Even though the moderators of all 3 presidential debates failed to ask any question about climate change or the environment, Donald Trump has made no secret of his disdain for America’s Environmental Protection Agency. In October, he promised to cut EPA regulations “70 to 80 percent” (watch this video at the 4 minute mark). In explaining how he will cut spending to pay for tax cuts, he has singled out the Environmental Protection Agency for budget cuts, promising to: 

[In reality, EPA’s entire budget equals about one percent of the national deficit, estimated at $590 billion for 2016.]

If you are wondering how Trump will dismantle EPA regulations and staff, meet Myron Ebell, the man Trump has picked to lead his EPA transition team. Ebell is Director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). Ebell’s official bio is here. DeSmogBlog, which tracks PR experts who are funded by polluters, has an alternative rundown here.

Polluter-Funded Attacks on EPA and Climate Science

Ebell’s work has been funded by some of America’s biggest polluters. CEI jealously guards the sources of its $7 million annual budget, but research from records of Exxon Mobil and others show a long track record of taking money from polluters (ExxonMobil said they halted funding to CEI in 2006). In 2013, the Washington Post obtained a list of donors for CEI’s annual dinner, providing a rare window into the companies funding CEI’s operations. Energy companies gave more than $110,000 for the event, including money from Marathon Petroleum, Koch Industries, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, and American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers.

The biggest energy donor for the evening was Murray Energy Corporation, the largest underground coal mining company in America and a vocal critic - and litigant - against EPA.

In 2015, I probed Ebell on Murray Energy funding during a debate on C-SPAN. You can watch the short exchange here. After first claiming he doesn’t “represent” companies, he went on to acknowledge that he wasn’t getting as much money from energy companies as he wanted. 

I have written previously about Trump’s dangerous thinking on climate change here and here. Ebell is a ready match for Trump’s climate denial. As part of a 1998 team that included Exxon and other top polluting companies, Ebell put together a communications plan to “undercut the ‘prevailing scientific wisdom’” and convince the American public that climate science was uncertain. The plan identified the American Petroleum Institute, the National Mining Association and other industry trade associations as target funding sources. 

Ebell explained the motivation behind his work to Frontline in 2012: 

Ebell’s work extends beyond creating scientific doubt. He also has a long history of attacking the Environmental Protection Agency. In a 2002 email to George W. Bush’s White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), Ebell urged the White House to discredit EPA’s scientific reports on climate change and to fire EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, the former GOP governor of New Jersey. 

Andrew Revkin, formerly the environmental beat reporter of the New York Times, recounts some of his encounters with Myron here.

Myron also chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, a coalition built to “question global warming alarmism.” Cooler Heads goes further than standard climate deniers, occasionally spreading happy visions about global warming, such as this from their December 2014 newsletter:

Merchant of Doubt: From Tobacco to Climate

If you think that Ebell’s work to create doubt about climate mislead the public, it is not a coincidence. In researching this blog, I uncovered some new information about Myron Ebell’s start in the world of corporate-funded advocacy. As part of the tobacco lawsuits, a trove of documents have become publicly available, and an online search revealed the tobacco-funded roots of Ebell’s past.

The tobacco archives inlcude a 1996 letter from Ebell’s early employer, Frontiers of Freedom Institute, to Samuel Chilcote Jr., president of the Tobacco Institute, the lobbying arm of the tobacco industry and a Frontiers funder. The letter spells out how funding from the Tobacco Institute helped Frontiers both in “protecting the first amendment rights of the tobacco industry” and in “hiring Mr. Myron Ebell as our policy director.”

In another document sent to Philip Morris in 1998, Frontiers requests more funding from Phillip Morris for several staff, including Policy Director Myron Ebell, as part of a broad campaign to make regulating the tobacco industry “politically unpalatable.” 

Also from the tobacco files: Philip Morris funded CEI in the 1990’s as CEI advocated for acceptance of “safer cigarettes.”

Even without this information at hand, the impact of Big Tobacco’s playbook on CEI has not gone un-noted. In 2015, Eric Pooley of Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) noted the connection in his review of the film Merchants of Doubt: 

Putting Clean Air and Clean Water at Risk

By selecting Myron Ebell to head his transition team, Trump has given special interests a dangerously influential position to damage the Environmental Protection Agency. Trump’s stated goals of dismantling EPA through budget cuts and regulatory rollbacks would cripple America’s highly successful landmark environmental laws, such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

Rolling back clean air and clean water regulations would leave our most vulnerable populations - young children and infants, the elderly, the sick - at the mercy of the good will of corporate polluters. Cutting funding for enforcement will increase the risk that bad actors run amok as responsible corporations do their part to protect public health. Nobody is safe from the dangers of air and water pollution, but impoverished and minority communities around the nation will be open to the kinds of injustice faced by the residents of Flint, Michigan from lead contamination of their drinking water.

For more than 40 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has been ably guided by Democratic and Republican presidents and their appointees. EPA’s efforts under the Clean Air Act alone has saved hundreds of thousands of lives and improved the lives of millions more. In monetized benefits, the health savings of the clean air act have been between ten and one hundred times as great as the costs.

Given the agency’s strong track record of effective, common sense results and stewardship, it is not surprising, but easily forgotten, that Republican and Democratic Congresses alike have funded the agency sos that they have the resources to do their job. And, as EDF’s Tomás Carbonell details in this blog, the courts have repeatedly backed EPA when they act to protect health and the environment. These same courts are likely to take a critical view of any president’s efforts to eliminate or roll back these same regulations, but that is thin reassurance when so much damage could be done before the court intervenes.

I end with the words of two former, highly respected Republican heads of EPA: William Ruckelshaus, who led EPA under Presidents Nixon and Reagan, and William Reilly, who headed EPA under President George H.W. Bush. In a statement this summer, they wrote: