Robert Reich:
Trump’s new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, is already filling the agency with climate-change deniers, according to the Times.
For example:
1. Douglas Ericksen, a current Washington state senator, is being considered as the regional administrator of the E.P.A.’s Pacific Northwest office. As a state senator, Ericksen has been active in opposing efforts to pass a state-level climate change law taxing carbon pollution. Last month, he invited Tony Heller, a climate denialist who blogs under the pseudonym Steven Goddard, to address a Washington State Senate committee on the costs of climate change policy.
2. David Kreutzer, a senior research fellow in energy economics and climate change at the conservative Heritage Foundation who has publicly praised the benefits of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is under consideration for a senior position.
3. Ryan Jackson will be Pruitt’s chief of staff. Jackson was chief of staff for Senator James Inhoff, long known as Congress’s most prominent skeptic of climate science. Another former Inhofe staff member, Byron Brown, will serve as Mr. Jackson’s deputy.
4. Andrew Wheeler, a fossil fuel lobbyist and a former Inhofe chief of staff, is a finalist to be Mr. Pruitt’s deputy.
5. Steve J. Milloy, who runs the website JunkScience.com, which aims to debunk climate change, is a member of the E.P.A. transition team.
And then, of course, there's Pruitt himself, who has spent years trying to impede or reverse EPA regulations. These people don’t want to know the facts of climate change. They’ve spent their careers trying to ignore them. And now they’ll be running the chief agency of the federal government that’s supposed to slow or reverse it.
The entire Trump administration is built on a tissue of lies.
E.P.A. Head Stacks Agency With Climate Change Skeptics
By Coral Davenport
