Andrew Wheeler, acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), made his first appearance on Fox News on Tuesday in an interview with host Dana Perino. Wheeler got soft treatment during the interview, just as his disgraced predecessor Scott Pruitt did during most of the numerous interviews he gave to Fox News.

Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, came on to discuss the Trump administration's proposal to replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which was intended to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants and move the nation toward cleaner sources of power. The EPA's proposed replacement plan would drastically reduce emissions standards for coal plants and allow more air pollution, which even the agency expects would lead to 470 to 1,400 premature deaths each year by 2030, as The New York Times reported.

Perino started the interview by inviting Wheeler to “reassure [the layperson] that this isn't about giving polluters a pass.” Later in the interview, she asked Wheeler about the Times article and the estimates of premature deaths, but he dodged the question, and she didn't follow up and press him for an answer.

The interview with Fox appears to have been Wheeler's second TV interview since taking the helm at EPA on July 9. Wheeler did an interview last week with the TV conglomerate Sinclair, another Trump-friendly, right-wing outlet. The Sinclair interviewer, Boris Epshteyn, asked no hard questions either. After Wheeler's Fox appearance on August 21, he gave what appears to have been his third TV interview -- this time to Fox Business, yet another Trump-friendly network.

From the August 21 edition of Fox News' The Daily Briefing with Dana Perino:

DANA PERINO (HOST): Joining me now is acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler. It’s good to have you on the program. Tell me how you would explain to the layperson -- I know that this stuff can get very technical -- what you are trying to do and how you would reassure them that this isn't about giving polluters a pass.

ANDREW WHEELER (ACTING EPA ADMINISTRATOR): Sure. First of all, Dana, thank you for having me on the show today. This is a big day, the unveiling of our Affordable Clean Energy rule. What this rule will do will set guidelines for the states to then work with utilities around the country to make sure that every utility makes reductions on their CO2 emissions going forward. It’s very different from the Obama approach, which was very much a command-and-control approach where they dictated to all the states what they had to do. We’ll actually be working cooperatively with the states on this.

PERINO: So, the clean air rules over time have been, the states work together and it's all integrated. But for people who say “but air pollution knows no state boundaries,” so doesn't the EPA need to oversee what the states are doing in order to protect people?

WHEELER: Yes, and we will be. What we’re doing is setting the guidelines, and then the states will then report back to the agency as to how they’re going to implement this and we will then be able to approve their plan. And if we don’t believe that they’ve gone far enough, we can always step in as a backstop to make sure that they are making the reductions that are necessary going forward.

PERINO: Critics of this move will say that this is a rollback of President Obama's very stringent regulations, but as I recall, Obama’s rule actually never went into place. There was a major lawsuit by 29 states that went to the Supreme Court and it's been stayed. So, what are you actually replacing?

WHEELER: Exactly. It's not a rollback, it's an overhaul, because the Obama regulations, as you said, never took effect because the Supreme Court did take the unprecedented action of issuing the stay. So what we're doing is we took a close look at the Clean Air Act to make sure that we are within the four corners of the act, that we’re using the laws that Congress gave us, and we’ve moved forward with this new approach, which we believe is legally sound and can be implemented across the country and it will provide protections for all Americans, as well as lower electricity rates. And this is exactly what President Trump asked us to do last year.

PERINO: Sorry, so if I can get in here -- two of the other pieces of criticism: One, the New York Times article today was about the increase in possible premature deaths due to this new policy, saying that the plan would see between 470 and 1,400 premature deaths annually by 2030 because of increased rates of microscopic airborne particulates. The Obama administration would say that obviously its plan was much better than that. I wanted to also ask you about climate change and the administration's position on it, human-caused or not, because one of the criticisms is that in the report that you’ve put forward for this new proposal, climate change doesn’t even come up until page 300. Was that on purpose?

WHEELER: Well, I do believe that climate change is real and that man does have an impact on climate change. We talk about this in terms of energy efficiency, and energy efficiency you release less CO2, and that’s what we’re providing with this regulation. As far as the New York Times report, this regulation and the Obama approach were both about CO2 reductions. We address particulate matter and the other pollutants under other regulations and those regulations are still in effect. In fact, we just released a report two or three weeks ago showing that our air quality is 73 percent cleaner today than it was in the 1970s, and all of those regulations, the guides to that 73 percent cleaner, are still in effect and will still be working into the future.

PERINO: One last question for you, we’ll make it a quick one: The lawsuits that are currently underway from the Justice Department against big energy companies that are underway, I think it’s DTE in Michigan -- will those continue to be prosecuted under this new rule?

WHEELER: Well, there was no prosecution under the previous rule, so those prosecutions were under other regulations.

PERINO: OK.

WHEELER: And yes, we will continue to enforce the regulations that are on the books. Absolutely.

PERINO: All right. Andrew Wheeler, for your first national interview, thank you so much for being here. We appreciate it.

WHEELER: Thank you, Dana.