text: The $43,000 phone booth that then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt installed in his office may not have been worth all the headaches it caused him. 
   
   He placed only one phone call to the White House, newly released records from the agency show. It lasted five minutes. 
   
   The head of the Environmental Protection Agency resigned last month after coming under fire for how he spent tax dollars and treated his staff. He made the five-minute call on Jan. 29, according to Verizon phone logs released in response to litigation filed by the Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy group. 
   
   [Scott Pruitt’s $25,000 soundproof phone booth? It actually cost more like $43,000.] 
   
   The new documents do not show how many incoming calls Pruitt received in the soundproof booth, which he installed last year. In April, Pruitt testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee that he used the booth sparingly. 
   
   “It’s for confidential communications, and it’s rare,” he told Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.). 
   
   
   
   Then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt at the White House in June. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) 
   
   Previously Pruitt had likened the booth to a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), which government officials use to conduct secure conversations, arguing that he needed it to discuss matters with the White House. The EPA has a SCIF at its headquarters on a different floor from the administrator’s office. 
   
   “Cabinet-level officials need to have access to secure communications,” the then-administrator testified in December. “It’s necessary for me to be able to do my job.” 
   
   EPA officials said Monday that they could not specify how many incoming calls Pruitt received from the White House in the soundproof booth. 
   
   “EPA has learned from Verizon that in order to request complete phone logs of all incoming and outgoing calls to or from these lines, EPA would need to supply Verizon with a subpoena for the records,” said EPA spokesman James Hewitt, who declined to say what the call was about. 
   
   The agency identified two phone lines associated with the booth, according to correspondence between EPA attorneys and Sierra Club lawyers. The phone numbers released through billing records for November involve calls technicians made to test the lines, EPA lawyers said. 
   
   The EPA voluntarily provided billing records for the booth through June 20, just two weeks before Pruitt resigned his post, that show no other outgoing calls from the booth. The Sierra Club’s original public-records request covered the period ending Dec. 6. 
   
   The Government Accountability Office concluded that Pruitt violated federal spending laws when he built the phone booth, because he spent more than $5,000 without providing advance notice to Congress. 
   
   While the original contract for the phone booth was slated to cost roughly $25,000, the agency ended up paying contractors an additional $18,000 to convert a closet space that could house it. That work included removing closed-circuit television equipment, pouring 55 square feet of concrete, installing a drop ceiling and patching and painting the room. 
   
   Pruitt told members of the Energy Committee in April that he did not know the project’s price tag had escalated to $43,000. “I was not aware of the approval of the $43,000, and if I had known about it . . . I would not have approved it,” he said. 
   
   A few hours later, Pruitt remarked to members of a House Appropriations subcommittee that in retrospect, the decision to install the booth “should not have been made.” 
   
   Melinda Pierce, legislative director for the Sierra Club, said in a statement that the incident underscored the kind of managers President Trump has picked to run the federal government. 
   
   “With each new revelation it becomes clearer and clearer that Donald Trump enabled the most corrupt cabinet member ever to hang on far past his expiration date,” Pierce said, adding that Pruitt’s successor continues to advance policies that benefit corporate interests. “We need leadership at the EPA that can be trusted to protect our health, not polluter profits.” 
   
   Shortly after taking the helm of the EPA, acting administrator Andrew Wheeler indicated in an interview with E&E News that he does not intend to dismantle the phone booth. He added that he would maintain a policy Pruitt instituted in the spring that requires that at least two senior EPA officials beyond the administrator sign off on any expense over $5,000. 
   
   “It’s there,” Wheeler said of the booth. “It would be expensive to tear it apart. I don’t see any sense in tearing it apart. And in this day and age, I don’t know what the assessment was for the need of it.” 
   
   Read more 
   
   Pruitt’s $25,000 phone booth cost more like $43,000, records show 
   
   Pruitt blames aides and staff for spending missteps at EPA 
   
   Scott Pruitt resigns amid ethics, management scandals ||||| THE LIGHTBULB 
   
   Acting Environmental Protection Agency chief Andrew Wheeler listens as President Trump leads a cabinet meeting in the White House this month. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) 
   
   Investigators in Congress and reporters played a role in unearthing information about Scott Pruitt’s suspect spending decisions. But much of the credit for exposing the activities of the former Environmental Protection Agency chief goes to the Sierra Club. 
   
   Now the group is making its move against his successor, acting administrator Andrew Wheeler. 
   
   The nation’s oldest environmental advocacy group overwhelmed the agency with requests for emails and other documents sent by Pruitt and his closest aides. When the EPA failed to cough up the correspondence requested under the Freedom of Information Act, the Sierra Club sued. By April, the lawsuit yielded a trove of documents used by reporters, including those at The Washington Post, to share with the public details of his behavior in office that sparked a firestorm of criticism. 
   
   This week the Sierra Club filed an amendment to a lawsuit against the EPA in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, asking the agency to release yet more communications from EPA staff — including those, for the first time, from Wheeler. 
   
