Pruitt’s climate message now official
Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt has long insisted it is difficult for scientists to measure precisely the extent to which humans cause climate change.
Now EPA’s regional staff members engaging with local communities and American Indian tribes have been instructed to push the same message too.
This week, EPA staffers received an email instructing them to underscore the uncertainties about how human activity contributes to climate change.
Here are a few of the “talking points” in the email, first reported by HuffPost and confirmed by The Washington Post:
• “Human activity impacts our changing climate in some manner. The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue.”
• “Clear gaps remain including our understanding of the role of human activity and what we can do about it.”
Pruitt and other administration officials and President Donald Trump repeatedly and publicly have highlighted uncertainty about the role humans have played in contributing to the warming of the planet since becoming EPA administrator. Now it’s official internal guidance.
Consider how closely the talking points match Pruitt’s rhetoric during a March 2017 interview on CNBC, with the use of words such as “precision,” “impact” and “debate” that also appear in the memo:
“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 . ... We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”
Yet some of the talking points are also at odds with the vast majority of climate scientists abroad and at home. A 2017 interagency report by federal scientists concluded that “it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
The talking points appear to be an effort to narrow the gap between what Pruitt and the rest of the EPA bureaucracy say publicly about climate change.