Today is Earth Day, and, to mark the occasion, thousands of Americans will flock to parks, beaches, and hiking trails. Others will stay home, monitoring their Twitter feeds for the latest Scott Pruitt scandal.

Like clockwork, the most recent one broke on the eve of the celebrations. The Hill reported on Friday that the lobbyist whose wife had rented a room to Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, at a very favorable rate, had tried to set up a meeting earlier this year with the E.P.A. on behalf of the philanthropic arm of one of his clients, despite having insisted he had had no business before the agency in two years. The firm, Williams & Jensen, had not, it appears, filed the needed disclosure forms for such contact, although a spokesman for Williams & Jensen told The Hill that it was in the process of correcting this mistake. (The firm, the spokesman said in an e-mail, “is filing/has filed the requisite disclosure forms required by law accordingly.”)

As of last week, at least ten investigations into Pruitt’s lordly spending habits and droit-de-seigneur ethical standards were under way. (More may have been initiated since then; it’s hard to keep track.) As many commentators have noted, in an Administration founded on the motto “You’re fired,” it’s remarkable that Pruitt has lasted as long as he has. And it’s unclear whether he can tough it out much longer; on Wednesday, the White House budget director, Mick Mulvaney, told lawmakers that he was looking into Pruitt’s widely lampooned “privacy booth.”

“I’m not any happier about it than you are,” Mulvaney assured members of the House Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee, referring to the unauthorized expenditure of forty-three thousand dollars on the phone booth.

In the upbeat spirit of Earth Day, it’s worth hoping that Pruitt will soon be gone. But in the planetary-crisis spirit of the event, it’s worth pointing out that, if he is in fact booted, it will probably be for the wrong reasons. Pruitt’s lavish spending—on an oversized security detail, on weapons and bulletproof vests for said detail, on trips to Morocco and Italy that included his security detail, on trips to his home state of Oklahoma, on art for his office, on the Maxwell Smart phone booth—represents a variation on a familiar theme. Government officials who have pledged to serve the electorate instead use their offices to benefit themselves or their friends, or to indulge their taste for first-class travel or fancy furniture. But in Washington, as the saying goes, it’s not what’s illegal that’s the scandal, it’s what’s legal. Pruitt’s gravest wrongs involve not tens of thousands of dollars but, potentially, tens of millions of lives.

In his relatively brief time in office—he’s headed the E.P.A. for just over a year—he has announced his intention to undo just about every major environmental regulation enacted over the past decade. The list of planned rollbacks is so long it’s impossible to include here; among the highlights—or, if you prefer, low-lights—are the following:

• Pruitt has announced his intention to revoke the Clean Power Plan, the Obama Administration’s signature effort to combat climate change. The plan was supposed to cut carbon pollution from power plants, and, in the process, avert some ninety thousand childhood-asthma attacks. • He has initiated a “review” of a rule requiring utilities to reduce emissions of toxic mercury. The rule was expected to prevent up to eleven thousand premature deaths each year. • The E.P.A. announced that it was halting the implementation of a rule requiring oil and gas companies to locate and repair leaks of methane, an extremely powerful greenhouse gas. In climate-change terms, the rule was expected to accomplish the equivalent of taking eight million cars off the road. (In this case, environmental groups successfully sued, and the rule remains in effect pending further litigation.)

Meanwhile, Pruitt has been doing his best to undermine the E.P.A.’s very raison d’etre, which is to use science to protect the public. Based on thinking so convoluted only the most ardent congressional Republicans could fall for it, he’s attempted to purge the agency’s science advisory boards of actual scientists, and replace them with industry insiders. He’s trying to ban the use of certain kinds of studies in the rule-making process, ostensibly to make the process more transparent, but this will just serve to make it more difficult for the agency to issue new regulations. All the while, he keeps repeating Fox News’ favorite scientific untruths, insisting, to cite the most dangerous example, that the connection between carbon-dioxide emissions and global warming remains unproved.

“This is not just any old white lie,” Justin Gillis observed recently, in the Times, “This is a civilization-threatening lie, a lie that will kill people and destroy small nations, if not some large ones.” “It would be a shame for Mr. Pruitt to be allowed to slither back to Oklahoma without everyone appreciating the true magnitude of what he has done,” Gillis added. Indeed. Later this week, Pruitt is scheduled to appear before two House subcommittees on the environment, and Democrats are pressing to compel him to testify under oath. Perhaps some of them will try to question him about his more consequential activities.

Meanwhile, drought conditions, almost certainly exacerbated by climate change, have turned Pruitt’s home state into a tinder box; at least two people have been killed in recent wildfires there. More—much more—of this lies in store in a warming world, and Pruitt bears responsibility for not helping Oklahomans, or anyone else, prepare for the threat. Let him slink back to Oklahoma, on an economy-class fare, and contemplate that.