A breath of fresh air from the EPA! Via Politico:
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt dismissed European critics of President Donald Trump’s climate policies as hypocrites on Wednesday, while chastising German Chancellor Angela Merkel for phasing out her country’s nuclear power plants.
“I just think the hypocrisy runs rampant,” Pruitt said in an interview with POLITICO. “To look at us as a nation and say, ‘You all need to do more’ in light of what we’ve done in leading with innovation and technology — the hypocrisy is palpable in those areas.”
Pruitt mentioned Merkel by name, urging the public to press her on the issue. If reducing carbon dioxide emissions “is so important to you, Madam Chancellor, why are you getting rid of nuclear? Because last time I checked, it’s pretty clean on CO2,” he said.
Merkel is one of the most vocal public defenders of the Paris climate change agreement, the 2015 pact that Trump said last month he intends to leave. Merkel hosted the recent G-20 summit of the world’s wealthiest economies, where the United States was the only country not to throw its support behind the deal. At the same time, Germany announced in 2000 it would phase out nuclear power, a shift that Merkel accelerated after the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan.
Pruitt repeated his criticism of the Paris deal, casting doubt on whether the United States would remain part of the climate agreement even if the Trump administration rewrites former President Barack Obama’s aggressive plan to cut U.S. emissions. When Trump announced the withdrawal June 1, he held out the possibility of negotiating to “re-enter” the accord “on terms that are fair to the United States.”
Pruitt argued that the United States has shown it can address climate change without being bound to an international agreement. He noted that U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have declined since President George W. Bush decided in 2001 to abandon the Kyoto Protocol.
“What we ought to be focused upon in my view is exporting innovation and technology to nations like China, like India, to help them with respect to their power grid,” he said.