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Donald Trump’s strange cabinet: Climate deniers, conspiracists and one-percenters

Climate deniers, conspiracists and one-percenters: Trump’s cabinet of characters

The president-elect plans to surround himself with enemies of the environment, billions of dollars in net worth and people who are against their own agencies, Guardian, Tom McCarthy, 30 Dec 16, Barack Obama’s original cabinet was chockablock with historic firsts. The first African American attorney general. The first Nobel laureate upon appointment. The first female homeland security secretary, and the first African American to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Donald Trump’s cabinet, if confirmed, also would advance multiple historic firsts. It would be the first cabinet of multiple billionaires. It would be the first cabinet to give pride of place to climate deniers. It would be the first cabinet whose members want to eliminate their own agencies. And it would raise the bar – a lot – for conspiracy theorists.

Before Trump’s team faces closer scrutiny from Congress in January, here’s your guide to understanding how these four categories define many of Trump’s major nominees and advisers. 

Climate deniers and enemies

These nominees would lead the four most important agencies in combatting climate change.

Scott Pruitt, EPA
Oklahoma state attorney general Pruitt wrote in a May 2016 editorial in the National Review that there was a climate change “debate” that was “far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged …” He was part of a “secretive alliance” with fossil fuel companies to fight Obama administration environmental regulations, according to 2014 New York Times reporting.

Ryan Zinke, Department of the Interior
Congressman from Montana

In a 2014 interview, Zinke blamed the buildup of greenhouse gases on volcanoes. “I’m a conservationist, but when there’s a volcano in the Philippines that erupts and produces more CO2 than humans have produced in 200 years – is CO2 really the problem?”

Rick Perry, Department of Energy

Former Texas governor

Perry wrote in a 2010 book that “we have been experiencing a cooling trend”. “I don’t believe that we have the settled science,” he said in a 2014 interview, continuing: “Calling CO2 a pollutant is doing a disservice the country, and I believe a disservice to the world … I’m not a scientist.”

Mike Pompeo, CIA
Congressman from Kansas

Pompeo has used congressional hearings to grandstand against “what you all call climate change today”. He told CSPAN in 2013: “There are scientists who think lots of different things about climate change. There’s some who think we’re warming, there’s some who think we’re cooling, there’s some who think that the last 16 years have shown a pretty stable climate environment.”

Rex Tillerson, secretary of state
CEO of ExxonMobil

Tillerson pays lip service to “risks of climate change” but runs the world’s biggest non-state oil and gas extraction company. Likewise, he has said ExxonMobil favors a climate tax and supports the Paris climate accords but has not backedthose statements with action.

One-percenters

Trump’s billionaire cabinet could be the wealthiest administration ever. At least six appointees have net worths estimated in the nine figures. Collectively, they have more money than a third of American households combined, according to a Quartz calculation………

Divided loyalties 

A noticeable Trump innovation in picking a cabinet: appointing leaders who have said they would like to destroy the agencies they’re supposed to lead. A variation is appointing leaders whose careers have undercut the agencies they’re supposed to lead.

Rick Perry

Perry famously suffered a memory lapse during a presidential debate in trying to name the Department of Energy as one of three federal agencies he would eliminate if elected. “Oops,” he said. Perry’s background in nuclear issues, which is the energy department’s main charge, appears to be limited to an effort to privatize the disposal of radioactive waste in Texas. Perry’s two immediate predecessors in the job were both nuclear physicists.

Scott Pruitt

Pruitt has been involved in multiple lawsuits against the EPA. He is currently part of a legal action waged by 28 states against the EPA to halt the Clean Power Plan, an effort by Obama’s administration to curb greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. Pruitt has said the American people “are tired of seeing billions of dollars drained from our economy due to unnecessary EPA regulations”, and he boasted on his LinkedIn page that he was “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda”………

Conspiracists

Trump traffics in conspiracy theories and fake news – Barack Obama was born outside the US and sympathizes with terrorists, the election was rigged, Hillary Clinton is a criminal – so it’s only proper that his cabinet should too. Here are the three Trump nominees in competition for the tinfoil hat trophy.

Ben Carson, Department of Housing and Urban Development

Retired neurosurgeon

Carson believes pyramids were built by the biblical Joseph to store grain, thatVladimir Putin, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Abbas attended school together in Moscow in 1968, that Jews with firearms might have been able to stop the Holocaust, that he personally could stop a mass shooting and that Osama bin Laden enjoyed Saudi protection after 9/11……… https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/28/donald-trump-cabinet-climate-deniers-conspiracy-wealth?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1&utm_content=buffer36606&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

December 30, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA