Climate change sceptic to take top role
UNITED STATES: Donald Trump will nominate a climate change sceptic to lead the US Environmental Protection Agency suggesting he will keep his pledge to dismantle President Barack Obama’s efforts to combat global warming, and withdraw America from the Paris climate accord.
The choice of Scott Pruitt, 48, the attorney-general of Oklahoma, dismayed environmentalists but won praise from Republicans and industry.
Pruitt, from a state rich in oil and gas, has said the debate on climate change science is ‘‘far from settled’’. He has conducted a series of legal battles against the agency Trump has now picked him to lead.
In 2014, an expose by The New York Times newspaper revealed how Pruitt and other Republican attorney-generals had forged a secretive alliance with large energy companies to attack federal clean-air rules.
In picking him Trump brushed off pleas from Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore, both of whom he met this week.
Instead, he kept a campaign promise he made to the distressed coal communities of Appalachia: he told them he would roll back EPA regulations.
Gore, the former vice-president, was initially meant to meet Ivanka Trump, fuelling speculation that the president-elect’s eldest daughter might champion liberal causes, including climate change, but so far her influence appears to be limited.
Trump is expected to name Andy Puzder, a fast-food boss who has spoken enthusiastically about replacing restaurant workers with machines, as labour secretary.
He is chief executive of CKE Restaurants Holdings, which has 4000 restaurants in 40 countries, and has lobbied against raising the federal minimum wage above US$9 (NZ$12.54) an hour.
An aggregate of recent polls by the HuffPost Pollster website suggested Trump’s net ‘‘favourability’’ rating has edged into positive territory for the first time since he launched his campaign.
The margin, though, is thin: 49 per cent of voters now think of him favourably; 47 per cent do not.
Trump’s meetings with actor DiCaprio, who gave a presentation on how green-energy jobs could boost the US economy, and Gore had raised hopes among environmentalists that he had retreated from his view, expressed in 2013, that climate change was ‘‘a hoax invented by the Chinese’’.
He conceded last month that there was ‘‘some connectivity’’ with human activity and added he would keep ‘‘an open mind’’ on policy.
The choice of Pruitt suggests otherwise.
Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, said Pruitt’s ‘‘reluctance to accept the facts or science on climate change couldn’t make him any more out of touch with the American people, and with reality’’.
Pruitt’s relationship with the energy industry, he added, ‘‘only tightens’’ the grip that special interests have on Washington, a web of influence that Trump had promised to break.
A spokesman for Trump said: ‘‘For too long the Environmental Protection Agency has spent taxpayer dollars on an out-of-control anti-energy agenda that has destroyed millions of jobs, while also undermining our incredible farmers and many other businesses and industries at every turn.’’ - The Times