You need to know this....
So far, Donald Trump's choice of cabinet members has been - well - deplorable.
He's picked someone who wants to privatize Medicare to oversee Medicare as his secretary of Health and Human Services.
He's picked a bankster who foreclosed on a 90-year-old over a 27 cent underpayment to oversee banksters as his Treasury Secretary.
And he's picked a guy who thinks the KKK were just fine as long as they don't smoke pot to oversee our Civil Rights and marijuana laws as his Attorney General.
But as bad as those picks were, they pale in comparison to Trump's latest choice for a cabinet member, especially if you care about the future of our existence as a species on this planet.
Multiple sources now say that Trump has picked Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to regulate fossil fuels as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
This really is about as bad as it gets.
Pruitt is a close ally of the fossil fuel industry - and he's lead the Republican war on President Obama's climate regulations.
In some cases, as the
New York Times reports, he's literally acted as an agent for big oil even while working in his capacity as Oklahoma's top law enforcement official.
"A 2014 investigation by The Times found that energy lobbyists drafted letters for Mr. Pruitt to send, on state stationery, to the E.P.A., the Interior Department, the Office of Management and Budget and even President Obama, outlining the economic hardship of the environmental rules."
Not surprisingly, Pruitt is also a climate change denier - either totally stupid about science or just happy to take all that petro-billionaire money to keep him in power.
For example, just this past June, he wrote an editorial in the
Tulsa World newspaper falsely claiming that -
"Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind."
So, here were are - Global temperatures are rising faster than ever before, Arctic sea ice is at record lows, all signs point to runaway climate change becoming a reality within the decade, and the man who's now set to head up environmental policy for the next few years thinks there's still a "debate" about whether or not climate change is even real.
-Thom
(What do you think? Tell us
here.)
