Donald Trump's pick for Environmental Protection Agency is a warming denier

Washington: President-elect Donald Trump has selected Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a close ally of the fossil fuel industry, to run the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), signaling Mr Trump’s determination to dismantle President Barack Obama’s efforts to counter climate change — and much of the EPA itself. Mr Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the president-elect’s comments during the campaign. Mr Trump has criticised the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to “cancel” the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a “war on coal.”

Mr Pruitt has been in lock step with those views. “Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind,” he wrote in National Review earlier this year. “That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.” Mr Pruitt is a hero to conservative activists, one of a group of Republican attorneys general who formed an alliance with some of the nation’s top energy producers to push back against the Obama regulatory agenda. Fossil fuel interests greeted Trump’s selection with elation.

By arrangement with the New York Times