“I’m just thrilled as a bird dog in an aviary to be destroying the environment for my corporate buddies!” 

That line is from an email sent to Scott Pruitt by “Roderick Hastie, a lobbyist at Hunton & Williams, a law firm that represents major utilities, including Southern Company, urging Mr. Pruitt’s office to file comments on a proposed E.P.A. rule related to so-called Startup, Shutdown and Malfunction Emissions.”

I like it because it doesn’t even pretend that Pruitt might want to think independently. It’s not “some thoughts that might inform your thinking” or “a few suggestions on combatting this rule”, but “here’s exactly what you should say.” It’s openly disdainful. And Scott Pruitt loves every moment of it.

That’s the big takeaway from the data dump, the thousands of emails detailing his master/sub relationship to energy. This man is one of the great climate villains of our time, because he’s willing to climb to power specifically to propitiate the short-term profit hunger of the extraction energy. And now he’s the head of the EPA.

(In a way, maybe the delay on the emails is a good thing, since anyone else running the EPA would be nearly as venal, though not as transparently so. Maybe this will blow up and consume his time, and weaken his attempts to weaken the agency. But there is still a lot of damage he can get done, a lot of long-term terrifying damage. Luckily, the working white class doesn’t need clean air or water. They just need liberals to stop being so condescending, and everything will be all right.)