Last week, a number of sordid stories about Trump’s cabinet members came out, specifically in regards to their relationship to the truth. First, AG Jeff Sessions admitted he had in fact met with a Russian ambassador, despite claims otherwise. And it turns out VP Mike Pence used a private email account (an AOL account, no less!) to conduct official, sensitive state business.
And more relevant to this space, newly-minted EPA Admin Scott Pruitt, who also committed the capital sin of using a private email address to conduct official state business -- and lied about it to the Senate.
Pruitt, then, is clearly not someone whose words we can take at face value. So when he first addressed the EPA last week and talked about being able to be “both pro-jobs and pro-environment”, it was a little weird.
Because that is definitely true, as Dave Roberts at Vox explains. Environmental regulations “have little to no effect on long-term aggregate employment.” To justify the claims of massive job losses (or the highest range of job gains, he points out) resulting from regulation, you have to use “funky, opaque models” and a particular set of assumptions. (Sound familiar?)
Now, we’re not holding our breath that Pruitt’s lip service is sincere. After all, everyone puts their best foot forward when starting a new job. As for what he truly thinks, and much more importantly how he’ll act as administrator? Obviously, we can’t know that.
But we can see what some of his ideological brethren say. For that, we turn to DeSmog, where Zach Roberts covers the CPAC panel on “Fake Climate News Camouflaging an Anti-Capitalist Agenda — and What President Trump Plans To Do About it.”
This panel featured three absolute luminaries of the scientific and journalistic worlds who know about fake climate news better than anyone: Breitbart London’s Editor-Who-Needs-An-Editor James Delingpole, Tony Heller (AKA Steve Goddard AKA denier so belligerently wrong he’s shunned even Curry and Watts), and JunkScience guy and former tobacco flak, fossil fuel lobbyist, coal executive and, mostly recently, Trump EPA landing team advisor(!), Steve Milloy.
By the sounds of it, there were plenty of fun moments- like Milloy comparing his anti-EPA crusade to the Les Mis character Inspector Javert, which is an interesting comparison, as Roberts reminds us: “given that Javert is a character so blindingly obsessed with duty that he ends up committing suicide rather than accepting that the target of his pursuit, a convict guilty of stealing food, could be a moral person.”
Tony Heller took the crowd back in time with a slideshow of newspaper clippings of past weather reports that were supposed to show how media is always hyping the weather.
And Delingpole, who will stoop to using child trafficking to make a jab at alarmists, was of course as understated and diplomatic as ever, telling the audience “I can tell you that the Greenies are … are … some of the worst people in the world.”
So there you go. We’re not saying that’s how Pruitt thinks of the folks he’s leading at the EPA, but it is a glimpse into how deniers talk in semi-private. The only way to know how Pruitt speaks in private is if there were some reason that he had to turn over emails from his personal address as part of a FOIA request.
But that would only be possible if he used his personal email address for official government business...
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