Forget hot air, judge climate action

Here are two things that happened this week: 1) Record-setting wildfires burned out of control in Oklahoma and Kansas. More than 1,000 square miles burned in Kansas, the largest blaze in the state’s history; entire towns had to be evacuated in Oklahoma. This came after record-setting February heat led to drought conditions across the plains — in fact, the February temperature in one Oklahoma town reached 99 degrees.

2) The former attorney general of Oklahoma, and now the man in charge of environmental protection for the entire United States, said in a television interview: “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.”

New Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt is, of course, wrong here. The scientific community has made it very clear that human beings are indeed warming the planet. The cloud of carbon dioxide and methane we’ve tossed into the atmosphere by burning coal and gas and oil has given us record temperatures year after year.

I imagine Pruitt knows he’s wrong here, and is simply telling a lie, akin to the one he told at his confirmation hearings about not having used private email accounts for government work.

But what Pruitt says is not all that important. It’s what he does that matters.

Let’s say that eventually he’s forced into admitting that humans are changing the climate. Let’s say he ceases his absurd denial.

If he continues the set of policies he and the rest of the Trump administration have put in place, climate change will just keep getting worse. He wants to gut the Obama Clean Power Plan, and apparently he wants to rewrite the rules and let Detroit produce a new generation of gas-guzzlers.

Those two actions will pour more carbon into the atmosphere, and they will help cook the planet. No matter what he says or doesn’t say.

In fact, it’s probably time to stop asking politicians whether or not they believe in climate change. Because it sets the bar much too low. If they say no, they don’t believe in it, then what are you supposed to do? Arrange a physics seminar for them? And if they say yes, they do believe in it — well, who cares?

We have plenty of examples of politicians much more “enlightened” than Pruitt who make the right noises about climate change but then support pipelines or frack wells. In a sense, they’re just as dangerous, because they give the illusion of action where none exists. By that measure at least Pruitt is consistent.

We’re going to see this same dance play out with the Paris climate accords in the weeks ahead. The Trump administration is under pressure to stay in the climate treaty that the world’s nations agreed to in 2015. Rumors abound: Ivanka wants to stay in. Steve Bannon wants out. But it’s all a shadow dance, because the administration has already decided not to take the steps the treaty calls for. If it makes a paper promise, it will be for PR reasons only.

Meanwhile, physics — entirely honest — does its thing. It takes the extra energy we’re trapping with our carbon dioxide and melts the Arctic (where ice volume is at a record low for the date) and the Antarctic (where scientists wait for an iceberg the size of Wales to break off the Larsen Ice Shelf). It raises the ocean a little more every day, and bakes to death a few more coral reefs. It dries out grasslands and sets them ablaze.

So one can certainly look at Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma and say “Liar, liar, state on fire.” But his words almost seem beside the point. The point is to build enough political power to change his and others’ actions, as people have begun to do on issues from immigration to Obamacare. For those who care about the climate, that chance will come on April 29, when a vast march will gather in D.C.

We’ll be demanding that the nation cease building new fossil fuel infrastructure, and that instead it commit to 100% clean energy. Deeds, that is, not words. That may seem unlikely, but: The plains are on fire. Eventually the truth will out.