To see more of Major Garrett’s interview with Scott Pruitt, watch “CBS Evening News with Jeff Glor” tonight at 6:30 p.m. ET/PT.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt told CBS News that a partnership with “industry” is necessary in order for the agency to protect the environment.
“This paradigm that says we have to choose industry over the environment or the environment over industry is the old way of thinking,” Pruitt told CBS News’ chief White House correspondent Major Garrett in an interview Wednesday.
“Now that serves political ends but it doesn’t serve the environment because I will tell you this: to achieve what we want to achieve in environmental protection, environmental stewardship, we need the partnership of industry,” he added.
Pruitt, who has been accused by critics of being too cozy with special interest groups and executives and advocates of the fossil fuel industry, defended these relationships as necessary for environmental stewardship. The former Oklahoma Attorney General, cited his experience as a prosecutor, and called it “wrong-headed” to assume that all industries are bad actors.
“We should be about stewardship and we should be about partnership,” Pruitt said. “Now, I will tell you as a former attorney general, I’ve led a grand jury. I’ve prosecuted bad actors. And I will tell you, if we have companies, industries, citizens who violate the law, we are going to prosecute them and we are going to hold them accountable. But we should not start from the premise that all people are that way or that all industries are that way. That is just simply wrong-headed. And it doesn’t achieve good outcomes.”
Pruitt has also come under fire for appointing executives from the coal, gas and chemical industries to senior staff positions at the EPA. He has swiftly sought to reverse, delay and block more regulation than any other administrator in the history of the agency.
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