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Scott Pruitt just can’t win. The Environmental Protection Agency head has the impossible task of running an agency that directly contradicts his own long track record of denying climate change and the proposed solutions to combatting it.
But Pruitt at least must have thought he’d catch a break from settled science when he stopped by Fox News for an interview.
Not so fast.
During a surprisingly tough interview with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, the former Oklahoma attorney general was forced to contend with those pesky facts once again.
Pruitt began the interview by rattling off some of his talking points before Wallace quickly interrupted, playing a video of Pruitt denying that humans play a leading role in contributing to global warming.
“Mr. Pruitt, there are all kinds of studies that contradict you,” Wallace said, pointing out that both U.N. and U.S. studies show with near 100 percent certainty that human activity is the leading factor in climate change.
“Mr. Pruitt, are we supposed to believe that that’s all a coincidence?”
A clearly caught-off-guard Pruitt then appeared to lose his footing a bit, before acknowledging that man-made climate change is real, before quickly disputing how much of a factor it actually is and how society should address it.
“You’re kind of sugarcoating,” Wallace said. “Simple question: What if you’re wrong?”
Wallace was pressing Pruitt on new rules and rollbacks initiative by the Trump White House, including a widely criticized move to not ban harmful insecticides.
Pruitt then literally just repeated his talking point, insisting it’s a question of how much we are actually impacting the environment and “how much can be done through process.”
“We have nothing to be apologetic about,” Pruitt insisted,” “We do it better than anyone in the world.”
It’s not that Pruitt gives a bad interview. His willingness to acknowledge a human role in climate change is indicative of the new global warming denier approach: acknowledge what’s happening is real, but immediately dispute its impact, while quietly suggesting there’s nothing to be done about it anyway.
Amazingly, just that much of a change has resulted in some friction with conservatives who worry that Pruitt and the Trump Administration may not be going far enough in rolling back protections put into place by President Obama and past presidents.
