Senate Confirms Coal Lobbyist as the EPA’s New #2

Meet Andrew Wheeler, the new Deputy Administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency. He’s a longtime coal lobbyist who doubts climate change. Normally, those traits would disqualify him from becoming the second-highest-ranking official at the EPA, but that’s probably precisely what got him nominated by President Donald Trump.

Additional thanks goes to the Republican-led Senate, which decided to ignore the obvious conflicts at hand and confirm him with a 53-45 vote. As Vice News points out, Wheeler has previously hosted a number of fundraisers for the very Senators who voted him to his position.

Until 2017, Wheeler worked as the head of Faegre Baker Daniels, an energy and natural resources advocacy firm that lobbies Congress against instituting environmental regulations on behalf of Murray Energy, a giant in the coal industry.

“Sadly, I am concerned that Andrew Wheeler’s background means that he will never understand that saving coal is not the job of the EPA,” said Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat who voted against the confirmation. “It is the EPA’s job to regulate coal to protect public health and the environment.”

Wheeler also worked for 14 years as a congressional staffer on energy policy for Senator Jim Inhofe, a lawmaker you probably know best for claiming that climate change isn’t real because he was holding a snowball.

It’s therefore no surprise that Wheeler hedged questions from senators about climate change with this response: “I believe that man has an impact on the climate, but it’s not completely understood what the impact is.”

This confirmation comes at an especially tumultuous time for the EPA. Scott Pruitt is at the center of about a dozen scandals, and in any other administration he would have most certainly been fired by now.

In the fairly likely event that Pruitt resigns, gets fired or is impeached in the not too distant future, the deputy administration would become the acting director, meaning Wheeler would then be in charge of the EPA. What a remarkable feat for a coal industry insider!

Although it’s discouraging to see that Trump is fixated on positioning one environmental-destroyer after another in EPA leadership roles, that’s no excuse not to get a man as despicably unethical as Pruitt out of the government. Don’t forget to sign this Care2 petition to make sure he gets the boot for his egregiously poor leadership and moral compass.

In the meantime, Pruitt seems pretty excited to have someone who is committed to undermining the EPA serve as his #2. He wrote on Twitter, “Andrew has spent his entire career advancing sound environmental policies & I look forward to working with him to implement President Trump’s environmental agenda.”

That’s precisely the problem. Of course a man who made his fortune from representing the coal industry is going to be on board for Trump’s aggressively anti-regulatory approach to handling (and in reality not handling) corporations that pollute extensively. This administration cannot end soon enough.

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