Embattled EPA Director Scott Pruitt went on national TV to announce on
behalf of the US government that “I would not agree [CO2 is] a primary
contributor to the global warming that we see… There’s a tremendous
disagreement about the degree of the impact [of] human activity on the
climate.”
So the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) filed a
Freedom of Information Act request asking the EPA to turn over
documents Pruitt relied on to form this view, which is wildly out of
step with the scientific consensus.
Instead of complying, the EPA refused, so PEER sued. In court, the EPA
argued that complying with the request would be unduly burdensome,
consuming “countless hours researching and analyzing a vast trove of
material on the effect of human activity on climate change” which is “a
subjective assessment upon which reasonable minds can differ.”
The judge ruled against the EPA and slammed them in his decision,
calling the EPA’s response an “epistemological smokescreen” that was
“both misplaced and troubling.”
Pruitt is a trumpist and thus a subscriber to Norman Vincent Peale’s fake it till you make it doctrine
in which you just insist that you are right until you are either
revealed to be right or you get bored and start claiming you’re right
about something else, or possibly until you die.
