Here’s the video: Energy Secretary Rick Perry denies man-made CO2 emissions are the main cause of climate change. pic.twitter.com/koDcJwhVJ1
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 19, 2017
Since being named (and confirmed) as Energy Secretary, former Texas governor Rick Perry has done a lot of learning on the job. However, one of the positive things Perry routinely said was that he wanted the U.S. to stay in the Paris Agreement and that the U.S. would promote clean energy. However, Perry has now officially said that he does not think that carbon dioxide emissions and human activity are the primary causes of climate change.
Asked whether CO2 emissions are primarily responsible for climate change, Perry told CNBC’s “Squawk Box”: “No, most likely the primary control knob is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in.”
“The fact is this shouldn’t be a debate about, ‘Is the climate changing, is man having an effect on it?’ Yeah, we are. The question should be just how much, and what are the policy changes that we need to make to effect that?” he said.
Perry joins Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt as members of the Trump administration who officially said they didn’t believe carbon dioxide emissions were the primary contributor to climate change, views opposed by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and several other members of the administration have refused to say whether or not President Trump believes climate change is real. The EPA website recently removed a page that put the onus on carbon dioxide.
Perry continued in his interview to say that this actually was the smart thing to say, and may have subtly defended the President’s silence of climate change, a phenomena he has repeatedly said is a hoax in the past.
Despite those conclusions, Perry said, “This idea that science is just absolutely settled and if you don’t believe it’s settled then somehow you’re another neanderthal, that is so inappropriate from my perspective.”
Being a skeptic about climate change issues is “quite all right,” he said, suggesting that skepticism is a sign of a “wise, intellectually engaged person.”
At this point, it would be hard to find anyone in the Trump administration who would publicly declare a belief in public warming.
(via CNBC)