Government pressure. The European Union has set a goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, and seven EU countries plan to phase out vehicles powered by gasoline and diesel over the next few decades. Austria, with the most aggressive timetable, will ban internal-combustion-engine vehicle sales after 2020.

Although California recently announced it would ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035 and most diesel-powered trucks by 2045, the Trump administration has taken the opposite tack, gutting landmark Obama-era rules curbing vehicle and power plant carbon emissions, rolling back methane emission and coal ash storage regulations, and lifting bans on oil and gas drilling on public land. Congress, meanwhile, has declined to consider climate bills that have been introduced since the beginning of the 2019-20 session.

The September 21 New York Times story cited unnamed energy analysts who excused Chevron and ExxonMobil for not changing their business models. “US lawmakers,” the analysts told the Times, “have simply not given them enough incentives to make a radical break.”

A major reason Congress has not given the US oil industry enough incentives to change course is because oil and gas companies have been giving a critical mass of US lawmakers enough incentives to do nothing. As mentioned above, $401,198 of the $991,329 ExxonMobil has spent so far on congressional incumbent campaigns during the current election cycle has gone to 115 of the 150 climate science deniers on Capitol Hill. Likewise, Chevron has spent $936,489 on incumbent campaigns so far. A little more than $433,000 — 46 percent — has gone to 82 climate science deniers.

Besides making campaign contributions, oil companies spend a lot of money to keep tabs on their friends in Washington. So far, the top three oil and gas lobbyists during the 2019-20 cycle are Koch Industries, which has spent $30.72 million; Chevron, which has spent $28.54 million; and ExxonMobil, which has spent $28.36 million.

Why does ExxonMobil still support so many climate science deniers in Congress while contending to be so keen on a carbon tax? After all, just two years ago the company announced it would donate $1 million over two years to Americans for Carbon Dividends, a political action group created to promote a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

Some lawmakers are bullish on a carbon tax, but ExxonMobil largely ignores them. Since January 2019, eight representatives, two Republicans and six Democrats — and nine senators, all Democrats — have introduced 10 carbon tax bills and one cap-and-trade bill. But only one of the eight representatives and four of the nine senators received a campaign contribution from ExxonMobil during this election cycle. The total amount the company donated to the five lawmakers was $15,000 — a measly 4 percent of what it gave climate science deniers.

To be sure, ExxonMobil’s spending on climate disinformation has shrunk dramatically in recent years. The company’s 2019 outlay was less than half of what it spent in 2017 and the lowest amount since 1999, when Exxon was going through its merger with Mobil. Likewise, its campaign contributions to climate science deniers in Congress dropped from $1.1 million during the 2017-18 election cycle to only $400,000, this cycle.

But the fact remains that, while the company is saying all the right things publicly about the need to address climate change, it is continuing to fund think tanks and lawmakers who dispute the science and oppose government action. That suggests that its professed support for a carbon tax is no more than a disingenuous public relations ploy to delay government action.

The tobacco industry used the very same tactic to hold off regulations for decades, and it worked well until it didn’t, when the industry lost in court and agreed to pay $246 billion in fines to states over 25 years.

Author’s note: Besides the US Chamber of Commerce ($415,000), American Enterprise Institute ($110,000) and Manhattan Institute ($90,000), ExxonMobil gave grants in 2019 to five other climate science denier groups: Center for American and International Law ($5,000), Federalist Society ($10,000), Hoover Institution ($15,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000). For an overview of ExxonMobil’s grants from 1998 through 2019, click here.

This article, which was originally published by Truthout, was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Allow me to introduce a friend, Elliott Negin, who writes for the Union of Concerned Scientists. The UCS, marshals volunteers and a network of twenty-thousand scientists for a variety of objectives including fighting misinformation and attacks on science, on matters from global warming to pollution to nuclear weapons.

Elliott just wrote an essay considering a speech by Scott Pruitt, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, before CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, The analysis underscores Pruitt’s startling hypocrisy, most recently on display in Congressional hearings exploring some of the many oddities of Pruitt.

Tough competition, but Pruitt is a contender for the most glaring example of Trump Administration venality, and of the easy willingness of the Administration to plant time bombs in the environment and in the public health in the service of puppeteers like the Koch brothers. A menace like Pruitt is best exposed when he preaches to the choir. Eight minutes into his CPAC presentation Pruitt sits down with interviewer Gina Loudon who asks for a show of hands of “those of you that kind of hoped that Administrator Pruitt will just sort of make the EPA go away”. Big cheer. Now, that’s a choir.

