Trump's former EPA transition head has a 'message of hope' about how the government will dismantle environmental policies by Lindsay Dodgson and Reuters on Jan 31, 2017, 9:41 AM Advertisement
 LONDON — The United States will switch course on climate change and pull the country out of a global pact to cut emissions, said Myron Ebell, who headed Trump's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team until his inauguration. Trump, a climate skeptic, campaigned on a pledge to boost the US oil and gas drilling and coal mining industries by reducing regulation, and alarmed nations that backed the 2015 Paris agreement to cut greenhouse gases by pledging to pull the U.S. out of the global deal agreed upon by nearly 200 countries. "(Trump) could do it by executive order tomorrow or he could do it as part of a larger package," Ebell told reporters in London on Monday. "I have no idea of the timing." Trump's administration has also asked the EPA to temporarily halt all contracts, grants, and interagency agreements pending a review, according to sources. But Ebell told the conference that he brought "a message of great hope, both to the US and to the world, in terms of the changes that Trump administration will bring on energy and environmental policy." Those changes include how Trump plans to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, defund UN climate programs, and undo Obama's climate action plan. He said that the "first hopeful thing" was that Trump wants to jump start more fossil fuel production, which he added would be very popular in many parts of the US, away from what he referred to as the "bi-coastal elite." Ebell was also asked about his position on climate change, which runs contrary to the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and being worsened by human activity. During an interview with my colleague Rafi Letzter in August, Ebell referred to climate scientists as "global warming alarmists" and suggested that climate research was an arm of a coordinated political movement. "I think that the global warming movement has three parts," he told Letzter. "One is to exaggerate the rate of warming, one is to exaggerate the potential impacts of warming and how soon they may occur, and the third is to underestimate wildly the costs of reducing our emissions by the magical amount that they have picked." During Monday's conference with reporters, Ebell reiterated those points. "The climate science community is actually quite small and yet I'm amazed by how many people have become public policy experts on the basis of being scientists," he said on Monday. "The expert class is full of arrogance or hubris, and people, at least in this election, have said we've had enough of that." Business Insider also asked Ebell about the recent deletion by the current administration of several web pages devoted to climate change which were formerly on the EPA website, but he declined to respond. SEE ALSO: Trump is taking advice on the future of the environment from a man who denies basic science DON'T MISS: The EPA, which protects Americans from poison and pollution, has been frozen under Trump
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