Scott Pruitt, President Donald Trump's pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, may have made a false statement under oath to the Senate.

This was first reported Monday by Fusion's Daniel Rivero. Business Insider was later able to confirm the underlying facts of Rivero's article.

Pruitt — the attorney general of Oklahoma known for 14 lawsuits designed to fight regulations and cleanup efforts by the agency he hopes to lead— made the apparent false statement when referring to an ongoing environmental lawsuit involving several poultry companies in Arkansas.

Pruitt's predecessor, Drew Edmondson, brought the case against Tyson Foods, Cargill Turkey, and 12 other poultry companies. Edmondson accused them of dumping 300,000 tons of poultry waste (read: bird poop) a year into the Illinois River upstream of Oklahoma.

The case, brought before a federal judge, was fought entirely before Pruitt took office in 2011. The judge, however, has yet to issue a ruling years later.

During Pruitt's campaign to become state attorney general, he received $40,000 in donations from those companies and law firms representing them, according to The New York Times. Once in office, he took an apparently less aggressive approach to pursuing the case than his predecessor.

In response to questions from Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey during his confirmation hearing, Pruitt said: "I have taken no action to undermine that case. I have done nothing but file briefs in support of the court making a decision."

Rivero and his team at Fusion found no evidence that Pruitt or his office had filed any briefs in support of making a decision with the case, apparently contradicting his claim under oath to the Senate.

In an independent review of publicly available documents from the case, Business Insider confirmed Rivero's finding that no such briefs were filed since Pruitt took office.

As Fusion reported, the sole pertinent substantive filing by the state since Pruitt took office was a notice that a Supreme Court case thought to be relevant had been decided but would not make a difference in the Oklahoma case. (You can read that document below.)

In an email to Business Insider, Pruitt confirmation team spokesman John Konkus disputed Fusion and Business Insider's interpretation of these facts.

Konkus said that Pruitt's response to Booker was referencing the notice about the Supreme Court decision. That notice (embedded below) does not appear to include an encouragement to the judge to reach a decision.

However, Pruitt's team suggests that the act of filing a notice in support of the state's argument is an implicit encouragement to reach a decision.

Here's Konkus's full statement:

"Mr. Pruitt was referencing a notice filed in which the Attorney General's office sent a Supreme Court decision to the judge which supports Oklahoma's arguments made in the case.

"On 7-6-2011 the Attorney General's office filed notice of relevant authority sending the court the Supreme Court decision in AEP v Connecticut which the Attorney General's office says supports their arguments made in the poultry case regarding whether the CWA displaced its federal common law nuisance case."

Business Insider asked Konkus in a follow-up email where in the notice Pruitt's office encouraged the judge to reach a decision.

Konkus replied: "His intent in sending the notice was to encourage a decision in favor of Oklahoma's position."

Read the full, original report on Fusion.

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China steals an unsavory global spotlight for the thick, noxious smog that often chokes its mega-cities.

Air pollution has become so bad in Beijing, for example, that Chinese officials aim to slash its local coal consumption by 30% in 2017.

Meanwhile, the US — which currently ranks eighth on the list of countries with the lowest air pollution — could be headed in the opposite direction. 

President Donald Trump has said that he intends to fulfill his campaign promise of revitalizing the American coal industry, despite the criticism of fossil fuel industry analysts and the rise of affordable sources of renewable energy. Congress is also working to repeal numerous environmental and health regulations.

With these and other changes afoot, it's worth taking a look at current global rankings to see how China, the US, and other countries stack up when it comes to air quality, total energy use, and renewable contributions to power production.

Here the best and worst of 135 countries according to World Health Organization (WHO) and International Energy Agency data, which was shared with Business Insider by The Eco Experts, a UK-based solar energy comparison site.

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There are many ways to measure air pollution, but a key indicator is called "PM 2.5"— one of the most harmful classes of airborne pollutants.

The "PM" stands for "particulate matter," and the "2.5" stands for 2.5 microns in diameter or smaller — roughly the size of a single bacterium. Such pollution, as Business Insider's Lydia Ramsey explained in 2016, "is especially dangerous because it can get lodged in the lungs and cause long-term health problems like asthma and chronic lung disease."

When PM 2.5 levels go above roughly 35 micrograms per cubic meter of air, it can become a major health problem. The WHO recommends keeping PM 2.5 levels to about 10 micrograms per cubic meter.

While Chinese cities have recently hit more than 500 micrograms of PM 2.5 per cubic meter, Saudi Arabia, on a per-country average, has the most toxic air in the world.

Air pollution levels are one thing, but deaths attributed to them are another.

Take China, for instance. The country isn't in the top 10 for highest average levels of air pollution, in terms of PM 2.5 (Saudi Arabia wins that contest, thanks in part to its oil industry). However, it ranks fifth for having the most deaths per capita due to air pollution, in part because if its high population density.

The US currently has one of the lowest death rates attributed to air pollution.

Reports of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) impending death may have been greatly exaggerated.

Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz introduced a bill Friday (H.R.861)  to abolish the EPA, but Democratic congressional staff told Business Insider that they don't expect the bill to go anywhere.

Gaetz, along with cosponsors Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Steven Palazzo of Mississippi, and Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, is associated with the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party.

