Trump's just-named EPA chief is a climate change denier

It almost sounds like farce, except it's true: President-elect Donald Trump has tapped a climate-change denier to run the federal agency in charge of reducing the nation's planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Trump on Wednesday nominated Scott Pruitt, the Republican attorney general in oil-rich Oklahoma, to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Trump transition officials told reporters.

Pruitt has a long record of suing the agency he has been nominated to lead, including opposing the agency's Clean Power Plan, which seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. 

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Pruitt, who keeps close ties to the fossil fuel industry, has been one of the most vocal critics of the Obama administration's environmental agenda. 

He has described himself as a "leading advocate" against the current EPA's "activist agenda," which includes landmark rules to curb state's carbon emissions and accelerate the country's transition to cleaner energy sources.

Image: Andrew harnik/AP

Despite the far-reaching consensus among the world's climate scientists that humans are causing climate change, Pruitt claims that the "debate is far from settled," according to a May op-ed he co-authored in the conservative magazine National Journal.  

"Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connections to the actions of mankind," Pruitt wrote, along with Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange. "That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress."

Pruitt and Strange were responding to a group of Democratic attorneys general who are investigating whether U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil Corp. had deliberately misled the public and investors about the risks that climate change poses to its business.

"We won't be joining this coalition, and we hope that those attorneys general who have joined will disavow it," Pruitt and Strange wrote.

Pruitt is part of a different coalition of Republican attorneys general who have forged an alliance with some of the biggest oil and gas producers to push back against the Obama administration's environmental rules, a 2014 New York Times investigation found.

As part of that alliance, Pruitt joined an effort by 28 other attorneys general to dismantle the EPA's Clean Power Plan. The rule, which took effect last year, requires states to take measures to cut carbon emissions from power plants to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

The Clean Power Plan is central to America's climate commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement, an international deal to limit global warming that entered force last month. The U.S. has promised to cut its total greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels in 2025.

Trump has vowed to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, which foreign leaders, scientists and environmentalists have urged him not to do. 

Trump's intentions to appoint someone who is at the very least skeptical of the EPA's power were made clear when he appointed well-known climate denier Myron Ebell, a researcher at a Washington think tank, to lead the transition effort at the agency. Ebell has claimed that the Clean Power Plan is illegal. 

Environmental groups condemned the nomination, and some Democratic senators began to announce their opposition to the appointment on Wednesday. However, it's not clear that many Republican senators, many of whom share his views on global warming and the EPA's actions under Obama, will oppose Pruitt.

"Pruitt has fought back against unconstitutional and overzealous environmental regulations like Waters of the U.S. and the Clean Power Plan; he has proven that being a good steward of the environment does not mean burdening tax payers and businesses with red tape," said Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe, who is the Senate's most prominent climate denier, in a statement.

"Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt represents a serious attack on American values. It’s now up to the Senate to stand on the right side of history and fight for our families by defeating this nomination," said Tom Steyer, a billionaire Democratic activist who leads the group NextGen Climate. 

May Boeve, the executive director of 350.org, issued a statement that was equally critical of Pruitt. 

"You couldn't pick a better fossil fuel industry puppet," she said. "This is a man who cares more about the profits of coal company CEOs than the health of our children or the future of our planet."

The Pruitt pick comes just two days after Trump offered a glimmer of hope to environmentalists by meeting with former vice president and renowned climate activist Al Gore. 

"Pruitt's appointment reveals Trump's climate flip-flopping and meetings with Gore as nothing more than a smokescreen," Boeve said in her statement.