Getting a major appointment from Donald Trump is like sitting in the barber chair of Sweeney Todd. Bets are now placed on whether the President will find it expedient to give Pruitt the Trump Heave-Ho or keep him to placate Pruitt supporters like Senator Rand Paul. “@EPAScottPruitt is likely the bravest and most conservative member of Trump’s cabinet,” tweeted Paul on April 5. “We need him to help @realDonaldTrump drain the regulatory swamp.” Pruitt’s so brave he seeks to hide in his forty-three grand cone of silence. Paul’s tweet reminds us how prescient George Orwell was. Note that draining the swamp has morphed into draining the regulatory swamp.

If you can persevere or jump to the last two minutes of the CPAC speech, about twenty-one minutes in, Loudon and Pruitt are rolling out doublespeak that would leave Orwell in awe.

It’s instructive to examine the realities behind three points of emphasis in Pruitt’s CPAC speech: attention to process, rule of law and federalism. However this game of White House Chutes and Ladders plays out, those realities are still the bedrock of Trump’s environment and energy agendas, no matter who is in charge at EPA.

EPA Chief Pruitt Even Violates His Own Principles by Elliott Negin

With Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s job now hanging in the balance, it is a good time to recall that, just after his Senate confirmation, he gave a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that emphasized the three principles he said would stand at “the heart of how we do business at the EPA”: process, rule of law, and federalism.

A little more than a year into his tenure, he has violated all of them.

Subverting Process

“Number one,” Pruitt told his CPAC audience, “we’re going to pay attention to process.”

In fact, as we now know, Pruitt has a long track record — going back to his days in Oklahoma — of flouting official procedures when it suits him.

Most troubling is Pruitt’s disdain for EPA policy procedures, which have a considerable impact on public health. Just this week, Pruitt undercut the EPA’s long-established process for drafting strong, protective regulations by proposing that the agency no longer accept studies if all of their data isn’t publicly available. That would mean the agency would have to ignore most epidemiological studies, which rely on private medical information that cannot and should not be shared.

Polluter-funded members of Congress have tried to pass bills instituting this restriction for years, despite the fact that it would violate the EPA’s obligation to use the best available science to protect public health. Sure enough, emails obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists show that political appointees, not career staff or scientists, were behind the proposal, and they only considered its potential impact on industry. In response, nearly 1,000 scientists sent a letter to Pruitt asking him to back off.

Pruitt also packed the EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB) with industry scientists, overturning four decades of precedent by banning scientists who have received EPA grants from serving on the SAB or any other agency advisory panel. Why? Pruitt claims they have a conflict of interest. Pruitt did not renew terms for a number of respected members and dismissed several independent scientists before their terms were up, shrinking the SAB from 47 to 42 participants and more than doubling the number of its polluter-friendly members.

Likewise, Pruitt clearly has little use for standard EPA administrative procedures. The Government Accountability Office, for example, recently found that he violated federal law by ordering a $43,000 soundproof phone booth. Political appointees, it turns out, have to clear office improvement purchases over $5,000 with Congress. Unlike his predecessors, he has routinely flown first class, and so far it has cost taxpayers more than $150,000. He tripled the size of the administrator’s security team to 19 agents, and according to CNN their annual salaries alone cost at least $2 million. He has a 24-hour-a-day bodyguard. He rented a condo for $50 a night — well below market value — from the wife of an energy lobbyist who met with Pruitt last July and lobbies EPA on behalf of his clients. The list of Pruitt’s ethical infractions goes on and on.

Breaking the Rule of Law

“When rule of law is applied it provides certainty to those that are regulated,” Pruitt explained during that CPAC speech. “Those in industry should know what is expected of them. Those in industry should know how to allocate their resources to comply with the regulations passed by the EPA.”

It’s hard to argue with that. Of course industrial facility owners should be clear about their responsibility to curb emissions. Under Pruitt, however, polluters can be certain about at least one thing: There’s a good chance they won’t be prosecuted. For Pruitt, the rule of law is made to be broken.

In its first year in office, the Trump administration resolved only 48 environmental civil cases, about a third fewer than under President Barack Obama’s first EPA director and less than half under President George W. Bush’s over the same time period, according to a February report by the Environmental Integrity Project. The Trump administration recovered just $30 million in penalties from these cases, nearly 60 percent less than the $71 million the Obama administration recovered in its first year.