In an interview with the Northwest Florida Daily News, Gaetz said  the EPA's rules and regulations designed to protect the environment actually hurt people and that the agency has "violated the sovereignty of the states."

For evidence, he pointed to coastal wetland protection rules requiring farmers to get permits before watering their cows from ponds on their land. He argued that states and local governments are better positioned to protect "their environmental assets."

But congressional staffers told Business Insider that Gaetz, a freshman congressman, likely lacks the political oomph to push through such a drastic change to the federal bureaucracy.

First, abolishing the EPA would involve repealing a number of laws entrusting the agency with a number of specific environmental responsibilities. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Republican Party seems to have consolidated behind the Trump administration's still-fuzzy, though apparently less-extreme vision for the agency — one that still represents a significant departure from the status quo under Trump's predecessors.

The president's exact plans for the agency remain unclear, even to people working there now and scientists who rely on the EPA for funding.

However, the available evidence suggests that people in Trump's orbit want to radically downsize the agency while keeping it running. And the White House has already taken steps designed to limit its ability to regulate industry.

There's no evidence though to suggest that Trump's team or Republican leadership in Congress will take steps to dismantle it entirely. If they did intend to do so, it seems unlikely that they'd still be working to get aspiring EPA administrator Scott Pruitt confirmed.

That said, Democrats aren't ignoring Gaetz's bill entirely.

"It shows how brazen Republicans are in promoting their dirty air and water and anti-science agenda," a House Democratic leadership aide told Business Insider.

The idea of abolishing or reducing the power of the EPA isn't entirely new to Republican Party politics — even though it would have been unimaginable under Republican presidents from Richard Nixon, who oversaw the agency's founding, to George W. Bush, whose EPA head has opposed Trump's EPA administrator pick as "disdainful" of the agency's mission.

In 2011, a Senate bill to roll the EPA into the Department of Energy attracted the 17 cosponsors, including party leaders like John McCain and Orrin Hatch. However, it failed to pass out of the Democrat-controlled Senate.

That same year, then-presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich floated the idea of abolishing the agency during a speech in Iowa. 

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WASHINGTON - A media watchdog group is suing to force U.S. President Donald Trump's pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency to release records detailing his communications with energy companies ahead of a Senate vote to confirm his nomination.

The Center for Media and Democracy, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, will file a lawsuit on Tuesday in an Oklahoma court against that state's Attorney General Scott Pruitt, Trump's nominee to become the top U.S. environmental regulator.

The group wants to force Pruitt to respond to more than four dozen "open records requests" that have been filed as far back as January 2015 to publish emails between his office and energy companies.

The media watchdog filed seven of those requests seeking access to more than 3,000 emails. The lawsuit accuses Pruitt of violating the state's Open Records Act by failing to release those emails to the public.

"We are doing this because these emails should be released so that people can properly vet his record before the Senate votes to confirm him," said Nick Surgey, the center's director of research.

Pruitt, 48, sued the agency he intends to run 14 times on behalf of Oklahoma to weaken or gut its key regulations, earning him strong support from energy companies and Republican lawmakers who have accused the Obama administration's EPA of regulatory overreach.

On Thursday, the Senate environment committee approved Pruitt despite a boycott of his nomination by the panel's Democratic members. The full Senate, which is under Republican control, is expected to confirm him but has not set a date for the vote.

The lawsuit submitted on Tuesday calls on the court to stop Pruitt from denying access to requested public records and to prevent his office from destroying any documents relevant to the requests.

Surgey said Pruitt was seemingly "unapologetic" during the confirmation hearings about his "strong relationships with Oklahoma's oil and gas companies" and that the public should be aware his ties to the types of companies he would need to regulate as EPA administrator.

Pruitt's office was not immediately available for comment.

Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a member of the Senate panel that held Pruitt's hearing, accused the nominee of stonewalling the request for information about his relationships with industry.

"I hope this lawsuit forces Attorney General Pruitt to stop the cover-up and disclose these emails immediately so the American people know what conflicts of interest this nominee has,” Whitehouse said in a statement to Reuters. 

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At least four damaging tornadoes and hail struck Louisiana Tuesday, including at least one major funnel cloud in New Orleans East, according to the Weather Channel and local reports.

The tornado impacts left 9,300 New Orleans residents temporarily without power. It followed several earlier tornado reports as thunderstorms moved east across Louisiana. The first tornado touched down Tuesday morning south of the town of Killian, with at least three more touching down throughout the day.

The National Weather Service office in New Orleans continues to issue warnings and take cover alerts across the states Tuesday afternoon as the storms progress.

Locals and meteorologists shared images of the storms and resulting damage online.

Not all of the images came from the New Orleans tornado. Here's one from near Convent, LA:

 We're already getting a sense of what the damage looks like:

If you are in the affected area, follow local news and radio reports for guidance and updates.

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NOW WATCH: This NASA map shows the drastic disappearance of Arctic ice

Four hundred and forty-seven former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) workers — 491 if you count the 44 who joined later — recently signed an open letter circulated by environmental watchdog group Environmental Integrity Projectto Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell explaining why they oppose making Scott Pruitt administrator of the agency.

"Our view is not partisan," they write in the letter, which goes on to explain that they collectively served under Republican and Democratic presidents.

Pruitt's record, they continue, "raises serious questions about whose interests he has served to date and whether he agrees with the longstanding tenets of US environmental law."

