Pruitt EPA: Serving a VERY Special Interest
Let’s not assume that the transportation and freight industries are all on board with every environmentally hostile move made by the Trump administration—in particular the moves of that mendacious boot-licker of fossil fuel interests, Scott Pruitt.
Check out this January 28 piece from The Energy Collective on backlash from the freight industry at Pruitt’s proposal to exempt certain heavy polluters from existing emissions regulations:
Pruitt offers loophole to “glider trucks”
Note especially the comment of one experienced heavy duty truck dealer referring to “days years ago when our truck shop was so thick with the exhaust from the trucks you could not see the other side of our shop.” Here’s a guy (I assume a guy) who had first-hand, concrete visual evidence of the damage from heavily polluting vehicles of the past in his own shop—someone for whom environmental unfriendliness is more than a mere leftist catchphrase. Imagine what he’s telling his grandchildren about Scott Pruitt. (And maybe the entire Trump administration.)
It’s Worse than Anti-Regulation Principle – It’s Corruption
What this particular attack on the environment tells us is that Scott Pruitt is working to sabotage regulation, not in the interest of the industry as a whole, not even for the principle of the free market, but on behalf of some small segment—individual or group—who stands to profit by a favor only to themselves. The glider truck folks have somehow got Scott Pruitt’s ear, and he’s willing to flip the bird to the rest of the industry to give them a big profit-making break.
There’s no other explanation than that this is flat-out corruption. Corruption has a become one of the hallmarks* of the Trump administration—in tax policy, health care, and environmental protection, to name three of the most obvious areas. Much of what is being done in the name of “freedom” is instead barely-veiled favoritism. One wonders how long it will take members of the House “Freedom Caucus” supporting the Trump agenda to realize their self-proclaimed appellation is a fraud.
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* Other hallmarks include, but are not limited to, misogyny, racism, hostility to science, denigration of the disadvantaged, unapologetic deference to the rich and powerful, hostility to the freedom of the press, hostility to the LGBTQ community, indifference to truth. . . it’s a long hall.