The office of Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency-hating chief of the EPA, was deluged with phone calls Friday over his numbskull remarks about carbon dioxide and climate change. So many calls, in fact, that they jammed the office’s main phone line.
The calls came in response to Pruitt’s telling CNBC on Thursday that carbon dioxide isn’t a “primary contributor” to climate change:
"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's "Squawk Box."
"But we don't know that yet. ... We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis."
That view contradicts his stance in his written responses to questions from senators at his confirmation hearings in which he said the EPA administrator has an “important role when it comes to the regulation of carbon dioxide.”
His comment on CNBC, of course, was classic climate science denial, version #4, in which the denier implicitly or explicitly concedes that climate change is happening but not because of human activity. This is usually attached to a line saying “the climate is always changing” so what’s happening now is no different from what’s always occurred in the Earth’s existence. Deniers of version #1 claimed that climate change wasn’t happening at all. Indeed, as recently as five years ago, some deniers—many of them paid shills—claimed that Arctic ice was not dwindling.
Today, the Washington Post reported the outpouring of response to Pruitt’s anti-scientific remarks:
The calls to Pruitt’s main line, 202-564-4700, reached such a high volume by Friday that agency officials created an impromptu call center, according to three agency employees. The officials asked for anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
By Saturday morning calls went straight to voice mail, which was full and did not accept messages. At least two calls received the message that the line was disconnected, but that appeared to be in error. [...]
While constituents sometimes call lawmakers in large numbers to express outrage over contentious policy issues, it is unusual for Americans to target a Cabinet official.
Given what a low priority most Americans—including many progressives—place on dealing with climate change, it’s encouraging to see this response. The Post’s Juliet Ellperin suggested that it may have been mostly due to a comment on Reddit. Perhaps.
David Willett, the senior vice president for communications at the League of Conservation Voter, told Ellperin that the league had not organized a campaign specifically around Pruitt’s remarks. But he added: “It’s not surprising to hear people are calling after Pruitt contradicted his own agency’s science. We’re seeing record-setting response rates to mobile alerts, petitions and funding appeals.”
Good. But it’s going to take a lot more than phone calls and petitions and more money flowing into the coffers of activist environmental groups. The climate crisis is not just other policy dispute.
For more than a quarter-century, we’ve had denials that there is a crisis. We’ve also had delays in doing anything by non-deniers, those hypocrites—many of them Democrats—who say there is a crisis but argue that other issues take precedence for now.
Deniers and delayers have given us no choice now but to take bold action, far bolder than any that has so far been proposed by any politicians of prominence. This at a time when we are being led by people like Pruitt who think we should take no action at all or, rather, retreat from actions already being undertaken.