Pruitt is the somewhat embattled Oklahoma state attorney general whom Trump picked to lead the agency responsible for protecting the environment and the health of Americans through regulation. He's generally understood as a friend of corporations— to the expense, his critics argue, of the health and safety of Oklahomans.

During his hearing, Pruitt presented himself as a person interested in protecting the environment, but also in restricting the EPA to a more limited regulatory role. He argued that the agency has at times exceeded its legal reach and needs reining in.

His confirmation for the role awaits a vote of the full Senate after an unusual and ultimately unsuccessful boycott by Democratic Senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee.

The authors of the letter, which was published and sent to Congress on Monday, also write that Pruitt has shown interest only in repealing regulations and not in the EPA's basic health and safety functions, and that the Oklahoma AG's still-murky ties to fossil fuel industry groups are cause for alarm. Forty-four additional former EPA employees signed onto the letter after it was first published.

You can read the full letter below, and find the original document here, along with the full list of signatures.

Dear Senator McConnell and the U.S. Senate,

We write as former employees of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to share our concerns about Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s qualifications to serve as the next EPA Administrator in light of his record in Oklahoma. Our perspective is not partisan. Having served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, we recognize each new Administration’s right to pursue different policies within the parameters of existing law and to ask Congress to change the laws that protect public health and the environment as it sees fit.

However, every EPA Administrator has a fundamental obligation to act in the public’s interest based on current law and the best available science. Mr. Pruitt’s record raises serious questions about whose interests he has served to date and whether he agrees with the longstanding tenets of U.S. environmental law.

Our nation has made tremendous progress in ensuring that every American has clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and uncontaminated land on which to live, work and play. Anyone who visits Beijing is reminded of what some cities in the U.S. once looked like before we went to work as a people to combat pollution. Much of EPA’s work involves preserving those gains, which should not be taken for granted. There are also emerging new threats as well as serious gaps in our environmental safety net, as the drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan, painfully demonstrates.

Our environmental laws are based on a partnership that requires EPA to set national standards and gives states latitude when implementing them so long as certain minimum criteria are satisfied. This approach recognizes that Americans have an equal right to clean air and water, no matter where they live, and allows states to compete for business without having to sacrifice public health or environmental quality.

Our environmental laws include provisions directing EPA to allow for a “margin of safety” when assessing risks, which is intended to limit exposure to pollutants when it is reasonable to expect they may harm the public health, even when all the scientific evidence is not yet in. For example, EPA’s first Administrator, Bill Ruckelshaus, chose to limit the amount of lead in gasoline before all doubt about its harmfulness to public health was erased. His action spared much of the harm that some countries still face as result of the devastating effects of lead on human health. Similarly, early action to reduce exposure to fine particle pollution helped avoid thousands of premature deaths from heart and lung disease. The magnitude and severity of those risks did not become apparent until much later.

Mr. Pruitt’s record and public statements strongly suggest that he does not share the vision or agree with the underlying principles of our environmental laws. Mr. Pruitt has shown no interest in enforcing environmental laws, a critically important function for EPA. While serving as Oklahoma’s top law enforcement officer, Mr. Pruitt issued more than 50 press releases celebrating lawsuits to overturn EPA standards to limit mercury emissions from power plants, reduce smog levels in cities and regional haze in parks, clean up the Chesapeake Bay and control greenhouse gas emissions. In contrast, none of Mr. Pruitt’s many press releases refer to any action he has taken to enforce environmental laws or to actually reduce pollution. This track record likely reflects his disturbing decision to close the environmental enforcement unit in his office while establishing a new litigation team to challenge EPA and other federal agencies.

He has claimed credit for an agreement to protect the Illinois River that did little more than confirm phosphorus limits established much earlier, while delaying their enforcement another three years.

In a similar vein, Mr. Pruitt has gone to disturbing lengths to advance the views and interests of business. For example, he signed and sent a letter as Oklahoma Attorney General criticizing EPA estimates of emissions from oil and gas wells, without disclosing that it had been drafted in its entirety by Devon Energy. He filed suit on behalf of Oklahoma to block a California law requiring humane treatment of poultry. The federal court dismissed the case after finding that the lawsuit was brought not to benefit the citizens of Oklahoma but a handful of large egg producers perfectly capable of representing their own interests. To mount his challenge to EPA’s rule to reduce carbon pollution from power plants, he took the unusual step of accepting free help from a private law firm. By contrast, there is little or no evidence of Mr. Pruitt taking initiative to protect and advance public health and environmental protection in his state. Mr. Pruitt’s office has apparently acknowledged 3,000 emails and other documents reflecting communications with certain oil and gas companies, but has yet to make any of these available in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed more than two years ago.

Contrary to the cooperative federalism that he promotes, Mr. Pruitt has suggested that EPA should refrain from trying to control pollution that crosses state lines. For example, he intervened to support a Farm Bureau lawsuit that would have overturned a cooperative agreement between five states and EPA to clean up the Chesapeake Bay (the court rejected the challenge). When asked how a state can protect its citizens from pollution that originates outside its borders, Mr. Pruitt said in his Senate testimony that states should resolve these disputes on their own, with EPA providing “informational” support once an agreement is reached. But the 1972 Clean Water Act directs EPA to review state water quality plans, require any improvements needed to make waters “fishable and swimmable,” and to review and approve plans to limit pollutant loads to protect water quality. EPA’s power to set standards and limit pollution that crosses state lines is exactly what ensures every American clean air and water, and gives states the incentive to negotiate and resolve transboundary disputes.

