Pruitt: Bible says ‘harvest the natural resources’

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt said his desire to use the Earth’s resources like oil and coal is grounded in the Bible.

In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network published Thursday, Pruitt spoke about how his Christian views inform his views on the environment and environmental policy.

“The biblical world view with respect to these issues is that we have a responsibility to manage and cultivate, harvest the natural resources that we’ve been blessed with to truly bless our fellow mankind,” he told CBN’s David Brody.

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Trump’s top environmental regulator, who has overseen aggressive rollbacks of rules on greenhouse gases, air pollution, water pollution, chemicals and more, also tied religion into his ongoing criticisms of left-wing environmentalists. He accuses them of wanting to shut down drilling and other resource development.

“The ‘environmental left’ tells us that, though we have natural resources like natural gas and oil and coal, and though we can feed the world, we should keep those things in the ground, put up fences and be about prohibition,” he said. “That’s wrongheaded and I think it’s counter to what we should be about.”

Pruitt said his Christianity also informed his decision to work in government and his views of how government should work.

“I spent a couple years just earnestly praying, asking the question that I don’t think we ask enough: ‘God, what do you want to do with me?’” he told CBN.

“It was actually Isaiah chapter one that I was reading through at that time that really spoke to my heart,” he said. “Specifically, in the latter part of chapter one where God says to Israel, ‘I will restore your leaders as in the days of old, your judges as at the beginning.’ And there was just a desire that welled up in me to say, ‘I want to be like those leaders that we had at our founding, at the inception of our country.’”