A key figure picked to prepare the federal environment agency for life under a Donald Trump administration has met in Washington D.C. with some of the world’s most notorious and longest-serving climate science deniers.
Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), was picked by the now President-elect to lead the Environmental Protection Agency “transition team” back in September.
Trump has pledged to strip many powers from the EPA to boost fossil fuel production.
Ebell has spent two decades trying to undermine the science linking dangerous climate change to fossil fuel burning.
E&E News reported that Ebell was at one meeting hosted by the CEI and held in the hearing room of the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee.
The EPW committee is chaired by Senator James Inhofe who, like Trump, has described human-caused climate change as a hoax.
The meeting was not open to the public or the press, E&E News reported, with Ebell refusing to give any details.
Climate Denial Who’s Who
But details of the gatherings have been made public by some of the climate science denialists who attended. The attendee list reads like a who’s who of the climate science denial industry.
Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts, of the far-right One Nation party, who is in the U.S, revealed he had given a speech at a CEI meeting with Ebell.
Roberts wrote the meeting was a gathering of the Cooler Heads Coalition and then listed some of the participants.
Screenshot from the Facebook page of Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts.
They included Marc Morano, Randy Randol, Steve Milloy, Chris Horner, Craig Rucker, Patrick Michaels, Ken Haapala and James Taylor.
The views of most of the attendees are in direct contradiction to the overwhelming majority of scientific research published over decades, as well as the positions of the world’s major scientific academies.
Also listed by Roberts as attending was Breitbart writer James Delingpole, who published a picture of himself, Roberts and Ebell on his Twitter account.
America’s most evil pic.twitter.com/gxRBm48yLq
— James Delingpole (@JamesDelingpole) December 13, 2016
Delingpole says climate change is “junk science” and has said that “hanging is too good” for climate scientists.
Denialists Reunited
Three of the attendees — Ebell, Randy Randol and Steve Milloy —were part of the Global Climate Science Communications Team in the late 1990s.
The GCSC was a coalition of think tanks and fossil fuel companies that hoped to shift people’s understanding of the science linking fossil fuel burning to human-caused climate change.
At the time, Randol was a lobbyist for ExxonMobil and Milloy was the executive director of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition — a tobacco industry-funded front group.
One of the meeting’s attendees, lawyer Chris Horner, was named this week to Trump’s EPA “landing team” alongside Ebell.
Horner, who has been funded by coal companies, is known for launching multiple FOIA requests targeting the email inboxes of climate scientists and government officials. Many see his work as harassment.
Also in attendance, according to Roberts, was Fred Singer – a former advisor to TASSC who set up his first group to attack climate science in 1990.
Trump this week named current ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson as his nomination for the Secretary of State.
On Twitter Tony Heller reported that Tim Ball, a retired geography professor and climate science denier from British Columbia, told the EPW meeting: “I’ve waited 40 years for this moment.”
In November 2016, Ball and Heller were in Australia for speaking engagements at the invitation of Roberts who claims there is no evidence linking climate change to human activity.
Ball then travelled to the US for a two-day conference organised by G. Edward Griffin with the title: Global warming: An Inconvenient Lie.
Griffin, who runs Freedom Force International that organised the conference, is a conspiracy theorist who claims there is no such thing as the HIV virus, that climate change is a hoax and that a US military plane shot down one of the passenger flights that crashed during the September 11 attacks in the United States.
The full line-up of attendees at the Cooler Heads Coalition listed by Roberts was Tony Heller, Tim Ball, Fred Singer, Ken Haapala, Craig Rucker, Randy Randall, Steve Milloy, Marc Morano, James Delingpole, Chris Horner, Myron Ebell, Tom de Weise, James Taylor, Pat Michaels, Austin Smithson, Brandon Middleton, Marlo Lewis and “Mandy from Senator James Inhofe’s staff”.
Main image: At a November 2016 march in Boston, a protestor carries a sign saying President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Myron Ebell for the EPA transition team is not wanted. Credit: Peter Bowden/Flickr (CC BY–NC–SA 2.0)