   “With these FOIAs, we're keeping an eye on their external communication, which will allow us to see how they're getting information, how they're making decisions,” Sierra Club senior attorney Elena Saxonhouse said. “That was the same approach that we took with the Pruitt FOIA, and it's really the same strategy here.” 
   
   The organization is not letting up after its past FOIA requests yielded documents that helped whittle down President Trump’s support for Pruitt -- even though the former EPA chief was lauded by conservatives for reducing regulatory burdens for businesses. 
   
   For example, one of the more unusual emails unearthed by the Sierra Club was a request from Pruitt's scheduler to Dan Cathy, the chief executive of Chick-fil-A. The aide asked Cathy whether he would meet with Pruitt to discuss “a potential business opportunity.” The fast-food company eventually confirmed to The Post that Pruitt told a Chick-fil-A representative over the phone that he wanted his wife to become a franchisee. 
   
   Another exchange revealed the agency spent $1,560 on a dozen customized fountain pens emblazoned the Pruitt's signature. 
   
   Of course, the Sierra Club did not originally file its public-records requests on Pruitt with fancy pens or fried chicken in mind. “He had many ties to polluting industries,” said Saxonhouse, who was recently profiled in Slate for overseeing the Sierra Club's FOIA efforts. 
   
   “There is still a lot of people at EPA there to carry out the agenda of granting industry wish lists,” she added. 
   
   In total, the Sierra Club is seeking the records of 25 more staffers with its suit in San Francisco. The agency did not reply to a request for comment from The Post. 
   
   Environmentalists see a similar pro-industry streak in Wheeler. After working for years for Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), one of the most ardent opponents of climate science in the Senate, Wheeler went on to lobby for several industries, including coal and nuclear companies, before joining the Trump campaign as an energy adviser. 
   
   Programming note: I am off next week, but the Energy 202 is not. Several of my colleagues will be filling in for me during my vacation. 
   
   POWER PLAYS 
   
   Environmental Protection Agency Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) 
   
   — More on Wheeler: The acting administrator pledged upon taking office that he would avoid potential conflicts of interest. But E&E News reports that since taking over as acting chief of the agency, Wheeler has taken three meetings with former clients that “may have violated the Trump administration’s ethics pledge,” and attended events that included the head of a company that Wheeler agreed not to meet with through 2020. The meetings, which E&E News reports are mentioned on Wheeler’s public schedule, “stand in stark contrast to the acting EPA chief's claims that he is taking pains to avoid helping his former clients advance their interests,” per the report. “It's possible that the meetings with former clients weren't about a 'particular matter' that Wheeler previously worked on for them. But that's difficult to determine from the public calendars, and EPA didn't provide additional information about the focus of the events.” 
   
   Vehicles sit in rush hour traffic at the interchange between the Interstate 405 and 10 freeways in Los Angeles, California. (Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg) 
   
   — EPA rolls forward with some Pruitt deregulation... The Trump administration is set to halt Obama-era fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks, Wheeler told USA Today, adding that the previous administration “jumped the gun” on increasing fuel-economy standards. The Obama-era agreement was to boost fuel-economy levels to an average of 34.5 mpg by 2016 and increase it yearly up to 54.5 mpg by the end of 2025, per the report. 
   
   ...and reverses it elsewhere: In a 180, the EPA said Thursday it would enforce stricter pollution limits on “glider trucks,” which The Post’s Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis report emit dozens of times more soot and contaminants than diesel engine trucks. The move reverses ex-administrator Pruitt’s final act as the head of the agency. In a three-page memo, Wheeler said he would withdraw Pruitt’s “no action assurance” to manufacturers of glider trucks that said they would not have to limit their production to 300 trucks through the end of 2019. “In his memo Wheeler noted that the agency suspends enforcement only in rare circumstances and that after consulting with EPA lawyers and policy experts, 'I have concluded that the application of the current regulations to the glider industry does not represent the kind of extremely unusual circumstances that support the EPA’s use of enforcement discretion,’” per Eilperin and Dennis. 
   
   Former Republican Senate candidate and former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship. (Craig Hudson/Charleston Gazette-Mail via AP) 
   
   — Bye-bye (again), Blankenship: West Virginia blocked convicted former coal baron Don Blankenship from running for Senate as a third-party candidate. Blankenship, who finished third in the May Republican primary, had hoped to get on the ballot as the Constitution Party's nominee. But Secretary of State Mac Warner said Blankenship’s bid would violate the state's “sore loser law,” Politico reports. 
   
   But don’t count Blankenship out yet. He previously vowed to take legal action were the secretary of state to deny his bid and said in a statement Thursday he was "confident" the decision would be overturned. 
   
   Secretary of Energy Rick Perry stands with the main cyrogenic heat exchange as he speaks with reporters at Dominion Energy's Cove Point LNG liquefaction Project facility in Lusby, Md. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen) 
   
   — Perry tweet violated federal law: The Government Accountability Office has determined that a July 2017 tweet from the Energy Department sharing a column by Secretary Rick Perry that criticized Obamacare violated federal appropriations law. The tweet was in violation “because Energy did not show that its appropriation was available for the purpose of informing the public about health care,” the GAO concludes in its report. 
   
