ANALYSIS: TRUE. Scott Pruitt is the greatest-ever Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
In the Obama era especially, the EPA was used to advance an anti-market agenda in the guise of environmental correctness. Obama’s various federal clean air regulations, for example, were justified by supposedly expert testimony from the EPA that fine particles of soot in the atmosphere were killing hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.
But there was no real evidence for this. Essentially the ‘proof’ had been rigged by parti-pris activist scientists at the EPA – who were permitted to keep their data and methodology secret so that they could not be found wanting in independent experiments.
Hence the new rule just introduced by Scott Pruitt that from now on the EPA cannot engage in “secret science”. Whatever side of the political debate you’re on, this ought to be a good thing: Pruitt is just insisting on something which should have been EPA policy from the start – rigorous observation of the scientific method (part of which stipulates that for any experiment to be valid it must, of necessity, be reproducible).
Pruitt is never going to get any credit for this, either from the greens or the left (not that there’s really much difference). That’s because his opponents recognise it as yet another assault by the Trump administration on the “consensus” science of the Climate Industrial Complex.
The “party of science” is actually the party of “science.”