If this is some plot in a 6D chess play (like some people on Reddit were saying), then I am inclined to lean to the position that perhaps those people should rule; it's not like I have ever met a politician capable of playing 6D chess.

This guy is somewhat theatrical, but from what I understand he has quite serious credentials. I don't have the time, unfortunately, to geek out about him, but it beats hearing about yet another dictator in a random shit hole country.

I am not really in favor of actually destroying environmental departments if they actually have some knowledge and/or infrastructure. The right way to do it would be to open the documents and processes to the public and replace it with some court that is able to make these decisions such that if a violation happens, they have the expertise to efficiently decide on it.

I can easily imagine that those departments never had any value (like a naive person would assume they have).

In a libertarian economy a bunch of businesses would want to rule out environmental risk and fund an EPA like entity to make sure they aren't doing anything bad (with extremely severe financial penalties for that hypothetical EPA being corrupt (e.g. bankruptcy for every participating member)).

I don't expect miracles, but it sounds like he wants to give Argentina a more extreme version of the Singapore treatment (which was exceptionally successful). It would be interesting to know the debt/GDP ratio and absolute economic numbers for those two countries at the start of their transformations, but I am not going to dig those up. I am sure someone at Goldman Sachs did that a month ago, however.