What Trump EPA Will Look Like With Climate Skeptic Ebell at the Helm

"When the pope wrote in an encyclical last year that the Earth is “among the most abandoned and maltreated of the poor,” Myron Ebell immediately saw that as an opportunity to attack. The Vatican “seems to have forgotten” that “putting the world on an energy-starvation diet will consign billions of people to perpetual energy poverty,” Ebell wrote in a blog post for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Global warming might be bad, he added, but “global warming policies…will almost certainly be catastrophic.”

Ebell, the director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a prominent climate-change skeptic, was chosen at the end of September to head the Environmental Protection Agency’s transition team if Donald Trump is elected president. That does not necessarily mean he would have a role in a Trump EPA, but at the very least, he would be able to populate the EPA with officials who share his views and those of Trump, who hasn’t made the environment an issue in his campaign but does offer goals and proposals on his campaign website. His plans are listed under a tab that says “Energy.” There is no “Environment” tab. And his proposals have far more to do with boosting energy production than with conservation. It says nothing about greenhouse gas emissions."

Paul Raeburn reports for Newsweek October 3, 2016.

SEE ALSO:

"Why Is Trump So Fixated On Abolishing The EPA?" (Grist)

"Trump Picks Top Climate Skeptic to Lead EPA Transition" (Scientific American)

"Trump Backs Off Plan To Eliminate EPA" (Washington Examiner)

"Meet Trump’s Pick to Dismantle EPA" (Huffington Post/EDF Action)

"No Debate: Trump Picks a Perfect Transition Man for the E.P.A." (Dot Earth/NY Times)