Washington, D.C.’s chattering classes and gleeful environmentalists will no doubt spend much of the coming days debating what, exactly, it was that led to EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s resignation on Thursday. After all, scandals have been nipping at Pruitt’s heels for months, and still he maintained the confidence of his boss even as he maintained the public profile of a con man that seemed to know no shame.

Perhaps what finally pushed Pruitt out of office was the viral video of a D.C.-area teacher, Kristin Mink, holding her toddler as she confronted Pruitt at a lunch spot. “This is my son,” Mink says in the video, by way of introducing herself to Pruitt. “He loves animals. He loves clean air. He loves clean water. . . . We deserve to have somebody at the EPA who actually does protect our environment, somebody who believes in climate change and takes it seriously, for the benefit of all of us, including our children. I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out.”

Hell hath no fury like a mother worried about her child’s health; maybe it was Mink’s righteous indignation that prompted Pruitt to head toward the exits.

Or perhaps the final straw was the secret calendar that Pruitt kept in order to conceal his meetings with people like coal company CEO Joseph Craft, who has donated millions of dollars to mostly Republican candidates and committees and desperately wants to erase the coal-industry regulations of the Obama administration. The secret-calendar revelations came just this week, and it might have been Pruitt’s tipping point. Turns out that altering or concealing public records is a federal crime.

Maybe Pruitt’s overdue departure was simply the result of the accumulated pressure of so many scandals and embarrassing revelations. Thirteen—that’s the number of federal probes into his spending and ethics that are currently under way. Some of Pruitt’s behavior that is under investigation includes taking gifts and favors from lobbyists, spending public money on a $43,000 phone booth without proper authorization, improperly using his security detail for personal travel to Disneyland, flying first class at taxpayer expense, bypassing federal rules to give substantial raises to staffers, using EPA employees as personal assistants, using undisclosed email addresses to carry out EPA business, and violating lobbying laws by telling coal producers to push Trump to leave the Paris climate accord. A criminal investigation may also be in the works. By the Fourth of July, one needed a scorecard to keep it all straight. 

Even as they parted ways, the bond between Pruitt and President Trump appeared exceptionally tight. Just look at Pruitt’s bizarrely obsequious resignation letter, in which he wrote, “My desire in service to you has always been to bless you as you make important decisions for the American people. I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence.” And here’s Trump’s response, as told to a group of reporters today on Air Force One: “Scott Pruitt did an outstanding job inside of the EPA. We’ve gotten rid of record-breaking regulations, and it’s been really good. You know, obviously the controversies with Scott . . . but within the agency we were extremely happy.”

While it’s unclear what that last sentence means, we know that Pruitt enjoyed mangling bedrock environmental protections the way President Trump mangles the English language. But in the end, Pruitt couldn’t even do dastardly very well. He may have spearheaded Trump’s decision for the United States to leave the Paris Agreement, but that may have just inspired the rest of the world’s countries (except for Syria) to carry on, quite well, without the U.S. His attempt to weaken auto efficiency standards have, so far, only resulted in the EPA being sued by 17 states. Judges have struck down at least six attempts by the Pruitt EPA to undermine existing environmental rules on everything from pesticides to renewable fuel requirements to lead paint.

Pruitt might have been a small-time grifter, but as an ideologically motivated hatchet man he was a big-time flop. Evidently he was too busy making $1,000 pen orders to completely wreck U.S. environmental and public health standards.

Scott Pruitt was an easy man to make fun of (just ask John Oliver), but environmentalists shouldn’t take too much joy from his demise. His interim successor, former coal industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, is likely to be much more effective at dismantling environmental protections. But more to the point, Pruitt’s disgraceful 17 months in office are a reminder that, when it comes to climate change and other pressing environmental crises, inaction and incompetence are themselves dangerous.

The same day that Pruitt resigned, the EPA finished drafting a new proposal to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants—one that is significantly weaker than Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Those weaker standards—even if they aren’t the reversal that Pruitt hoped for—will put more carbon dioxide in the air at just the moment when it is most critical to cut carbon pollution as much as possible.

If there’s one thing we don’t have with regard to climate change, it’s time. Scott Pruitt wasted far too much of it—his, ours, and the planet’s as well.