‘Fairly Arrogant for Us to Think That We Know Exactly What It Should Be in 2100’ Scott Pruitt Charges
The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, says it’s arrogant for humans to think we know what the ideal planetary temperature should be, and the warming of the earth might not be bad.Â
Administrator Pruitt, who spent years as a mouthpiece for the energy industry while serving as Oklahoma’s Attorney General, has become one of the world’s best climate change deniers by not denying the climate is changing.Â
Asked by Nevada television station KSNV if Americans “should be alarmed” when they hear about climate change, Pruitt grimaced, then delivered a carefully practiced response.
“No one disputes the climate changes,” Pruitt said, transforming the very definition of climate change into a weather forecast. “We see that, that’s constant,” he continued, again confusing climate change with weather – which are not the same.
“We obviously contribute to it – we live in the climate,” he acknowledged, “so our actions contribute to the climate changing to a certain degree.”
“We know that humans have most flourished during times of what? Warming trends,” Pruitt said. Which is true if the measurement is, say, after the Ice Age. “I think there’s assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing. Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100, in the year 2018?â€
“That’s fairly arrogant for us to think that we know exactly what it should be in 2100,” Pruitt charged.
Pruitt then went on to say a bigger question for him is if the EPA actually has the authority to regulate.
He does.
Congress established the EPA in 1970, under Republican President Richard Nixon. It was given full authority to regulate by Congress. In fact, when the EPA has failed to do its job, generally under Republican presidents, the courts have stepped in and ordered it to.
Pruitt, like many if not most Trump appointees, is focused on the delegitimization of the very agency he heads.Â
Climate change is “one of the greatest known threats to humanity,” HuffPost notes. “Pruitt’s antagonism toward established climate science … flies in the face of such research all the same. Scientists have long held a near-unanimous consensus that the climate is changing and that humans are the primary cause. World leaders and global organizations have declared the phenomenon one of the most pressing threats to humanity and have warned that unless the world works to halt greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, a host of climate-related effects could devastate the world.”
“The planet is already far off its goals to reduce such emissions, just two years after almost every country in the world signed on to the landmark Paris climate accord.”
Hat tip: HuffPost