We are most concerned about Mr. Pruitt’s reluctance to accept and act on the strong scientific consensus on climate change. Our country’s own National Research Council, the principal operating arm of the National Academies of Science and Engineering, concluded in a 2010 report requested by Congress that human activity is altering the climate to an extent that poses grave risks to Americans’ health and welfare. More recent scientific data and analyses have only confirmed the Council’s conclusion and added to the urgency of addressing the problem.

Despite this and other authoritative warnings about the dangers of climate change, Mr. Pruitt persists in pointing to uncertainty about the precise extent of humanity’s contribution to the problem as a basis for resisting taking any regulatory action to help solve it. At his Senate confirmation hearing, he stated that that “science tells us that the climate is changing, and that human activity in some manner impacts that change. The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue, and well it should be.” This is a familiar dodge– emphasizing uncertainty about the precise amount of humanity’s contribution while ignoring the broad scientific consensus that human activities are largely responsible for dangerous warming of our planet and that action is urgently needed before it is too late.

Mr. Pruitt’s indulgence in this dodge raises the fundamental question of whether he agrees with the precautionary principle reflected in our nation’s environmental statutes. Faithful execution of our environmental laws requires effectively combating climate change to minimize its potentially catastrophic impacts before it is too late.

The American people have been served by EPA Administrators, Republicans and Democrats, who have embraced their responsibility to protect public health and the environment. Different administrators have come to different conclusions about how best to apply the law in view of the science, and many of their decisions have been challenged in court, sometimes successfully, for either going too far or not far enough. But in the large majority of cases it was evident to us that they put the public’s welfare ahead of private interests. Scott Pruitt has not demonstrated this same commitment.

Thank you for considering our views.

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A clean water supply in China is not enough, apparently.

With the country’s air pollution many times above the maximum levels recommended by the World Health Organization, people want to keep the water away from contact with water before consumption.

With bottled water use doubling in China over the past decade, a company in the middle of an IPO worth up to $10 million in Australia says it has a solution — water cans that collapse on themselves as they are drained.

Tianmei Beverage Group Corp’s "Soft Water Barrel" is designed to prevent air contamination by folding in on itself as water is drawn out to prevent any air from getting inside the container, according to its chairman Anthony Sherlock, the former Chairman of Australian Wool Corporation and a director of Stockland.

This video shows the bottle in action

The foldable barrel joins a list of products from as mundane as air purifiers to bottled fresh Australian air as Chinese battle toxic haze and smog.

The haze that settled over much of China towards the end of 2016 and spilt over to the start of the year triggered a rise in smog avoidance travel packages to places as far as Iceland and Antarctica, according to online travel service Ctrip.com International.

More than half of China’s cities suffered medium to severe pollution early this year with PM2.5, a type of microparticle that endangers health, as the main pollutant in most of them, according to the government. Air pollution may cut the second largest global economy’s size by as much as 2.5 percent by 2060 by extending employee sick days, damaging crops and increasing health care costs, according to a report by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

"Air pollution has been a growing problem in China for years, and over the past few months has really hit crisis point," Sherlock said. "Health is already a major driving factor in demand for bottled water, and we believe the logical next step is that Chinese consumers will want assurance that their water is free from airborne contaminants as well."

With tap water in China also contaminated with chemicals and bacteria, 41% of Chinese have moved to bottled water, purifiers and dispensers, according to a survey by the China Water Supply Services Union, Tianmei’s IPO prospectus showed.

China’s bottled water consumption has increased from 5.69 billion gallons in 2007 to 11.50 billion gallons in 2014, according to an International Bottled Water Association.

Tianmei plans to use part of the money raised in the IPO to buy a water plant and for research and development.

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The Great Barrier Reef is called great for a reason, spanning nearly 350,000 square kilometres. So it's no surprise that it has been the site of massive geological events. Most recently, however, researchers have found evidence that roughly 300,000 years ago, something three times the size of Ayers Rock shifted underneath the corals that now populate the area.

It was called the Gloria Knolls Slide, and scientists believe it was the largest undersea landslide in history. Scientists from universities in Australia and Edinburgh discovered the remnants of the slide 75 kilometres off of the north Queensland coast in the Queensland Trough. Their results were published in the journal Marine Geology.

Some 1,350 metres under the surface and scattered across around 30 kilometres of sea floor, knolls from the landslide were recovered by the team. Knolls are small, round natural hill or mounds which help make up the aquatic habitat of marine life. They're typically formed from by volcanic activity and can reach 1,000 metres high.

The team were "amazed to discover this cluster of knolls" while they were scanning the sea floor, Dr Robin Beaman, Geoscience professor at James Cook University and an author of the study, said in a statement. 

"In an area of the Queensland Trough that was supposed to be relatively flat were eight knolls, appearing like hills with some over 100 m high and 3 km long," added Beaman.

They decided to investigate the mysterious knolls further, and used laser mapping which revealed that a landslide was the cause. An exciting coral community of both living and fossil cold-water coral species, gorgonian sea whips, bamboo corals, molluscs and stalked barnacles were also uncovered from sand sediment within a knoll. These lifeforms show that the reef is even more diverse and complex than we thought.

