Republican Crazy: Scott Pruitt---'Nuff Said

Given the paucity of Republican lawmakers who are presently willing to participate in town hall meetings with their constituents or, for that matter, even meet with constituents in their state or district offices (not to mention their Capitol Hill offices), it stands to reason that they have had plenty of alone-time to come up with a hefty stash of crazy things to say and/or do or of excuses as to why they said/did such crazy things.

They have not disappointed.

Which brings us to the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, who announced last week that he "would not agree that [carbon dioxide] is a primary contributor to the global warming that we see."

What makes this another piece of Trump Administration Crazy is not just that Pruitt's position is so egregiously wrong but that the Environmental Protection Agency states, on its own website, that "carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change."

It also states that human agency--read,the burning of fossil fuels--"releases large amounts of CO2, causing concentrations in the atmosphere to rise" and thus increasing the degree to which global warming takes place.

NASA--a pretty credible crowd--agrees with the EPA and its website.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration--another pretty credible crowd-- agrees with the EPA and its website.

Somewhere in the vicinity of 97% of those who do mainstream scientific inquiry--the most credible crowd!--into climate science agree with the EPA and its website.

Kerry Emanuel, a political conservative who has long spoken out against ideology trumping scientific fact and co-directs the Lorenz Center at MIT, states that "the most authoritative compilation of scientific research has shown that increasing carbon dioxide has been the dominant source of global warming."

Scott Pruitt--a lawyer and Republican politician with long ties to the oil industry, a long history of receiving political donations from the oil industry and a penchant for suing the EPA (he has sued the agency he now leads 14 times and actually has a lawsuit pending against it at the moment)--is not credible. In fact, after denying the deleterious effect of CO2 in the atmosphere, he went on to make the jaw-dropping statement that "there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact..."

No.

No.

No.

No, there's not.

Now, there's "tremendous disagreement" among politicians and lobbyists and CEO's and stockholders who are swimming in the money they have made from the fossil fuel industry.

But there is precious little disagreement about CO2 and its affect on global warming among credible researchers. Precious. Little.

I mean, who would you think to be more credible on the issue of human agency, carbon dioxide and climate change?

The Environmental Protection Agency? NASA? NOAA? Kerry Emanuel? A hefty 97% of scientific researchers?

Or, Scott Pruitt and the Koch Brothers?

The EPA, under Scott Pruitt's leadership, is said to be looking at the Trump administration cutting its budget by at least 20% for FY 2018.

The Washington Post reports this would result in staffing being cut from 15,000 to 12,000 and state grants as well as clean air and clean water programs being cut by 30%. The Chesapeake Bay cleanup project, once hailed as one of the most significant environmental gains in U.S. history, will see its budget cut from $73 million to $5 million for FY 2018. In other words, the effort to actually clean up the Chesapeake Bay is going to disappear.

As many as 38 other EPA programs will also just disappear, among them grants to clean up 25,000 of the 450,000 "brownfield properties"--typically abandoned industrial sites filled with pollutants, contaminants and hazardous waste material--that exist in the U.S.

And Alaskan villages that have been decimated by climate-change/global warming? Grants to assist those who live in these villages to cope with the destruction of their surrounding environment or to simply relocate will disappear as well.

Trump to Alaskans watching their homelands disappear beneath the water created by melting ice in the Arctic regions: "Best of luck to ya'. Because, well, ExxonMobil and the others, ya' know?"

In TrumpSpeak: Sad.

Pruitt, who wants the EPA done away with altogether, is fine with all of that. Which explains why he would lie about the effects of CO2.

But one would think he would have the sense to scrub the EPA website of information that directly contradicts the lies he's willing to tell.

Or, not.