Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said Thursday he did not believe carbon dioxide was a primary contributor to global warming, a view contradicted by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NBC News reported. It is also at odds with Pruitt's own promises during his nomination hearing before the U.S. Senate.
"I think 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, so no, I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see ," Pruitt told CNBC's "Squawk Box." "But we don't know that yet ... We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis."
But if Pruitt doubts the global scientist consensus that carbon dioxide is causing the Earth to warm, he did pledge during his confirmation hearing to regulate it in accordance with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling and an EPA finding that it was threatening public health.
"I also believe the Administrator has an important role when it comes to the regulation of carbon dioxide, which I will fulfill consistent with Massachusetts v. EPA and the agency's Endangerment Finding on Greenhouse Gases respective of the applicable statutory framework established by Congress," he wrote in response to a series of questions about greenhouse gases.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the EPA did have the authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in automobile emissions. It further found that under the Clean Air Act, the agency could not avoid taking action unless it determined that greenhouse gases did not contribute to climate change or explained why it could not make that determination.
Two years later, the then-EPA administrator signed a so-called Endangerment Finding that said the current and projected concentrations of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were threatening the public health of current and future generations. It also said that the emissions of the greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles contributed to greenhouse gas pollution.
When Pruitt was asked during his hearing whether he would review the finding, he said, "There is nothing that I know that would cause a review at this point."
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But he also said in his interview on Thursday that Congress had not addressed the issue of carbon dioxide.
"Congress has addressed this in the Clean Air Act," countered the Sierra Club's chief climate counsel, Joanne Spalding. "They've already said EPA is the expert agency that has that role."
To overturn its finding that carbon dioxide endangers public health, the EPA would have to provide a rationale for reaching the opposite conclusion and build a new scientific record.
"There's no scientific basis for the claim that carbon pollution does not endanger public health and welfare," Spalding said. "It's really impossible for them to do it....It would be a fool's errand frankly."
The Sierra Club, which highlighted Pruitt's written testimony, accused him of misleading Congress and urged his removal.
"As Pruitt testified before Congress, it is the legal duty of the EPA to tackle the carbon pollution that fuels the climate crisis, but now he is spewing corporate polluter talking points rather than fulfilling the EPA's mission of protecting our air, our water, and our communities," the Sierra Club's executive director, Michael Brune, said in a statement.
Another environmental group, 350.org, compared Pruitt's statement to a doctor saying cigarettes do not cause cancer.
"Pruitt's statement isn't just inaccurate, it's a lie," said spokesman Jamie Henn. "He knows carbon dioxide is the leading cause of climate change, but is misleading the public in order to protect the fossil fuel industry."
Pruitt's comment is contradicted by findings across the global scientific community.
NASA says on its website that "humans have increased atmospheric CO2 concentration by more than a third since the Industrial Revolution began. This is the most important long-lived 'forcing' of climate change."
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 1,300 independent scientific experts across the world, said in its Fifth Assessment Report that "there's a more than 95 percent probability that human activities over the past 50 years have warmed our planet" and "a better than 95 percent probability that human-produced greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have caused much of the observed increase in Earth's temperatures over the past 50 years."
In response to Pruitt, Climate Nexus, a group focused on the effects of climate change, compiled responses from some leading climate scientists.
Ben Santer, a climate researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said in response: "Mr. Pruitt has claimed that carbon dioxide caused by human activity is not 'the primary contributor to the global warming that we see.' Mr. Pruitt is wrong. The scientific community has studied this issue for decades. The consensus message from many national and international assessments of the science is pretty simple: Natural factors can't explain the size or patterns of observed warming."
And Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences and Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, said "It's clear that we are already being impacted by climate change here in the United States. To deny that reality not only is a denial of scientific evidence but it also threatens the safety and security of Americans who face increasing odds of extreme events like the California drought, the flooding from Superstorm Sandy, and the heat wave that decimated crops in the mid-west in 2012."
Meanwhile, The Associate Press reported that Mustafa Ali, the head of the EPA's environmental justice program, resigned in protest over the Trump administration's proposal to slash funding intended to help poor and minority communities nationwide.
Ali's resignation letter urges Pruitt to reconsider proposals to cut EPA's budget, including environmental justice grants, by one-quarter.
