Earth Protect Blog

Trump is assembling an all-star cast of climate change deniers for his transition team – often placing them at the heads of key agencies responsible for monitoring or dealing with global warming. The heads of 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, are all skeptical of the science of human-caused climate change. For instance, Myron Ebell, head of the EPA transition team, has said that the scientific consensus on climate change is “phoney”, while another member of the team David Kruetzer, of the conservative Heritage Foundation, has erroneously claimed there has been “global cooling” in recent years.

1. Myron Ebell at a meeting on April 3, 1998, Ebell was one of a dozen public relations experts and think-tank representatives who produced what they called their "Global Climate Science Communications" plan, with the aim of persuading "a majority of the American public" that "significant uncertainties exist in climate science", intending to convince the public and policymakers that the science was faulty and could be ignored. ExxonMobil, the coal utility Southern Company and the American Petroleum Institute were represented at the meeting, and there were proposals for industry funding.[14]

After this meeting, ExxonMobil, even though aware as early as 1981 that fossil fuels affected climate change,[15][16] began funding Frontiers of Freedom, where Ebell was a staff member. In 1999 Ebell transferred to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and from 1998 to 2005 ExxonMobil provided CEI with over $2 million of funding.[17] On October 27, 2006, Democratic senator Jay Rockefeller and Republican senator Olympia Snowe sent a joint bipartisan letter to Rex Tillerson, the new CEO of ExxonMobil, about its funding of various groups, stating "We fervently hope that reports that ExxonMobil intends to end its funding of the climate change denial campaign of the Competitive Enterprise Institute are true."[7][18] In 2007, Ebell said funding had no relevance as "We're not beholden to our donors, because we don't say, 'If you give us this money, we'll do this project'," and said "I can't even quite tell you who supports us on global warming". At that time, CEI had funding from the American Petroleum Institute, the Dow Chemical Company, Eli Lilly and Company, and William A. Dunn of Dunn Capital Management.[7] During an August 2015 discussion on C-SPAN, Ebell did not dispute the statement by Jeremy Symons of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) that CEI received funds from the Murray Energy Corporation coal mining group. Ebell responded that his group's total budget of about $6 million was far smaller than that of EDF.[3]

2. David Kruetzer another hire for the Trump EPA transition, is an economist and think tank official who has been a vocal critic of environmental regulations and climate change science. “Global warming is for real in that we’ve had global warming since the end of the last Ice Age,” he told C-SPAN’s Steve Scully last year.

As a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a group funded by foundations controlled by Koch Industries and other fossil fuel firms, Kreutzer has co-published several papers in which he casts doubt on federal policies aimed to fight climate change. In a paper from April that calls climate change an “unlikely problem,” Kreutzer and his colleagues argued that Obama’s EPA policies were “favoring elites and undermining the fairness of our economic system.”

This year alone he has criticized carbon dioxide caps, solar power, and fuel regulations. His main critique is that they are too costly and give the government too much power. Kreutzer has advocated several times for more domestic oil drilling. In 2008, he recommended in congressional testimony that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge be drilled for oil.

These people do not belive in science or the facts and work directly for big oil. Trump himself is invested in oil companies and will profit off decisions he will make in the White House.