On Thursday, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt said he doesn’t think carbon dioxide is a main contributor to global warming. Pruitt, a noted climate change skeptic, stopped by CNBC’s Squawk Box to advocate for more debate on the issue and claim that global warming is difficult to attribute to human activity:
“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet. … We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”
Pruitt’s statement may not totally come as a surprise, as the former Oklahoma attorney general has been a notorious fossil fuel proponent and has in the past sued the EPA, the agency he now runs. Despite evidence posted on the EPA’s website, Pruitt is standing his ground. Some aren’t happy with his statement, including Senator Brian Schatz, co-chair of the Senate Climate Action Task Force, who called Pruitt’s comments “irresponsible”:
“Anyone who denies over a century’s worth of established science and basic facts is unqualified to be the administrator of the EPA. Now more than ever, the Senate needs to stand up to Scott Pruitt and his dangerous views.”
The Trump administration has been going after climate change hard, as Trump reportedly ordered the EPA to remove these facts from its website and aimed to weed out employees who were proponents of the subject.