Pruitt’s exchange wasn’t “remarkable,” it was sickening—and it was helped along by questions from CNBC’s Joe Kernen who gave Pruitt every possible assistance in attacking basic science and voicing right-wing talking points.
“In recent years, critics would say the EPA has been too focused on CO2″ — carbon dioxide — “and maybe things like hazardous waste sites, particulate pollution, strip mining, what’s happening to the oceans — there are so many things that the EPA could do productively that maybe have been diverted from this single-minded focus on CO2,” host Joe Kernen asked. “Are you consciously changing the direction of the EPA to emphasize CO2 emissions less and emphasize these other things more?”
We should take a step back in amazement at the question itself, by the way. “What’s happening with the oceans” is that they are rising, warming and growing more acidic — thanks to global climate change. Oceans rise as Arctic and Antarctic ice melts, and the water itself warms and expands; more carbon dioxide dissolved in water makes it more acidic.
At the moment, you can still go to the EPA website and see information that directly contradicts Pruitt’s claims with detailed, extensive research.
Global climate is changing. Most of the warming of the past half-century is due to human activities.
But go quickly. Downloading you own copy wouldn’t hurt.
As they have been since the election, citizen scientists are still trying to collect government science data before Trump, Pruitt, and the enemies of facts manage to remove them and substitute their own propaganda.
In a Trump administration that has made clear its disdain for the copious evidence that human activity is warming the planet, researchers feared a broad crusade against the scientific information provided to the public. Reports last week that the administration is proposing deep budget cuts for government agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency have fueled new fears of databases being axed, if only as a cost-saving measure.
There is an enormous amount of information at risk in databases that represent irreplaceable investments of both time and technology. Theoretically, it’s illegal to destroy this government data, but the Trump regime can still bury it so deep, or twist it so badly, that the utility to scientists around the world is lost.
The public facing pages for the EPA and other agencies have already changed to hide accurate information from the public.
Pie charts on a Department of Energy website illustrating the link between coal and greenhouse gas emissions also have disappeared. So has the description on an Interior Department page of the potential environmental effects of hydraulic fracturing on federal land.
Pruitt’s statements show again that there will be no pivot. There is no more reasonable version of this regime waiting just around the corner. They are anti-climate change, anti-science, anti-facts … and they’re just getting started.
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