Scott Pruitt, who heads the Environmental Protection Agency, wants you to know how much you’re going to love a world with a little extra CO2.
The EPA administrator said that humans are contributing to climate “to a certain degree”, but added: “We know humans have most flourished during times of warming trends. There are assumptions made that because the climate is warming that necessarily is a bad thing.
The competition to be the least sane member of Trump’s cabinet is always high. After all … Trump. But Scott Pruitt continues to give it a solid effort. Apparently leaving his custom-built cone of silence (yes, a real thing) and shrugging off his 30-plus bodyguards (also real) and making his way from his private floor of the EPA building (real) through the multiple internal security systems he had installed (real) and down a hallway freshly swept (real) for the insidious bugs (not real) left by, let’s say secret supporters of clean air, Pruitt entered another office and used a random worker’s phone to call into a Nevada television show (a real thing that real Scott Pruitt really does).
In addition to declaring the benefits of a toastier planet, Pruitt made his case that trying to not radically change the composition of the atmosphere would simply be: arrogant.
“Do we know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100 or year 2018?” he told a TV station in Nevada. “It’s fairly arrogant for us to think we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”
Yeah … and here’s the problem. Humans legitimately might love a planet that was a little warmer. A slightly toastier, less wintry world might even be a bit nicer. Only … we spent the last 10,000 years siting our cities, raising crops, and building homes on this planet, not one that’s a smidge more pleasantly balmy.
Which means that as the temperature rises on this planet, it’s going to swamp cities, destroy trillions of dollars in property, erase croplands, and generally bring fire, famine, flood, plague, and warfare along with simply putting hundreds of millions of people out of their homes. This is not the definition of “flourishing.” You can look it up.
Beyond people, the changing climate is also having a disastrous effect on the natural world. Temperatures go up and down, but they generally do so over the space of many generations, allowing animals and plants to adapt, move to new territories, find new niches. Even happening at natural speeds, a change in the global temperature of two degrees is a serious thing, leading to extinctions and severe shifts in the environment. Changes of a much smaller magnitude have completely destroyed human civilizations in the Middle East and the American Southwest.
And this change isn’t happening at natural speed. It’s happening practically overnight. It’s like the difference between someone handing you a bullet, and someone delivering it via Colt.
At some point hundreds of years in the future, humans may “flourish” in a warmer world. And they’ll probably enjoy swimming over the sunken buildings of Miami, or hiking the fresh forests of Greenland. They may even visit Nevada, if they’re wearing their refrigerated shorts.
But those flourishing people will be swimming over and walking on a lot of bones, thanks to enormous jackasses like Scott Pruitt.