The selection of Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to run the Environmental Protection Agency, is a blatant endorsement of climate change denying and worse than that, it indicates a mandate to erode President Obama's legacy, specifically with respect to climate change.
Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the president-elect’s comments during the campaign. Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to “cancel” the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr. Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a “war on coal.” -- New York Times
There is no "war on coal" in Obama's Clean Power Plan except in the fevered imaginations of Republican propagandists. The displaced coal miners in West Virginia and Tennessee were packing themselves into field offices during the election to register to vote for Trump because Trump had promised them, "Work. So much work you won't know what to do with it." That was a blatant lie and an overt manipulation. Any rational examination of the issue shows that global technology has long swayed towards natural gas in lieu of coal extraction because of the plain economics of the situation: natural gas is so much cheaper.
And if there is a general in the "war on coal" that would be Scott Republican Hypocrite Pruitt himself, who is making money hand over fist, along with friend and campaign financier, Oklahoma billionaire Harold Hamm. They don't worry about Trump's impossible promises to be all things to all people: they just count the money.
“There is a fundamental inconsistency between Trump’s promise to ‘bring the coal industry back 100 percent,’ as he says, and any promises to use government policy to grow the market for natural gas,” said Robert N. Stavins, director of the environmental economics program at Harvard.
“The primary cause of the tremendous fall in coal employment is low natural gas prices, due to increased supplies of natural gas from hydraulic fracturing,” Professor Stavins said. “If the Trump administration wanted to help coal, it could ban fracking. But he can’t have it both ways.
”The United States is already on track to become the world’s largest oil and gas producer, largely without specific policies to push new production. Over the last decade, breakthroughs in hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, led to a boom in production of natural gas, which is now about 20 percent cheaper than coal. That boom, in turn, drove down demand for coal. Last year, natural gas overtook coal as the largest source of the nation’s electricity.
There is no way that the likes of Harold Hamm and Scott Pruitt are going ignore the cheaper fuel that lines their pockets, i.e. natural gas, regardless of whatever Trump might have told some hillbillies during the campaign in order to get their votes.
And it doesn't stop there, unfortunately. Pruitt is on record as being against Obama's Clean Power Plan, which is a cogent and sane document; anybody opposing it is not grounded in simple facts that have been available to the public for several decades.
The emission of greenhouse gases (GHGs) threatens Americans' health and welfare by leading to long lasting changes in our climate. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the primary greenhouse gas pollutant, accounting for roughly three quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010 and 82 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2013. Fossil fuel fired electric generating units (EGUs) are by far the largest emitters of GHGs, primarily in the form of CO among stationary sources in the United States.
In this action, the Environmental Protection Agency is establishing final emission guidelines for states to follow in developing plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from existing fossil fuels. — Clean Power Plan, EPA
It is common knowledge that the poles are heating up and that the ice floes have reduced in size threatening not only indigenous species like the polar bears and the penguins but affecting the weather patterns which are governed in no insignificant measure by the flow of air over the polar ice caps. The big air conditioner which the North Pole is to the North American continent cannot be overemphasized in importance.
For reasons best known only to Scott Pruitt and his ilk, Pruitt has been hell bent on opposing Obama's efforts at climate change and environmental responsibility. Obama has always seen clearly the fundamental premise that man is merely the steward of this planet, not its rightful owner; and that in his capacity as steward, it is man's duty to safeguard the well being of the animals and the ecology upon which they depend for their livelihood, even as we do for ours.
In the name of shortsightedness and sheer greed Pruitt, Hamm and their enabler, Donald Trump, seek to put their own financial well being above that of the American people and by extension the people of the world. Democrat leadership must stand firm against Pruitt as EPA head in order to avert a worse case scenario, which is an extinction level event on this planet. It will only take a rise in overall temperature of four degrees to achieve that; and we're virtually assured of being halfway there in a few years at the rate we're going. Pruitt's appointment this morning to run the EPA is an unqualified disaster.