"The oldest fossil corals recovered off the top of the knoll was 302,000 years," said Dr Angel Puga-Bernabéu of the University of Granada, who was the lead author on the study. "Which means the landslide event that caused these knolls must be older."

According to the researchers, this landslide could have triggered a massive tsunami, which could have been as large as 27 metres high. However, a lot more seabed mapping and sampling is required for them to understand the real hazard of tsunamis posed by these landslides, or whether it will happen again.

Join the conversation about this story »

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Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have been named the most "toxic" nations on Earth in a new report.

The Eco Experts gathered data on and then ranked 135 countries based on five environmental factors: Energy consumption per capita, CO2 emissions from fuel combustion, air pollution levels, deaths attributable to air pollution, and renewable energy production.

So instead of simply looking at levels of air pollution, the study also focused on the work being done to tackle climate change.

According to the data, Saudi Arabia is one of the world's largest oil producers but also has some of the world's lowest renewable energy contributions, despite having weather conditions ideal for solar energy. The Eco Experts says this suggests a disregard for the environment and the population’s health.

Meanwhile, China is aiming to invest £292 billion in renewable energy by 2020, according to The Guardian. This means that while the country's pollution levels remain notoriously high, it's actively searching for a path to a greener future and therefore falls lower down the toxicity ranking.

The most toxic European country was Luxembourg which suffers from heavy pollution from neighbouring countries including Germany and Belgium. The UK ranked 81st for toxicity, while the US fared slightly worse in 66th.

The 10 most toxic countries were:

1. Saudi Arabia
2. Kuwait
3. Qatar
4. Bahrain
5. United Arab Emirates
6. Oman
7. Turkmenistan
8. Libya
9. Kazakhstan
10. Trinidad and Tobago

The least toxic nations according to the report are mostly African nations such as Kenya, Mozambique, and Ethiopia, where a lack of industrialisation has led to less polluted air — although the study did not take water pollution into account, which is real problem in Africa.

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The INSIDER Summary:

• The Dead Sea, the lowest point on Earth bordered by Israel and Jordan, is receding due to mineral mining.
• A group of 28 swimmers swam across its salty waters to raise awareness of the issue.
• The waters are full of therapeutic minerals, but are toxic to ingest.

The Dead Sea is world-renowned for its extreme saltiness, which prevents lifeforms like fish and aquatic plants from living in it. Tourists from all over the globe flock to its shores to rub its mineral-rich mud on their skin and float in its buoyant water. But the Dead Sea has receded 80 feet in the past 30 years, and environmentalists are concerned that it might not be around much longer.

EcoPeace Middle East, an international environmental group, organized the first-ever Dead Sea Swim to raise awareness of the issue and call for government action.

Twenty-eight swimmers braved the harsh waters to swim from Jordan to Israel.

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The Dead Sea is the lowest point on Earth at about 1,400 feet below sea level.

Its waters are 10 times saltier than regular sea water. While full of therapeutic minerals, the water is toxic to ingest.

That didn't stop 28 swimmers from swimming nine miles across it, from Jordan to Israel, in the first-ever Dead Sea Swim.

• A former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientist criticized his colleague's data archiving methods.
• This is a pretty normal scientific argument, the kind that happens in fields from climate science to psychology to linguistics.
• A Daily Mail reporter wrote an article suggesting that the criticism was in fact a bombshell showing the NOAA had "duped" world leaders.
• The article had some serious factual errors.
• A climate science doubting congressman cited it as evidence of a conspiracy to hide data at the NOAA.

Here's something that happens a lot in science:

Two researchers disagree about the best way to go about studying something. They fight about it. Maybe at first it's a small personal squabble, but later it plays out in essays and papers and other documents that the whole world can look at.

The stakes in this kind of fight are serious. A career's worth of research might be on the line, or the accepted method for caring for patients, or even the future of a whole field of study. So things can get pretty heated; this past September one famous psychologist accused her peers of "methodological terrorism" in the midst of one such debate.

But the audience for this scientific infighting is usually pretty small, made up of fellow researchers, students, and the occasional nosey reporter.

Climate scientists don't have that luxury. Every step they take happens under the scrutiny of a well-funded peanut gallery of professional science deniers, anti-science politicians, and agenda-driven writers eager to spin any misstep into evidence of a vast conspiracy.

This happened back in 2009, when several climate scientists found their names dragged through the mud in Congress based on some stolen emails, despite no evidence of wrongdoing.

And it's happening again right now, after Daily Mail crime writer David Rose published an article with the alarming headline "Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data."

Rose interviewed John Bates, a retired NOAA scientist, who has a very specific criticism about the methodology used by fellow NOAA researcher Thomas Karl in a 2015 paper. That paper looked into a specific question in climate science: Why, according to some analyses, did the global rise in temperatures seem to pause or slow down during the first decade of the 21st Century?

The answer, Karl suggests, is that the climate didn't stop warming at all. Rather, measurement tools changed, creating the illusion of a pause. His conclusion isn't exactly controversial: Other scientists using other methods have arrived at essentially the same result.

But Bates felt that Karl's paper wasn't rigorous enough, and wrote a blog post about it on February 4. His criticism is fairly narrow: That Karl didn't hew closely to the data-archiving standards Bates had worked to implement during his time at the agency.

