Professor’s lament over EPA’s Pruitt

The ignition point for today’s hyper-politicization may have been then-President Barack Obama’s statement to the GOP, in the days after his first inauguration, that “elections have consequences.”

But its origins have seeds in the 1960s counter-culture and anti-war movements; the decline of manufacturing jobs brought on by the 1970s trade liberalization; the country’s increasing racial diversity; the ’90s consumerism and its accompanying discontents; the post-9/11 fear of terrorism; the global financial crisis that threatened to bring the world economy to its knees; the unprecedented governmental actions needed to stanch the consequent economic hemorrhaging; all capped off in 2009 by the inauguration of a black president whose agenda included remaking some institutions of American life.

A new level of politicization has been reached with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt. In that connection, I confess regret for whatever small role I played in unleashing Administrator Pruitt on the unsuspecting public.

Pruitt was a diligent law student of mine in the early 1990s. Surely I’m at least partially to blame for failing to nurture in him a deep regard for seeing law as an instrument for addressing real facts on the ground, not simply implementing a political ideology, regardless the facts.

Countless nights I’ve tossed and turned. Did I not closely guard against my personal political dispositions creeping into the classroom dialogue? Was it that my occasional bouts of cynicism left me ill-suited for academia? I understand why Obama’s environmental measures seem objectionable to Administrator Pruitt. What I fail to comprehend, though, is his utter disregard for tailoring EPA regulatory actions so they address the environment as facts demonstrate we find it, not as we imagine it.

Take Pruitt’s recent Clean Power Plan action. You can get into the legal weeds on all of this in a hurry. The only point I would make is that underlying the administrator’s action is a view of climate science that denies what’s known about the contribution of humans to climatechanging gases. That view he stated forcefully in his Senate confirmation: “[S]cientists continue to disagree about … global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”

Two pieces of irrefutable evidence on mankind’s connection to climate change cause me great concern with Pruitt’s view. Though attempts have been made, neither has been convincingly dealt with by climate change skeptics.

First, on the macro level, icecore samples show that over the 650,000 years preceding the industrial revolution’s widespread fossil fuel use, fluctuations in CO2 and methane levels have occurred, but never exceeded 300 parts per billion and 790 parts per billion, respectively. Since the industrial revolution, both have jumped, with CO2 now at 400 parts per billion and methane at 1,770 parts per billion.

Second, on the micro level, atomic analysis of CO2 in ice-core samples shows that the increased levels trapped since the industrial revolution bear a close isotopic resemblance to what’s released from the fossil fuels we use, while levels trapped in the earlier 650,000 years are less closely related.

I don’t dispute that the economic costs from fossil fuel-use reductions can be quantified with certainty; and that when such certainty is pitted against uncertainties surrounding climate science, reining in fossil fuels can look unattractive. That equation, however, fails to include the other key constituents necessary to cast the problem in its complete form. For it is not simply a matter of evaluating costs that are certain against climate science uncertainties, but against the probability of such uncertainties occurring and the magnitude of harm resulting from their potential occurrence.

What affords all of us, including Administrator Pruitt, the chance to blithely live regret-free is the fact we never live long enough to witness the full effect of many of our decisions. As discomforting as it might be to accept consensus decisions of the scientific community on particular matters, the alternative raises the specter of regression to the Dark Ages’ reliance on the shaman and the soothsayer.