When Trump announced his pick for administrator of the EPA, the world’s collective draw dropped – Scott Pruitt. The right could not imagine a better choice. And the left immediately lost their mind.
Pruitt is best known for having sued the EPA, the same organization he is slotted to take over upon confirmation.
The left has since come out and decried Pruitt as a ‘climate criminal’, but Pruitt is the best possible man to be atop the EPA. He is the only one who seems to understand that government regulation could never fix the problem. It can only slow the waves. But what’s the use in just slowing them?
As long as we are always reacting, we will always be a step behind. We will be a day late, and a dollar short. This is not how you save the planet; this is how you slow its death. You may have slowed the waves eroding our planet, but the waves will still get their way.
We can’t settle for the EPA’s policy of reacting. If we are going to have real environmental protection, we need revolutionary ones. We cannot just slow the waves. We need to stop them. We need a climate revolution. And that’s what Scott Pruitt’s nomination offers us.
At the end of WW2 we didn’t need just the same old thing, but we needed a complete revolution in weapons. It’s been said that, “talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target that no one else can see.” And that’s exactly what we need – genius.
The EPA’s knee-jerk policies that aim to slow the use of fossil fuels are busy killing jobs and draining money from our economy. And that makes them the biggest danger to the environment. Because they suck trillions out of our economy – trillions that could be reinvested in free market energy innovations.
The problem with the EPA is that in its pursuit of its reactive policies, it killed the ability for revolutionary change. It sucks money directly from the companies whose investment and research would come up with such change.
You can’t invest money back into this research when just one regulation was projected to cost the economy $1.85 trillion in 2015!
Environmental problems won’t be solved by government regulation. The answer can only come from free market innovation.
But that means that the government needs to deregulate these companies and allow them to search for the answer. Before the government choked them with regulations, they had already developed green energy initiatives.
Deregulation and Reinvestment will be critical in solving the environmental problems we face. And with Pruitt at the helm of the EPA, we can look forward to an economy that is working for Americans and an environment that works for future generations.
The economy and the environment should work hand-in-hand. For only when the economy is booming can innovators reinvest in green portfolios. That’s why we need Pruitt at the EPA. He can cut the innovation killing regulations, save American jobs, and work with businesses to bring about revolutionary environmental change.
Chris Kalbach is a philosopher and a veteran, and is currently working for a non-profit in Washington, DC. His views are his own. Follow him on Twitter @ckalbach27.