Other scientists, like NASA researcher Gavin Schmidt, have since criticized Bates's analysis. And if you want to read more about that debate, I suggest this article by Warren Cornwall and Paul Voosen. Snopes also does a good job of laying out the underlying facts of the statistical argument.

The key thing to understand though is that this is a fairly typical argument between scientists, the kind you can find in just about any field that relies on statistical analysis and data interpretation.

Bates suggested that Karl put his "thumb on the scale" in an attempt to discredit the warming pause. And he told Rose in an interview that Karl had exchanged "good" data for "bad" data.

Rose then turned that argument — which was about a single paper — into what he implied was essentially a conspiracy meant to deceive the public. He called Bates a "whistleblower" and his critique "devastating" to climate science writ large — to the point of arguing that world leaders had been "duped."

"[Bates's] disclosures are likely to stiffen President Trump’s determination to enact his pledges to reverse his predecessor’s ‘green’ policies," he added, "and to withdraw from the Paris deal."

The Mail article came up at a House Science Committee hearing where Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, a climate science skeptic, used it to suggest that NOAA is hiding the truth about climate change.

Schmidt later showed that a graph included in the story — intended to be used as evidence of NOAA misconduct — had in fact used distorted data.

Bates himself later told E&E News that "The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data, but rather really of timing of a release of a paper that had not properly disclosed everything it was."

In other words: The issue was never the truth of the global warming pause, which most other scientists agree likely didn't happen. Rather, it was a straightforward debate about data archiving and management.

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NOW WATCH: This startling animation shows how much Arctic sea ice has thinned in just 26 years

Rescuers and volunteers have been trying to save hundreds of pilot whales stranded in New Zealand's Golden Bay.

Up to 300 whales have died, in what is the country's largest known whale stranding since 1985.

Produced by David Ibekwe.

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LONDON — Britain's plan to leave the EU and do a quick trade deal with the US risks sacrificing whole swathes of environmental protections which currently apply to the UK, a new report has warned.

The House of Commons library has identified more than 1,000 pieces of environmental legislation that are contained within Britain's EU membership. These include protections on wildlife, air pollution, animal welfare and agriculture.

The government is committed to transferring all of these over to UK law with it's Great Repeal Bill.

However, a report published by Green MP Caroline Lucas on Monday warns that many of these risk being watered down or traded away in Britain's rush to do a comprehensive trade deal with Donald Trump.

"Theresa May’s courting of the United States in pursuit of a new Free Trade Agreement poses an even greater risk that Ministers may be tempted to water down regulations in their haste to demonstrate the 'success; of post-Brexit trade arrangements - such as those on GMOs, pesticides, and animal hormones," Lucas warns.

Opponents of the now suspended TTIP trade deal between the US and EU, warned that it would have weakened regulations on chemical and pesticide use, oil and gas extraction and genetically modified food.

For example, environmental regulations on pesticides which are currently banned in Europe, but not in the US, would have had to have been "harmonised" in order to smooth the process of free trade.

"Any suggestion of regulatory harmonisation is not going to mean the US starts restricting more chemicals," Michael Warhurst, executive director at Chemtrust, said at the time.

"We know chemicals are being discharged into rivers that harm the environment, such as feminising fish. Many of these are not banned in the US but are restricted at some level in the EU.”

Lucas believes that the risk from a deal with the Trump administration would be even greater than that posed by TTIP.

"With climate sceptics now in control of the US administration, and the recent attacks on US climate, energy and environment regulation that have followed, there will be a temptation for the UK to water down EU-derived environmental protections. The UK government, in committing to leave the environment in a better state than when it found it, must not succumb to deregulatory pressure from across the Atlantic.

"We must not open our borders to beef treated with hormones or chicken washed with chlorine," she adds.

A spokesperson for the prime minister told Business Insider that they had no plans to trade away environmental protections during trade talks.

"All regulations will be moved over when the great repeal bill is brought in," they said.

"Negations haven't started yet. We haven't triggered Article 50 yet, but we are determined that the environmental policies we have in place will stay in place."

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Here's what Lake Oroville, the body of water contained by the tallest dam in the US, looked like in August 2015, during the height of California's raging five-year drought:

Here's what that dam, the Oroville Dam, looked like this weekend:

Not surprisingly, the state was somewhat unprepared for the dam's water levels to reach capacity, which they did — rapidly — on Thursday.

After the dam's water levels steadily rose from Thursday through the weekend, authorities on Sunday evening ordered the evacuation of nearly 200,000 residents in several northern California towns.

"Immediate evacuation from the low levels of Oroville and areas downstream is ordered," the Butte County Sheriff's Office posted on Facebook.

Back in March, the rising water levels were good news

Officials have not released information on what exactly caused the dam's structural problems, including a gaping hole in the middle of the spillway.

But issues in the area may have been brewing since at least March of last year, when The Sacramento Bee reported that both of California's two largest reservoirs — which had been decimated for years by the drought — rose to historically average levels after a weekend of heavy storms.

That was great news — at first.

