The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, has a long history of being among the climate change deniers. He, along with several others, refused to believe that the human race contributed to the phenomenon of global warming. Although it is contradictory to appoint him as head of the EPA, it was exactly what our current president did. Emails recently released revealed that Pruitt personally oversaw efforts last year to take down information on climate change from the EPA website. Recently, in an interview with KSNV, Pruitt finally acknowledged the scientific consensus that climate change was, indeed, a result of human action. Unfortunately for us, he didn’t stop there. Although he now agrees that human action has contributed “to some degree,” he doesn’t believe that it will be detrimental in the future.
“Is it an existential threat? Is it something that is unsustainable, or what kind of effect or harm is this going to have? I mean, we know that humans have most flourished during times of what? Warming trends,” Pruitt said. “I think there’s assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing. Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100? In the year 2018? I mean it’s fairly arrogant for us to think that we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”
It seems, in this government, that whenever we take one step forward we immediately take a hundred back. The entire reason that climate change is an issue is because it will have disastrous consequences in the future. Sure, Pruitt finally admits that we are responsible, but he then mitigates the seriousness of the threat. The existence of climate change is backed by a wealth of scientific evidence and he now acknowledges part of it, but all of it is important. If he admits the validity of climate change, he then also has to acknowledge the repercussions that have also been extensively researched. It’s not simple enough to pick and choose what part of the science to believe. Selective attention is not a trait best applied to dealing with scientific evidence, especially not from the person who is the head of the EPA.
NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has presented the scientific consensus that human action is the primary culprit in climate change but also that it will result more droughts and heatwaves, stronger and more intense hurricanes and rising sea levels– all of which doesn’t exactly come across as “beneficial” for the longevity of the human race.
Taken as a whole, the range of published evidence indicates that the net damage costs of climate change are likely to be significant and to increase over time.
