Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is receiving help from well-known climate skeptics in meeting the demands of a court order to provide the basis for a statement he made that climate change is not man-made.
The Heartland Institute shipped copies of its 3,000-page “Climate Change Reconsidered” series of reports to Pruitt on Thursday, with a letter from the group’s president advising the EPA chief to use the documents in complying with the court’s June 1 order.
The D.C. District Court ordered Pruitt to back up claims he made in a CNBC interview last year that carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are not the primary contributor to climate change. The court was responding to an environmental group’s lawsuit on a Freedom of Information Act request that the EPA did not answer about the basis for the CNBC statement.
Judge Beryl Howell rejected the EPA’s objections to upholding the Freedom of Information Act request, calling the agency’s arguments “not persuasive” and ordering it to produce studies that the agency has supporting Pruitt’s position on climate change by July 11.
“We have no doubt that [the environmentalists], with the assistance of the judge, is trying to box you in and embarrass you,” said Tim Huelskamp, president of the Heartland Institute, in a letter that accompanied the studies.
“After all, you were only on the job for a few days and you could not possibly have reviewed all the documents EPA possessed before your confirmation — which would all toe the unscientific, alarmist dogma that marked the Obama years,” Huelskamp wrote. “Fortunately, you do not have to look far to find ‘documents that support the conclusion that human activity is not the largest factor driving global climate change,'” he said, citing the judge’s order.
Huelskamp said that its studies on climate change had been submitted in both digital and physical form during former President Barack Obama’s administration. But it is resending copies “in the event an Obama-era ideologue at EPA disposed of or destroyed those volumes,” Huelskamp said.
The volumes are scholarly documents refuting many of the conclusions of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s global warming forecasts and modeling.