After all, California had been in the midst of a five-year drought that experts had called the worst the state had seen in 1,200 years. Dwindling reservoirs, shrinking lakes, and dried-up farm fields dominated the landscape. The state's snowpack reserves, which typically supply California's farmers and residents with roughly a third of their water, lingered at their lowest level in history in 2015. In response, the state responded with urban conservation mandates requiring residents to use less water while supplies were so low.

Cautious optimism as levels rise

But in March, Felicia Marcus, the chair of the State Water Resources Control Board, told The Sacramento Bee that those mandates would finally be loosened in the coming months as water levels looked to be returning to normal — the first time they'd done so since 2013.

"In May, we'll be either lifting it or changing it significantly," she said in March. "The more precipitation we get, the more snowpack we have, the better it is."

That month, the combined supply at all of California's biggest reservoirs stood at about 78% of their average levels, but officials remained cautiously optimistic, saying there was no guarantee that the state would see enough storms to fully raise water levels.

Unprecedented storms

But over the past month, the state has seen unprecedented storms.

And last Tuesday, engineers discovered a 250-foot-long pothole in the main spillway of the Oroville Dam, a structure capable of storing more than 3.5 million acre-feet of water located in the Sierra Nevada foothills east of the Sacramento Valley. At 770 feet, it's the country's tallest dam and a key feature of the California water system.

The hole forced officials to close off the spillway, which is traditionally used to drain some of the excess water into surrounding areas. As a result, the reservoir began to fill. In less than a day, it took on some 150,000 acre-feet of water, The Sacramento Bee reported, filling to roughly 85% capacity.

At the time, the California Department of Water Resources reported that the dam itself was safe and did not pose a threat to downstream populations. "These are things we can repair," Eric See, the agency's environmental program manager, told The Sacramento Bee on Tuesday.

But the water kept coming.

Two days later, after the gaping hole in the spillway had continued to grow, the spillway gave in, and a complete break could be seen all the way across the structure:

As of Thursday afternoon, the dam continued to release thousands of turbo-charged cubic feet of water each second, including from the broken spillway. It wasn't enough to compensate for all the excess water brought in by storms, however, and heavy rainfall on Saturday caused the dam to overflow for the first time in its 49-year history.

Authorities ordered the evacuation of nearly 200,000 residents in several northern California towns Sunday night.

"Immediate evacuation from the low levels of Oroville and areas downstream is ordered," the Butte County Sheriff's Office posted on Facebook.

"Operation of the auxiliary spillway has lead to severe erosion that could lead to a failure of the structure. Failure of the auxiliary spillway structure will result in an uncontrolled release of flood waters from Lake Oroville."

Anticipating the failure of the dam's auxiliary spillway, officials in the northern California town frantically attempted to drain water from the main spillway, at a clip of 100,000 cubic feet per second, according to The Sacramento Bee. Helicopters dropped sand and rocks into a sinkhole in the spillway to stem the erosion.

"It's uncontrolled. It's uncontrolled," Department of Water Resources spokesman Chris Orrock said when asked how much water could be released should the spillway fail.

Later Sunday evening, officials said the threat of collapse from erosion had diminished, according to The Sacramento Bee. Water levels fell to a point at which little or no water flowed out of the emergency spillway, which Orrock said was the main factor in its erosion.

An evacuation center was set up in Chico, a nearby town north of Oroville, the sheriff's office said on Twitter. Traffic heading out of Oroville appeared to slow to a crawl as thousands of residents attempted to flee. Residents of seven towns in neighboring Yuba and Sutter counties were also instructed to evacuate. The number of residents ordered to evacuate totaled 188,000.

Officials estimate it could take up to $200 million to repair the damaged Oroville spillway, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Mark Abadi contributed to this post.

SEE ALSO: Authorities issue dire warnings amid threat of California dam collapse

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Dams can be amazing sources of renewable, carbon-free energy. Just build a sturdy wall, let a reservoir naturally fill up with water, and allow gravity to drive electric generators and power nearby towns and cities.

The US gets about 6% of its energy this way.

But as this week's Oroville, California dam crisis illustrates, hydroelectric energy technology comes with a major yet infrequent risk: Catastrophic collapse and flooding.

According to a March 2011 data analysis by reporter Phil McKenna at New Scientist, dams may be among the riskier power sources in the world. The magazine compiled data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the International Energy Agency, and othersources.

The analysis calculated the immediate and later deaths that occurred for every 10 terrawatt-hours (TWh) of power generated globally — as a point of contrast, the world makes about 20,000 TWh of electrical power a year.

The data give a range of deaths for each type of power, but the ranking consistently places hydroelectric power as more deadly than nuclear energy and natural gas:

• Nuclear— 0.2 to 1.2 deaths per 10 TWh (least deadly)
• Natural gas— 0.3-1.6 deaths per 10 TWh
• Hydroelectric— 1.0-1.6 deaths per 10 TWh
• Coal— 2.8 to 32.7 deaths per 10 TWh (most deadly)

Even accounting for nuclear disasters like Chernobyl, which caused an estimated 9,000 cancer deaths, nuclear power is one of the safest ways to generate electricity (contrary to popular belief).

Coal appears to be the most deadly because of the deaths it causes via air pollution.

Harvard University risk analyst James Hammitt tells Business Insider that those deaths are "highly predictable," in part because medical studies have strongly linked airborne pollution to mortality.

"We have tens of thousands of deaths a year caused by air pollution, and that's not unusual," Hammitt says. "But it is unusual to have deaths from hydroelectric power on any given year," due to the rarity of dam collapses without any warning.

