Environmentalists are grumbling that Trump hasn’t added enough members to his EPA transition effort, so he’s named to the team Colorado’s own Amy Oliver Cooke from the Independence Institute’s Energy Police Center, a free-market think tank where Cooke reigns as vice president and EPA skeptic. So that will gleefully shut them up, for a while.
Cooke is exactly the right person to join Myron Ebell, another free-market thinker, in transforming the wayward EPA from a power-hungry bureaucracy that does more damage than good, into an agency that serves rather than subjugates taxpayers.
Cooke has been tenacious in questioning and criticizing some of President Obama’s key policies enforced by the EPA. She also nailed Gov. Hickenlooper for supporting Obama’s so-called Clean Power Plan that threatens to cripple the state’s energy industry.
Cooke is also a fierce supporter of the natural gas industry and a chief critic of the fracking measures that failed to get on the ballot this year, as well as EPA’s attempts to over-regulate the industry out of business.
As the news of Cooke’s new position spreads, we expect to see a full-scale attack on her by the EPA’s cronies in their favorite industry, Big Environment. But she’s tough enough to shuck aside their criticisms, as she transitions more rationale thinkers into those seats of power, and holds the agency responsible for the disaster they caused at the Gold King Mine.