The new Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Andrew Wheeler, made clear during his first few days that he is different from his gaffe-prone predecessor, Scott Pruitt. While no one in Washington doubts that he shares Pruitt’s (and President Donald Trump’s) agenda of reducing the costs to business of complying with environmental regulations, Wheeler also has a chance to distinguish himself from his predecessor by pursuing that objective in a more sophisticated way: using regulation to stimulate technological innovation. As David Hart writes for Morning Consult, innovation may lower the burden on business considerably without sacrificing regulation’s environmental benefits to nearly the degree that Pruitt’s slash-and-burn approach did.
