President-elect Donald Trump gave Colorado environmentalists something to complain about last week when he said he would nominate Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

Pruitt is a friend to energy development, and a skeptic on man-made causes of climate change.

But Scott Braden, the public lands advocate for Conservation Colorado, told me I might be missing the man behind the curtain if I don’t pay close attention to Myron Ebell, the director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and head of the Trump transition for EPA and environmental issues.

In other words, the guy who signed off on Pruitt.

That’s the same Myron Ebell who was a philosophy major at Colorado College in the early 1970s and went on to get a master’s degree from the London School of Economics.

Ebell has carved out a name for himself as a climate change denier and perhaps the most vociferous opponent of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

He also chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, “which comprises representatives from more than two dozen non-profit organizations based in the United States and abroad that challenge global warming alarmism and oppose energy rationing policies.” Those cool heads include an all-star team of conservative advocacy groups, such as Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, Americans for Tax Reform and the American Legislative Exchange Council. https://www.globalwarming.org/about/

“In looking for someone to follow through on his campaign vow to dismantle one of the Obama administration’s signature climate change policies, President-elect Donald J. Trump probably could not have found a better candidate for the job than Mr. Ebell,” The New York Times reported in its Science section last month.

Those who see a brighter future for Colorado’s energy economy and more access to suitable public lands under Trump see the Ebell-Pruitt influence on government as a good sign.

“The regulatory reign of terror at the EPA is coming to an end,” Michael Sandoval, an energy policy analyst at the Denver-based Independence Institute, said on the right-leaning think tank’s website when Pruitt’s name surfaced this week.

In 2012 Ebell told PBS’ “Frontline” that what he’s fighting against is an ever-expanding government, and climate change is one of “many pretexts for expanding government.”

“There are holdouts among the urban bicoastal elite,” he told PBS. “But I think we’ve won the debate with the American people in the heartland, the people who get their hands dirty, people who dig stuff up, grow stuff and make stuff for a living, people who have a closer relationship to tangible reality, to stuff.”

Ebell added, “We need to keep banging away on the science.”

Braden is troubled by the timing and content of a report the Competitive Enterprise sent to Congress last week, called “Free to Prosper: A Pro-Growth Agenda for the 115th Congress.”

Here are the CEI’s bullet points:

Braden said the recommendations call for transferring public lands to requesting states, liquidation and privatization.

“Because Colorado would likely not request transfer of public lands, our 24 million acres of forests and public lands would be slated for privatization and liquidation,” he surmised.

Braden said he was shocked by recommendations to repeal national monuments unless they were explicitly endorsed by state legislatures and governors, and severely limit designation of new ones.

“So, in Colorado, unless the legislature intervened, Dinosaur, Browns Canyon and other popular and cherished national monuments would be slated for repeal, opening these national treasures up to mining, drilling and development,” he said.

The report’s recommendations state:

“These ideas, once at the outermost fringe, would render the public’s lands inaccessible and unrecognizable to most Coloradans,” Braden said. “We must ensure that none of these dreadful recommendations becomes reality. We know that Coloradans value access to and conservation of public lands, and the ideas contained in this report are an anathema to those values.”