08 December 2016 - Trump to name climate-change skeptic as the Environmental Protection Agency chief

An Enemy of the E.P.A. to Head It
The Editorial Board (The New York Times, 07/12/2016)

Had Donald Trump spent an entire year scouring the country for someone to weaken clean air and clean water laws and repudiate America’s leadership role in the global battle against climate change, he could not have found a more suitable candidate than Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general, whom he picked on Wednesday to run the Environmental Protection Agency.
This is an aggressively bad choice, a poke in the eye to a long history of bipartisan cooperation on environmental issues, to a nation that has come to depend on the agency for healthy air and drinkable water, and to 195 countries that agreed in Paris last year to reduce their emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases in the belief that the United States would show the way. A meeting Monday between Mr. Trump and Al Gore had raised hope among some that the president-elect might reverse his campaign pledge to withdraw the United States from the Paris accord. The Pruitt appointment says otherwise.
Since becoming Oklahoma’s top legal officer in 2011, Mr. Pruitt has been a bitter opponent of the E.P.A., joining in one lawsuit after another to kill off federal environmental regulations. He has challenged standards for reducing soot and smog pollution that cross state lines. He has fought protections against mercury, arsenic and other toxic pollutants from power plants. He has sued to overturn an E.P.A. rule modestly enlarging the scope of the Clean Water Act to protect streams and wetlands vital to the nation’s water supply.

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Why Scientists are Scared of Trump: A Guide
Elizabeth Kolbert (The New Yorker, 07/12/2016)
Next week, the American Geophysical Union will hold its annual conference in San Francisco. The A.G.U. meeting is one of the world’s première scientific gatherings—last fall, some twenty-four thousand experts in fields ranging from astronomy to volcanology attended. This year, in addition to the usual papers and journals, a new publication will be available to participants. It’s called “Handling Political Harassment and Legal Intimidation: A Pocket Guide for Scientists.”
The guide is the creation of a group called the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. One of the group’s founders, Joshua Wolfe, and its executive director, Lauren Kurtz, made the decision to write it on the day after the election. “There is a lot of fear among scientists that they will become targets of people who are interested in science as politics, rather than progress,” Wolfe told me in an e-mail.
With each passing day, that fear appears to be more well founded. The one quality that all of Trump’s picks for his cabinet and his transition team seem to share is an expertise in the dark art of disinformation.
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Environmentalists Outraged over Trump's EPA Pick, Scott Pruitt
Douglas Main (Newsweek, 08/12/2016)
As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Scott Pruitt joined several other states in suing the Environmental Protection Agency over its Clean Power Plan, an Obama administration policy aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and factories. Pruitt has also sued the EPA, along with officials from other states, over its plan to regulate the fossil fuel industry’s methane emissions. On his LinkedIn page, Pruitt says he is “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.”
And he’s now President-elect Donald Trump’s expected pick to head the EPA, according to The New York Times and The Washington Post (which have a good run-down of Pruitt’s record).
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