Now Scott Pruitt Thinks Climate Change Could Be Good
On the heels of revelations that he called President Donald Trump an “empty vessel” in 2016, EPA Chief Scott Pruitt is now thinking this whole global warming thing might not be so bad after all.
“We know that humans have most flourished during times of, what, warming trends,” Pruitt, a man who isn’t sure CO2 is a greenhouse gas, said Tuesday during an interview with KSNV television. “So, I think there’s assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing.”
Photo: AP
“Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100? In the year 2018?” Pruitt continued. “It’s fairly arrogant for us to think we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”
This is, of course, senseless insanity. It’s also par for the course in 2018, a year in which our consensus reality has become so fractured that the only thing we can all seem to agree on anymore is that rockets are cool. And it’s worth noting that Actually, Global Warming Is Good is a very old climate change denier talking point, one that goes hand-in-hand with the equally fallacious, misleading idea that more CO2 is a good thing because it’s “plant food.”
The recent televised comments came just a week after Pruitt told the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee that his now-infamous “red-team blue team” debate won’t be centered on the question of whether climate change is happening (it most definitely is), but more the nuanced inquiries befitting an artfully crafted public misinformation campaign, like Earth’s ideal temperature.
Not that it’ll make a difference to Pruitt as he continues dismantling the agency he was appointed to lead, but the National Climate Assessment released by the Trump administration last fall offers some clues as to how “ideal” future human-driven temperature changes may be.
On our current global warming trajectory, the world is in for one to four feet of sea level rise by 2100, an amount that’ll displace millions. Life-threatening floods, heat waves, and destructive mega-fires will become more common. In the US alone, climate change impacts could cost the government $34 too $100 billion a year by century’s end, Bloomberg reports.
But, hey, I suppose those Midwestern winters could lose their edge.
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by Maddie Stone
There are a lot of links in the Original Article that have not been reproduced here.
I don't believe for a second that Pruitt is this ignorant. He is speaking in pure Bad Faith .