A December analysis by The New York Times comparing the first nine months of the Trump regime with previous administrations, also found a marked decline in enforcement. It determined that the EPA under Pruitt initiated about 1,900 enforcement cases, about a third fewer than during the Obama administration and about a quarter fewer than the Bush administration over the same time frame.

Meanwhile, Pruitt — who sued the EPA 14 times to block stronger air, water and climate safeguards during his tenure as Oklahoma attorney general — is now trying to roll back environmental protections from the inside. Since taking office, he has moved quickly to delay or weaken a range of Obama-era regulations, including ones that protect the public from toxic pesticides, lead paint and vehicle emissions.

Ironically, Pruitt’s cavalier attitude about following procedures has thus far blunted his wrecking-ball campaign. “In their rush to get things done, they’re failing to dot their ‘I’s and cross their ‘T’s, and they’re starting to stumble over a lot of trip wires,” Richard Lazarus, a Harvard environmental law professor, told The New York Times. “They’re producing a lot of short, poorly crafted rulemakings that are not likely to hold up in court.”

Federalism for all but California

“So process matters, rule of law matters, but let me tell you this: What really matters is federalism,” Pruitt told the CPAC faithful. “We are going to once again pay attention to the states across the country. I believe people in Oklahoma, in Texas, in Indiana, in Ohio, and New York and California, and in all the states across the country, they care about the air they breathe, and they care about the water they drink, and we are going to be partners with these individuals [sic], not adversaries.”

California? He must have forgotten that when he lashed out at the state for embracing stronger vehicle fuel economy standards than what he and the auto industry would prefer. “California is not the arbiter of these issues,” Pruitt said in an interview with Bloomberg TV in mid-March. California sets state limits on carbon emissions, he said, but “that shouldn’t and can’t dictate to the rest of the country what these levels are going to be.”

California, which has a waiver under the 1970 Clean Air Act giving it the right to set its own vehicle emissions standards, reached an agreement with the Obama administration and the auto industry that established the first limits on tailpipe carbon emissions. The next phase of the standards calls for improving the average fuel efficiency of new cars and light trucks to about 50 miles per gallon by 2025 in lab tests, corresponding to a real-world performance of about 36 mpg. By 2030, that would reduce global warming pollution by nearly 4 billion tons, akin to shutting down 140 coal-fired power plants over that time frame.

California wants to stick with the standards. Pruitt, echoing the specious claims of auto industry trade groups, announced in early April that he wants to roll them back. Putting aside the fact that the auto industry’s own analysis concluded that carmakers can meet the 2025 targets primarily with conventional vehicles, what happened to Pruitt’s “cooperative federalism” ideal, especially since California is not acting alone?

Thirteen states, mostly in the Northeast and Northwest, and the District of Columbia have adopted California’s stricter emissions standards. Together they represent at least a third of the U.S. auto market. And in response to Pruitt’s roll-back announcement, 12 state attorneys general and 63 mayors from 26 states released a declaration supporting the stronger standards. “Such standards are particularly appropriate given the serious public impacts of air pollution in our cities and states and the severe impacts of climate change…,” the declaration reads. “If the administration attempts to deny states and cities the basic right to protect their citizens, we will strongly challenge such an effort in court.”

That declaration sounds a lot like what Pruitt endorsed at the conclusion of his CPAC speech, but of course he was referring to state efforts to weaken federal environmental safeguards, not strengthen them. “We are going to restore power back to the people,” he said. “We are going to recognize the regulatory uncertainty and the regulatory state needs to be reined in, we’re going to make sure the states are recognized for the authority they have, and we are going to do the work that’s important to advance freedom and liberty for the future. It’s an exciting time.

“The folks in D.C. have a new attitude,” Pruitt continued. “It’s an attitude that no longer are we going to dictate to those across the country and tell them how to live each and every day. It’s an attitude that says we’re going to empower citizens and the states. It’s an idea of federalism and believing in liberty.”

The CPAC crowd gave him a standing ovation, but the reception he’s now getting from both Democrats and Republicans alike is considerably cooler. At this point, Mr. Pruitt may soon find himself out of a job.

Some of Elliott’s offerings at the UCS and at the Huffington Post can be seen here and here.

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