Trump's transition: sceptics guide every agency dealing with climate change

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Guardian -The heads of Donald Trump’s transition teams for Nasa, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the Department of Energy, as well as his nominees to lead the EPA and the Department of the Interior, all question the science of human-caused climate change, in a signal of the president-elect’s determination to embark upon an aggressively pro-fossil fuels agenda.
 
Trump has assembled a transition team in which at least nine senior members deny basic scientific understanding that the planet is warming due to the burning of carbon and other human activity. These include the transition heads of all the key agencies responsible for either monitoring or dealing with climate change. None of these transition heads have any background in climate science.
 
Trump has also nominated Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to lead the EPA and is expected to pick congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers to head the interior department. Pruitt has claimed that scientists “continue to disagree” about the causes and extent of global warming while McMorris Rodgers has said that former vice-president Al Gore, who has championed climate action, “deserves an ‘F’ in science.”
 
The president-elect has vowed to pursue an “America first” energy policy that will open up a new frontier in domestic coal, oil and gas extraction while eviscerating the effort to combat climate change, which Trump has previously called a “hoax”.
 
Trump is personally invested in this agenda. According to his latest financial disclosure records, Trump held investments in the fossil fuel companies Shell, Halliburton, Total and Chevron. His largest energy investment was in BHP Billiton, with the documents showing a stake worth up to $1.015m.  Read more..
 
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