Lately I’ve written two columns mostly about replacing Obamacare. I was careful to use the more unpopular name, “Obamacare,” and also the better liked “Affordable Care Act” interchangeably. The difference in the popularity of the names suggested to me that some people thought they were two separate things instead of the very same law. It turns out this mistaken notion is held by about a third of us according to recent polling.

Let’s drop discussing Obamacare for now because other things are trending.

We have a new Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, and a new Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry. State Department bound Tillerson is perhaps twice as smart as Perry, but they have one thing in common. They both drip oil when they walk.

Secretary Perry’s two predecessors were nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz and Physics Nobel laureate Steven Chu. Perry was governor of Texas until 2015. Texas is, of course, synonymous with oil in the mind of the public. Governor Perry was a cheerleader for oil as governor, and since then he has gotten on the board of Energy Transfer Partners. This is the corporation building the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. With President Trump giving a go ahead, stopping it again with protests seems unlikely. In fact, Dakota Access began work just last Wednesday.

Though its name might seem to imply it, the Department of Energy (DOE) today is mostly not about oil, natural gas and coal. Perry is famous for saying (or trying to say in a campaign debate) that he wanted to abolish DOE, but he didn’t seem know much at all about DOE. Other agencies of government, rather than DOE, do most of the regulation of oil, coal, and natural gas. DOE under President Obama has been more concerned with solar, wind, and nuclear energy, curbing climate change, and future clean fuel technologies than the traditional, politically powerful fossil fuels.

Pricewise, solar and wind are now fully competitive with fossil fuels. They will probably be ahead still if Trump’s policies allow fossil fuels to cut their production costs by not having to abate their pollution. For years, we heard big coal and oil say, “We just need these fuels a little while longer before we transition to new clean energy. Solar and wind are too expensive.” Now that they’re not? We will see if Perry works to undermine them in favor of the dirty old fossil fuels. As governor, he was cheerleader for oil but he did support wind, and Texas went from zero to a major wind power electricity producer. He seemed to have no use for solar.

At the State Department CEO of ExxonMobil Corporation and Vladimir Putin’s boss, Rex Tillerson, (just joking, I think) is now in charge. He was not well known in the United States, but Tillerson had a long career in Russia and even won a medal from Putin. Talk about putting international big oil in the driver’s seat!

President Trump wants to reverse Obama/Clinton’s decision to not give the Keystone EL pipeline a permit. It was planned to move oil (actually diluted bitumen, “dilbit”) from the tar sands of Alberta down to Louisiana. Tillerson will accommodate Trump. Will the pipeline be built even when approved? Since being blocked, the economics of it have not improved. The price of oil remains very low and so the oil companies keep scaling back their previous plans for developing more of the filthy tar sands. Railroads and competing pipelines are already taking, or soon will be taking, the existing gunk (the dilbit) from the tar sand pits.

Scott Pruitt will be the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency. He is Oklahoma’s attorney general (AG) and a well-known climate change denialist. Oklahoma is an oil state and Pruitt was very close to the industry. He led or played a major role in 14 lawsuits against the EPA. As Oklahoma’s AG, he abolished the environmental law enforcement division of his office. The EPA won almost all these suits. Meanwhile, Pruitt garnered $270,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry.

The EPA administers most of the country’s environmental laws. Among them are: The Clean Air Act (CAA), the Clean Water Act (CWA), the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). Most people are not aware of these laws and probably think safer pesticides, pollution control on power plants and cleaning up sewer and manufacturing outfalls into rivers are somehow automatic parts of doing business. Because some of these laws are more than forty years old (updated along the way, of course), they now exist as critical undergirding of all our economic activities. Not surprising, however, most Americans today have almost forgotten them. That includes members of Congress and White House politicians.

Congress wrote these laws in mostly general ways and in the laws ordered the “administrator” (of the EPA) to fill in the details with rules and regulations based on scientific and engineering knowledge (“best available technology”) and studies. Some regulations took a decade or more to develop and put into force.

Many expect Pruitt to come in with meat axe and go after the regulations, but it isn’t that easy. These regulations are tied to each other and often backed up with millions, even billions of dollars of in place investment to protect the environment through obedience to the rules and regulations.

Ordering EPA personnel to ignore or violate these laws and regulations will quickly lead to huge lawsuits, and even threaten criminal sanctions if deliberately violated. Pruitt should consult the sad case of Ronald Reagan’s first EPA administrator Anne Gorsuch, whose son has just been nominated to the Supreme Court. Like Gorsuch, Pruitt will probably try to use budgetary starvation as a major weapon. Pruitt will have a friendly Congress, at least on the side of the majority.

I remember with pleasure the passage and implementation of the Clean and Clear Water Acts and many of the rest. As a young man, this raised my spirits that we were doing something truly effective to ensure our future. I would go to sleep easily thinking how things were going to get better and better, and they did. Pocatello, for example, is much cleaner than it was in the 1970s and 80s. But now, it is both hard to sleep and unpleasant to be awake.

Dr. Ralph Maughan of Pocatello is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He retired after teaching there for 36 years, specializing in voting, public opinion and natural resource politics. He has written three outdoor guides, including “Hiking Idaho” with Jackie Johnson Maughan. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition.