President Donald Trump’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency says he doesn’t believe carbon dioxide is a major cause of global warming, according to an interview he gave on CNBC.
“I would not agree that [CO2] is a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,” Scott Pruitt said earlier today in an interview with CNBC’s Joe Kernen. “I believe that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact.”
I can’t exactly be sure what that last sentence means, but his denial that any human actions have an appreciable impact on climate change or global warming is consistent with comments he made while he served as the attorney general of Oklahoma.
In addition, The New York Times reported earlier this week that Mr Pruitt has brought in political appointees from the office of Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who is a longtime climate change denier.
A growing body of scientific evidence suggests, however, that CO2 levels in Earth’s atmosphere are a major contributor to climate change, as the gas and other “greenhouse gases” trap heat in the atmosphere that would otherwise be able to radiate into space. The spewing of emissions from automobiles and coal-powered energy sources have been linked to the rise in CO2 levels in the atmosphere.