Former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt was confirmed to be administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week in a 52-46 Senate vote. His narrow confirmation is secure—Pruitt addressed EPA employees as their new boss just yesterday—but a trove of e-mails sent from Pruitt's office during his tenure as Oklahoma attorney general was released yesterday evening. Collectively, they could shed light on how closely Pruitt may be willing to work with the industries he’s now in charge of regulating.

On Tuesday evening, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) received 2,500 e-mails from the Oklahoma AG’s office that had been sent during Pruitt’s tenure. The CMD had asked for the e-mails in an open records request made in 2015, but the AG’s office only turned over 411 of 3,000 e-mails initially. This month, with Pruitt's confirmation vote just days away, the CMD requested that a judge order the missing documents finally be turned over. The judge gave the Oklahoma AG's office until February 21 to share the remaining e-mails, which comprised more than 7,500 pages. Senate democrats tried to stall the vote on Pruitt’s nomination until the remaining e-mails were released, but they were unsuccessful.

The New York Times, which had been able to see some of the e-mails ahead of time due to records requests from the paper’s own reporting, notes that the e-mails “do not appear to include any request for [Pruitt’s] intervention explicitly in exchange for campaign contributions, although Mr. Pruitt was separately working as a member of the Republican Attorneys General Association to raise money from many of the same companies.”

Instead, the e-mails show that oil and gas companies like Devon Energy, lobbying groups like American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), and law firms representing oil and gas interests wrote letters and talking points for Pruitt to use on behalf of the Oklahoma attorney general’s office.

The New York Times reported previously that in 2011 Pruitt sent a letter to the EPA accusing it of overestimating the amount of air pollution that comes with drilling new natural gas wells in Oklahoma. Through public records requests, the Times discovered that the letter was written by Devon Energy almost word for word. The CMD says that the new e-mails show more of that relationship. “In one e-mail, Devon Energy helped draft language that was later sent by Pruitt to the EPA about the limiting of methane from oil and gas fracking.” The New York Times wrote this morning that the new e-mails show that the Oklahoma attorney general’s office corresponded with Devon Energy more frequently than any other energy company.

Pruitt also challenged the EPA’s biofuel rules, which have required energy companies to cut gasoline with ethanol and other biofuels. According to Bloomberg, “In a July 13, 2013 e-mail, AFPM asks Pruitt to file a petition with the EPA challenging biofuel quotas. ‘We think it would be most effective for Oklahoma to file a separate waiver petition that emphasizes ’severe environmental harm,’ as this argument is more credible coming from a state,’ an AFPM representative told Pruitt.” Pruitt did file an opposition to the biofuel standards later that year, although his reasoning appears to have been that increasing biofuel in gas could harm consumers’ cars and could divert corn production from food to fuel.

The tension is interesting because Pruitt will now be in charge of the agency that determines the amount of biofuel to be blended into gasoline. President Trump has indicated a support for biofuels like ethanol, which is an important part of the economy in many states where Trump won decisively. During Pruitt's Senate confirmation hearing, the new administrator indicated that he would respect the EPA's existing renewable fuel standards.

The Oklahoma attorney general’s office has been ordered to release even more e-mails pertaining to later records requests made by CMD by February 27.

Pruitt’s first days

Meanwhile, automakers have petitioned Pruitt to review EPA rules concerning fuel economy standards that were promulgated in January just before the new administration took office. The rules require automakers to hit a fleet fuel economy average of more than 50 miles per gallon by 2025.

The Auto Alliance, which represents BMW Group, Fiat Chrysler, Ford, GM, Volvo, Volkswagen, Toyota, and others, wrote on Wednesday (PDF) that the rule set forth by the previous EPA was never finalized because it didn’t appear in the Federal Register, a daily newspaper of activities of the federal government kept by the National Archives and Records Administration. The Auto Alliance also said that there’s legal precedent for the new EPA to reconsider recent decisions.

Although in autumn the EPA determined that automakers would be able to meet the 2025 goals more economically than the agency predicted in 2011, automakers contend that they were promised a re-evaluation of the 2025 goals in April 2018 and that the EPA broke that promise by finalizing its rules in January 2017.

In 2011, the EPA estimated that increasing fuel economy would cost automakers about $200 billion over 13 years but save car owners $1.7 trillion over the life of the new vehicles.