× Expand Andrew Wheeler (l) will take over as EPA administrator in the wake of Scott Pruitt's resignation.

When former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt first ran for office back in 1998, he challenged a sitting, four-term Oklahoma state senator named Gerald “Ged” Wright.

Pruitt, just a few years out of law school, was considered a long shot, but he had a big ace up his sleeve: His megachurch. The deacon of his 4,000-member Broken Arrow Baptist Church, Pruitt was accused of turning it into his campaign headquarters. Wright told NPR’s Embedded that he personally received a scripted phone bank call that had Pruitt’s church in the caller-ID.

Pruitt won that election and eventually made his way up to become Oklahoma’s Attorney General. He also climbed the ladder in the Southern Baptist Church—the dominant religion of the South’s Bible Belt. Pruitt, a popular figure in the vast evangelical media conglomerate, became a trustee at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

This seminary—the largest Baptist school in the country—is probably best known for its longtime affiliation with Billy Graham and for taking a hard right, fundamentalist turn in the 1990s, requiring everyone at the school to either sign a pledge that they fully agreed with a document called the “The Baptist Faith and Message,” or leave.

This document has everything you need to know about Scott Pruitt and Bible Belt theology. It states matter-of-factly that the Bible has “God for its author” and “therefore, all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy.” It also includes such chestnuts as “life begins at conception”; a “wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband”; homosexuality is a “sexual immorality”; and “Christians are under obligation to seek to make the will of Christ supreme in our own lives and in human society.”

Pruitt not only believes the Biblical teachings that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that Noah put dinosaurs on the Ark, but that everything that must flow from this absurd foundation.

Although Pruitt is out of EPA, we definitely haven’t heard the last of him.

Arguably, the EPA’s single biggest challenge is regulating global-warming causing fossil fuels. But Pruitt literally doesn’t believe in fossils. He feels free to ignore basic, well-proven science to fit what God penned in his best seller.

Although Pruitt is out of EPA, we definitely haven’t heard the last of him. His ambitions are said to run to the presidency.

Perhaps worse, his successor offers more of the same.

Andrew Wheeler, who Trump has tapped to take over as EPA administrator, was a longtime aide to climate-change-denying Senator Jim Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma. He also served as chief counsel for the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, during Inhofe’s time as chair throughout most of President George W. Bush Administration.

It marked the beginning of a lot of environmental horror stories that still persist today.

Perhaps the worst is the exemption, from the Clean Water Act, of hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. the Halliburton Loophole) that passed in 2005 and gave way to the fracking boom. Earthquakes and groundwater pollution and depletion have followed.

It was Inhofe (and top lieutenant Wheeler) who wrote this legislation and guided it through Congress.

The problem, then and now, is that neither Inhofe or Wheeler are tethered to basic science. Like Pruitt, Inhofe is an evangelical, fundamentalist Christian, trapped in the same circular logic of using the Bible as a foundation for “science.”

While we don’t know Wheeler’s personal religious views, he certainly wrote, argued, and promoted Inhofe’s thinly veiled religious nonsense for more than a decade, including helping put out a list of 700 “scientists” who don’t believe humans play a role in climate change.

While we don’t know new EPA chief Wheeler’s personal religious views, he certainly promoted thinly veiled religious nonsense for more than a decade

Of course, nearly all were either non-scientists or scientists who did not study climate. As Ethics Daily pointed out, one person on the list, an avowed creationist named Chris Allen, didn’t even have a college degree. But he nonetheless had some of his “research” published in the report.

“It must have slipped these people’s minds that God created the heavens and the earth and has control over what’s going on,” Allen is quoted saying in the report. “Do you honestly believe God would allow humans to destroy the earth He created? Of course, if you don’t believe in God and creationism then I can see why you would easily buy into the whole global warming fanfare. I think in many ways that’s what this movement is ultimately out to do—rid the mere mention of God in any context.”

Wheeler inherits an agency that has already rolled back nearly every Obama era environmental policy, while stacking its leadership ranks with Pruitt clones.

For example, the EPA’s Great Lakes Region, which encompasses the nine states that border the Great Lakes, is headed by Pruitt pick Cathy Stepp, formerly secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources under Governor Scott Walker. Stepp’s only post-secondary education was when she attended a McDonald's management training course. (She does excel at business-friendly environmental regulation, though. One study found that fines for polluters in Wisconsin dropped 78 percent in 2015 with Stepp leading the way.)

Or how about Mike Stoker, administrator for the Pacific Southwest Region? He’s the guy who first led the “lock her up” chant for Hillary Clinton at the 2016 GOP convention. He also made a name for himself as the defense attorney for Greka Energy company, famous for oil pipelines that leaked 140,000 gallons of oil. (Stoker defends his time at Greka, pointing out, “Since I left, they’ve not had one oil spill.”)

Pruitt may be gone, but this big oil tanker known as the EPA is showing no sign of changing course anytime soon.