Donald
Trump picks climate change denier who wanted to scrap Environmental
Protection Agency as its new chief
Oklahoma
attorney general Scott Pruitt is a climate change denier. His legal
career includes fighting transgender rights and overtime pay for
working Americans
Rachael Revesz New
York
In one of the surest
signs yet that president Barack Obama’s progress on climate change
will be scrubbed from history, Donald Trump has selected a close ally
of the fossil fuel industry to head up the environment department.
The new leader of
the Environmental Protection Agency will be Scott Pruitt, the
Oklahoma attorney general, a Republican and key participant in the
fight against Mr Obama’s moves to counter climate change.
The move will
severely disappoint activists who might have been hoping for the
president-elect to change his mind, or at least dial down his
intentions to scrap United Nations funding to tackle global warming
and stop investment in renewable energy.
Mr Trump said at a
recent meeting at the New York Times that there was “some
connectivity” between humans and climate change, and said he would
keep “an open mind” when it came to environmental policy. His
flip-flop represented a huge change from his statement in 2013 that
climate change was a "hoax invented by the Chinese".
Mr Pruitt will most
likely eliminate any hope for an "open mind". He is a
climate change denier, and said the science behind it was "subject
to considerable debate".
Greenpeace spokesman
Travis Nichols said in a statement that Mr Pruitt would put the US
"at risk".
"Pruitt is a
pure product of the oil and gas industry, installed in successive
government posts to sell out his constituents at every turn," he
said. "He will push this country far behind the rest of the
world in the race for 21st century clean energy. With Scott Pruitt as
head of the EPA, the people and the environment will be in the hands
of a man who cares about neither."
48-year-old Mr
Pruitt has been hailed as a hero of the conservative movement that
pushed back against Mr Obama’s agenda. He, along with the likes of
Texas governor Greg Abbott, filed a 28-state lawsuit against Mr
Obama’s rules, which came into play last year. That suit has not
been resolved but is expected to end up with the Supreme Court.
The EPA of his
administration forced power plants to reduce their carbon dioxide
emissions under the 1970 Clean Air Act. A lawyer at the helm of the
EPA could work to slowly weaken and undermine that Act, if not scrap
it altogether.
Mr Pruitt's
appointment also raises questions about the future of the Dakota
Access Pipeline, a $3.8 billion oil and gas project that was denied
access over the weekend to dig under the Missouri River, close to the
reservation of the Native American Sioux tribe.
Mr Obama had said
the US Army Corps of Engineers would investigate other routes for the
pipeline.
The Oklahoma lawyer
has worked with oil and gas companies, who even drafted letters he
sent to lobby the government on climate change. In 2011, he copied
and pasted a letter written by lawyers for Devon Energy onto state
government-branded stationery and sent it to the EPA.
The exhange worked
both ways. Harold Hamm, CEO of Continental Energy, was co-chairman of
Mr Pruitt’s 2013 re-election campaign. He got more than $300,000
worth of donations from the oil and gas industry.
Greenpeace's Mr
Nichols said more people cared about climate change than voted for Mr
Trump, and that his administration was on the "wrong side"
of the issue.
"If climate
change denial is going to the default position of the Trump White
House, then relentless resistance will be the default position of the
American people," he said.
Mr Pruitt has also
fought transgender rights and basic workers' rights. He filed
lawsuits against Mr Obama's overtime rule, which planned to give
millions of Americans overtime pay as of 1 December. He also
challenged Mr Obama's order to public schools that they should allow
students to use the bathroom of their natural gender, instead of
their birth gender, otherwise the school could lose its federal
funding.
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