The Environmental Protection Agency is literally being run by a man who bases his policies on his “biblical worldview” rather than on what’s best for the nation and the American people.
As we all know, EPA chief Scott Pruitt hasn’t been a very good protector of the environment. Instead, his agenda has contributed to America withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, which made our country the only one not involved in coordinating the effort to stop and reverse climate change.
Pruitt has also helped President Donald Trump spearhead the effort to tear down former President Obama’s environmental legacy. Obama’s legacy includes two national monuments that Trump shrank by thousands of acres to open up the land to mining operations; and the clean energy plan that aimed to reduce pollution while creating thousands of jobs to propel our country into an energy efficient future, which Pruitt killed last year as well.
Sadly, Pruitt and Trump have been successful in rolling back environmental initiatives as they continue to neuter the EPA to turn it into a toothless government agency.
And Pruitt says it’s all because of his “biblical worldview.”
In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network that was flagged by Patheos, Pruitt claimed to be following the biblical command that humans be good stewards of the Earth.
Except that the way he sees it, that command means stripping the planet of all the natural resources we can reach regardless of how it harms the environment and our own well-being.
First, Pruitt says that he thinks his job is to “minister to people.”
“As I serve, and as we seek to make decisions, I want to do so based upon an attitude that we’re here to minister to people, serve people and have a light and a cheerfulness as we do it.”
Public servants are not in government to “minister” to anyone. Pruitt’s job is to protect the environment and the people who rely on the water and air it produces for us to live, which is everyone.
Nowhere in the job description does it say the head of the EPA is supposed to indoctrinate people into believing a personal biblical view on the environment. It also doesn’t say the EPA chief should be a shill for polluters.
Pruitt then whined about liberals.
“The ‘environmental left’ tells us that, though we have natural resources like natural gas and oil and coal, and though we can feed the world, we should keep those things in the ground, put up fences and be about prohibition. That’s wrongheaded and I think it’s counter to what we should be about.”
In other words, it doesn’t matter if we can utilize solar panels and wind energy to satisfy our energy needs. Pruitt would rather let oil and coal companies continue squeezing every last dirty resource they can out of the ground in the name of profit and use the Bible to excuse letting them.
It should also be pointed out that America’s “bread basket,” which actually does feed a lot of people around the globe, could be easily wiped out if oil or gas spill into the Ogallala aquifer, the main source of fresh water for eight states in the region. That is if climate change doesn’t dry it up first.
Speaking of the Bible, it’s apparently how Pruitt creates his policies at the EPA.
Pruitt went on to claim that he found his way into politics by praying to God:
“The biblical world view with respect to these issues is that we have a responsibility to manage and cultivate, harvest the natural resources that we’ve been blessed with to truly bless our fellow mankind.”
Take note, people. Pruitt is showing us how NOT to run a government agency.
The top person at the EPA has a responsibility to lead based on science and reason. It is unreasonable to use a 3,000-year-old text to guide our government decisions, especially since we have separation of church and state in this country. It’s also irresponsible considering oil and coal are not clean forms of energy. Both do great harm to other resources we need even more: water and air.
At some point during the interview, Pruitt said we should reduce pollution “through innovation and technology: not government mandate,” and that we shouldn’t be picking “winners and losers.”
But by killing clean energy initiatives while giving coal and oil companies the green light to drill and mine without consequence, Trump and Pruitt are killing innovation and picking winners and losers.
Trump recently slapped a tariff on solar panels that will cause a major setback for the push to transition to solar power for our electricity needs, which, of course, makes the coal and oil industry very happy. Meanwhile, Big Coal and Big Oil both get massive tax breaks in the tax law recently passed by Republicans and signed by Trump.
How are these actions not considered “picking winners and losers”? How can we reduce our carbon footprint through “innovation and technology” when the Trump administration is punishing innovation and technology while rewarding oil and coal?
If Pruitt were a true Christian, he would be fighting every day for a cleaner more energy efficient world on behalf of the people instead of letting oil, gas, and mining companies systematically ruin it.
Featured Image By Gage Skidmore Via Wikimedia Commons/CC-By-SA-2.0.
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