Pruitt ignites climate change storm
UNITED STATES: Scott Pruitt, America’s top environmental official, has strongly rejected the established science of climate change, outraging scientists, environmentalists, and even his immediate predecessors at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
‘‘I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,’’ Pruitt, the newly installed EPA administrator, said on the CNBC programme Squawk Box yesterday.
‘‘We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.’’
His comments represented a startling statement for an official so high in the US government, putting him at odds not only with other countries around the globe but also with the official scientific findings of the agency he now leads.
US President Donald Trump in the past has called the notion of human-fuelled climate change a hoax. Other cabinet members, including Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, have questioned the scientific basis for combating global warming.
But Pruitt’s attempt to sow scientific doubt where little exists has alarmed environmental advocates, scientists and former EPA officials, who fear he plans to use such views to attack Obamaera regulations aimed at reining in pollution from the burning of coal and other fossil fuels.
‘‘The world of science is about empirical evidence, not beliefs,’’ said Gina Mccarthy, the EPA’S most recent administrator. ‘‘When it comes to climate change, the evidence is robust and overwhelmingly clear that the cost of inaction is unacceptably high. I cannot imagine what additional information the administrator might want from scientists for him to understand that.’’
Pruitt, who was visiting the CERAWEEK energy industry conference in Houston, waded into related controversial topics during his CNBC interview.
He questioned whether it was the EPA’S role to regulate carbon dioxide emissions - something undertaken through the agency’s Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s most significant policy to combat climate change and challenged the Paris climate agreement.
His remarks appeared to fundamentally call into question whether the EPA has a role in the regulation of greenhouse gases that drive global warming, including carbon dioxide and methane. Last week, Pruitt’s agency withdrew an agency request to oil and gas companies to report on their equipment and its methane emissions, which could have laid the groundwork for tighter regulations.
Pruitt dismissed the international Paris climate agreement, which the Obama administration helped to lead and which was joined by nearly 200 countries in late 2015, as a ‘‘bad deal’’ for the US.
‘‘It’s one thing to be talking about CO2 internationally,’’ he said. ‘‘But when you front-load your costs, as we endeavoured to do in that agreement, and then China and India back-loaded their costs for 2030 and beyond, that’s not good for America. That’s not an ‘America first’ type of approach.’’
An international scientific consensus has concluded that it is ‘‘extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century’’.
The EPA’S own ‘‘Climate Change’’ website states: ‘‘Recent climate changes, however, cannot be explained by natural causes alone. Research indicates that natural causes do not explain most observed warming, especially warming since the mid-20th century. Rather, it is extremely likely that human activities have been the dominant cause of that warming.’’
Pruitt spoke amidst growing anticipation that the Trump administration will soon begin a formal rollback of President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, a policy capping emissions from electricity generation stations, such as coal-fired power plants.
Pruitt himself sued the EPA over the Clean Power Plan in his previous role as attorney general of Oklahoma - one of many lawsuits he filed against the agency. Others were over mercury and air pollution, the agency’s attempts to regulate pollution of waterways, and methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. - Washington Post