The fundamental responsibility of the Environmental Protection Agency is to ensure clean air and clean water for all Americans in order to protect our health and keep us safe. But Trump has instead nominated Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma Attorney General, who has made a career of fighting EPA safeguards and putting the priorities of big polluters before the people of his state. He even went as far as making the statement that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “was never intended to be our nation’s foremost environmental regulator.” Just how bad is Pruitt’s record? Well, it’s terrible. Here are the top five things you need to know about polluting Pruitt:

• Pruitt is a tool of big oil who blatantly copied an industry letter and sent it to the White House and EPA.
• Pruitt made national headlines in 2014 when the New York Times reported on the secret alliance he formed with major oil and gas companies to attack environmental protections .
• In 2011, one of Oklahoma’s biggest oil and gas companies drafted a letter for Scott Pruitt to send to the EPA, the Interior Department, and the White House opposing safeguards against the super climate pollutant methane. Pruitt lightly tweaked a few of the more than 1,000 words in the document, printed it on his official state government stationery, and sent it off to the federal government.
• While Pruitt was Chair of the Republican Attorneys General Association, Devon Energy contributed $125,000 to it. Two days later, Pruitt wrote a letter to the EPA protesting its proposal to study the impact of fracking.
• Pruitt sued the EPA to stop them from protecting kids against mercury, a neurotoxin.

Polluting Pruitt got his nickname by leading the fight against the Environmental Protection Agency’s mercury and air toxics safeguards, as well as protections against smog designed by the agency to clear the air we all breathe. Instead of recognizing that mercury is one of the most dangerous hazardous air pollutants—a neurotoxin which causes brain damage in children—Pruitt signed a legal brief contending that that the benefits of protections against mercury pollution are “small, uncertain, and in most instances unquantifiable.”

Pruitt led the fight to destroy
the life saving Clean Power Plan

The Clean Power Plan is the first national plan to reduce carbon pollution from power plants to clean up the air we breathe, tackle the climate crisis, and boost the clean energy economy powered by wind and solar. Pruitt’s principal credential to lead the Environmental Protection Agency under Donald Trump seems to be his willingness to destroy the lifesaving Clean Power Plan. Pruitt created an organization designed to undermine essential federal safeguards across the board. Pruitt used his position with the Republican Attorney’s General Association to create the so-called “Rule of Law Defense Fund,” a special interest-funded group designed to systematically coordinate opposition to protections and safeguards across the federal government in an effort to undermine them. Worse, the fund was set up so that it could accept unlimited anonymous donations from companies benefiting from the work of Pruitt and other Republican Attorneys General.

Last, but far from least, Pruitt is a climate science denier. As recently as last May, Pruitt falsely said that “that debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.” No person who denies the overwhelming scientific consensus on the human role in driving the climate crisis is fit to serve as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

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Adam Beitman is national communications director for the Sierra Club.