As I pointed out in this post Thursday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt got the jobs and environment story upside-down in his appearance on “Fox & Friends.” Nadia Prupis at CommonDreams takes note of that and another of his pitiful anti-green stances in "Even for Pruitt, It's Outrageous": EPA Chief Says US Should Exit Paris Deal:
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Scott Pruitt on Thursday explicitly called for the U.S. to remove itself from the Paris climate agreement, one of his strongest remarks yet expressing his opposition to the landmark deal to keep global warming below 2°C.
"Paris is something we need to look at closely. It's something we need to exit in my opinion," Pruitt said in an interview on "Fox & Friends."
"It's a bad deal for America," he said. "It's an 'America second, third or fourth' kind of approach."
The Trump administration has already taken steps to undo landmark climate regulations, such as the executive order President Donald Trump signed last month that called for repealing former President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan, which requires states to slash emissions and was a central component of the U.S.'s plan to meet its Paris goals.
Pruitt said adhering to the global climate treaty would cost American jobs, a claim which environmentalists—and, increasingly, even fossil fuel companies—say is wrong.
Nathaniel Keohane, the Environmental Defense Fund's vice president on global climate, told InsideClimate News that "[p]ulling out of the Paris climate accord would damage the U.S. more than it damages the Paris agreement or climate action globally." [...]
Kim Glas, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor and environmental groups, also said Thursday, "Administrator Pruitt's statements are unsurprising. He just can't seem to grasp what the vast majority of Americans and scientists have already figured out: climate change is real, it is happening now and human activities are causing it."
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QUOTATION
“She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.”
~Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin: A Novel (2009)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Texas declares sovereignty from U.S.:
If you dismissed Glenn Beck's argument for seceding from the Union as the isolated ravings of a lunatic, think again.
In this [delinked] video, Texas Governor Rick Perry wades into General Beck’s loony bin and declares Texas' sovereignty from the U.S., saying that the time has come to "draw the line in the sand" against the federal government. "No longer are we going to accept their oppressive hand in the state of Texas."
If you can hear today’s Kagro in the Morning show, you haven’t been nuked! On today’s show: progressives running as Rs, how the Kochs learned to live with Trump, the grassroots effort that just might rein in gerrymandering, and how ex-Gov. Bentley reminded me I was right about Garland.
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