   The offending tweet: The @EnergyPressSec account said “Time to discard the burdens and costs of Obamacare: @SecretaryPerry” along with a link to a column written by Perry. 
   
   View from my office window as the White House makes a bad weather call - meaning the president will take a car to Andrews, rather than depart via his helicopter from the South Lawn where reporters can gather to shout questions at him. pic.twitter.com/csRYnCmbGI — Hallie Jackson (@HallieJackson) July 26, 2018 
   
   — Clear with a chance of hot air: The White House on Thursday decided to have the president take the motorcade on his way to Air Force Once rather than take Marine One, citing “bad weather” per a pool report filed shortly before 9 a.m. on Wednesday. But some pointed out that it may have been a tactic to avoid reporters who gather on the South Lawn, where Trump would have had to board the helicopter. The National Weather Service said the bit of ground fog at Joint Base Andrews at 6:30 a.m. had cleared up by 7 a.m., according to BuzzFeed News. 
   
   THERMOMETER 
   
   — Man it’s a hot one: More specifically, The Post’s Joel Achenbach and Angela Fritz write, it’s been a “hot, strange and dangerous summer across the planet.” Scorching temperatures and wildfires have impacted regions all over the world, with record temperatures in Japan, Algeria, Oman and Canada, and deadly wildfires in Greece. In the United States, 35 different weather stations have reported new warm overnight temperature records. 
   
   “The brutal weather has been supercharged by human-induced climate change, scientists say,” Achenbach and Fritz write. “Climate models for three decades have predicted exactly what the world is seeing this summer. And they predict that it will get hotter — and that what is a record today could someday be the norm.” 
   
   Temperature difference from normal (20th-century average) in June 1976 and June 2018. (NOAA) 
   
   ...and if there were any doubt that summers are getting hotter: Two separate maps showing data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration comparing June 1976 and June 2018 tell you what you need to know about the warming earth, The Post’s Jason Samenow reports. “Look at how much more red there is in 2018 vs. 1976,” he writes. “The headlines you see touting a global heat wave are not hyperbole. While there are cool pockets, most of the Northern Hemisphere, where it is currently summer, is hotter to much hotter than normal" compared with the 20th century baseline. 
   
   — Trump vs. vaquita: The United States Court of International Trade ruled Thursday that the federal government must ban seafood imports from Mexico that are caught in gillnets, fishing nets dropped in the water to entangle fish and shrimp, a method that the court ruling notes is putting the critically endangered vaquita porpoise at risk. The court denied a motion from the Trump administration to dismiss the case brought by environmental groups. The ruling notes that scientists estimate there are only about 15 vaquita left is existence, and the population could be extinct by 2021 “if current levels of gillnet fishing in vaquita’s habitat continue.” 
   
   Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. (Jacqueline Nell/Disneyland Resort via Getty Images) 
   
   — The last straw: Walt Disney is joining the growing number of companies that are pledging to eliminate single-use plastic straws and stirrers. The theme-park giant said Thursday it will remove those products from all parks by mid-2019, a move it said will eliminate the more than 175 million straws and 13 million stirrers it uses annually, according to USA Today. 
   
   A photo from 2017 of one of 15 critically endangered Kemp's ridley sea turtles. (Larry Benvenuti/Florida Keys News Bureau via AP) 
   
   — Some less happy news from Florida: Already this year, hundreds of sea turtles have washed up on beaches in South Florida and scientists are pointing fingers at a red tide algae bloom. Since the bloom started in October, there have been 287 sea turtle deaths in waters along the southwest Florida coast as documented by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Associated Press reports. Heather Barron, who leads the Center for the Rehabilitation of Wildlife veterinarian hospital warned about how the high number of deaths may affect the protected species long term in an interview with the News-Press in Fort Myers. "This is so devastating to the population of sea turtles that was really starting to come back, and I fear this event will have an impact for years to come," she said. 
   
   DAYBOOK 
   
   Coming Up 
   
   EPA acting administrator Andrew Wheeler is scheduled to testify before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on August 1. 
   
   The Women’s Council on Energy and the Environment holds a discussion on the role of science in public policy on August 2. 
   
   EXTRA MILEAGE 
   
   Salt Lake Tribune cartoonist Pat Bagley calls B.S. on Zinke's national monument review, which has already shrunk the size of two monuments in the state:
target: – Scott Pruitt is no longer head of the Environmental Protection Agency, but the saga of his $43,000 phone booth isn't quite over. The Washington Post is out with one last financial tidbit courtesy of the Sierra Club, which sued the EPA to access records related to Pruitt. It learned, per Verizon phone logs, that Pruitt made a single outgoing call from the soundproof phone booth. The five-minute call was placed to the White House on Jan. 29. The EPA on Monday said it learned it couldn't provide the incoming call logs without subpoenaing Verizon, so any details on calls Pruitt may have received from the White House in the booth aren't available.