Make America Ignorant and Polluted Again

Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, has dismissed a basic scientific understanding of climate change by denying that carbon dioxide emissions are a primary cause of global warming.

Pruitt said on Thursday that he did not believe that the release of CO2, a heat-trapping gas, was pushing global temperatures upwards.

“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,” he told CNBC.

  Guardian

Yes, but the "tremendous disagreement" is between scientists and science deniers aka religious nuts.

This stance puts Pruitt at odds with his own agency, which states on its website that carbon dioxide is the “primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change”. This finding is backed by Nasa, which calls CO2 “the most important long-lived ‘forcing’ of climate change”.

Scientists have understood for more than a century that CO2 traps heat. Atmospheric concentrations of the gas have increased by more than a third since the industrial revolution, driven by the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

[...]

“The world of science is about empirical evidence, not beliefs,” said McCarthy, an appointee of Barack Obama. “When it comes to climate change, the evidence is robust and overwhelmingly clear that the cost of inaction is unacceptably high.

“I cannot imagine what additional information the administrator might want from scientists for him to understand that.”

[...]

A core EPA function is the regulation of greenhouse gases, including CO2. Pruitt, in his previous role as attorney general of Oklahoma, sued the EPA to halt Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which imposes emissions limits on coal-fired power plants.

The plan, similar to many of the other Obama-era policies to combat climate change and safeguard clean air and water, is likely to be dismantled by the Trump administration. The president has previously called the EPA a “disgrace” and promised to reduce it to “tidbits” in order to spark economic growth.

[...]

Pruitt sued the EPA 14 times while attorney general of Oklahoma and has worked in concert with fossil fuel interests in many of these cases. The recent release of thousands of Pruitt’s emails during his tenure showed an extremely close relationship between Pruitt’s office and oil and gas companies.

What a surprise.

In pictures. Click the graphic.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.