But there's a catch.

When you include the deaths caused by the tragic 1975 collapse of China's enormous Banqiao Dam, hydroelectric can be considered one of the riskiest power sources.

From 1951 to 1952, China built the giant hydroelectric dam on the Ruhe River with help from the Soviet Union. But in early August 1975, a unusually wet typhoon moved into the area and broke records for rainfall, filling up the Banqiao Reservoir and pushing the limits that engineers designed for the dam.

On August 8, 1975, the dam collapsed and sent a wall of water nearly 20 feet (6 meters) high and 7.5 miles wide (12 kilometers) downriver, according to a summary of a chapter in the book "The River Dragon Has Come!" by investigative journalist Dai Qing.

The torrent wrecked other dams along the river and killed an estimated 85,000 people. When accounting for later deaths caused by flood-related disease and famine, however, the toll may actually be closer to 220,000 to 230,000 people.

This devastating outlier pushes the statistical risk of dams dozens of times higher, to 54.7 deaths per 10 TWh — about 46 times more risk than nuclear power. Business Insider contacted the National Hydropower Association for comment on the risk that hydroelectric dams pose in the US, but we did not immediately receive a response.

The Chinese rebuilt the Banqiao Dam in 1993 and incorporated the lessons learned from the tragedy.

While it remains to be seen whether the Oroville Dam will actually collapse — it was stabilizing at the time this story was published — one crucial difference between the two events is that authorities were able to urge more than 180,000 people in that region of California to evacuate immediately.

"That makes this much less threatening than something like an earthquake, when you can't do anything to evacuate ahead of time and it just happens," Hammitt says.

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NOW WATCH: Countries around the world are pouring billions of dollars into France's revolutionary nuclear fusion reactor

• Very fine air pollution that causes smog and haze can raise the risks of many diseases.
• In at least 15 cities, air pollution has now become so bad that the danger to health of just 30 minutes of cycling each way outweighs the benefits of exercise altogether.

Who says exercise is always good for you?

Cycling to work in certain highly polluted cities could be more dangerous to your health than not doing it at all, according to researchers.

In cities such as Allahabad in India, or Zabol in Iran, the long-term damage from inhaling fine particulates could outweigh the usual health gains of cycling after just 30 minutes. In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, this tipping point happens after just 45 minutes a day cycling along busy roads. In Delhi or the Chinese city of Xingtai, meanwhile, residents pass what the researchers call the "breakeven point" after an hour.

Other exercise with the same intensity as cycling — such as slow jogging — would have the same effect.

"If you are beyond the breakeven point, you may be doing yourself more harm than good," said Audrey de Nazelle, a lecturer in air pollution management at Imperial College's Centre for Environmental Policy, and one of the authors of the report.

The study, originally published in the journal Preventive Medicine before the World Health Organization's latest global estimates, modeled the health effects of active travel and of air pollution. They measured air quality through average annual levels of PM2.5s, the tiny pollutant particles that can embed themselves deep in the lungs.

This type of air pollution can occur naturally — from dust storms or forest fires, for example — but is mainly created by motor vehicles and manufacturing.

Breathing polluted air has been linked to infections including pneumonia, ischemic heart disease, stroke and some cancers. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's Global Burden of Disease study ranks it among the top risk factors for loss of health.

The report in Preventive Medicine assumed cyclists moved at speeds of 12/14kph, with health benefits calculated in a similar way to the WHO's Heat assessment tool. It also assumed cyclists used roads with double the background levels of air pollution, which may underestimate how poor air quality is in many developing world cities: for example, a study in Lagos found five out of eight sites exceeded Delhi's annual PM2.5 concentration.

People commuting to work along busy roads in a city with average annual background PM2.5 levels of 160 micrograms per cubic metre (μg/m³) or above will pass the breakeven point at just 30 minutes a day, the study found.

Using the WHO's latest global estimates, published in May, those levels are only reached in Zabor, and in Allahabad and Gwalior in India — although many large cities in the developing world do not accurately measure air pollution so were not included in the WHO database.

How polluted does air have to be before the harm from cycling outweighs benefits

Fifteen cities (see map above and table below) have annual mean PM2.5 levels of 115μg/m³ or above, according to the WHO data, so the breakeven point is reached after an hour of active travel. Fine particulate levels above 80μg/m³ were found in 62 cities, making cycling more harmful than beneficial after two hours.

The study found people in western cities such as London, Paris or New York would never reach the point where PM2.5 air pollution's negatives outweigh exercise's positives in the long term.

"The benefits of active travel outweighed the harm from air pollution in all but the most extreme air pollution concentrations," said Nazelle. "It is not currently an issue for healthy adults in Europe in general."

London's annual average PM2.5 pollution was estimated at 15μg/m³ by the WHO — above the WHO's guideline of 10, but still at a level at which the study estimated active travel would always be beneficial. Paris had ambient PM2.5 levels of 18μg/m³, while New York had 9μg/m³.

However, the study did not consider the health impacts of short-term spikes in PM2.5 pollution, or take into account the effect of exercising in air containing larger PM10 particulates, ozone, or toxic nitrogen oxides (NOx) from diesel cars.

London mayor Sadiq Khan issued his first "very high" air pollution alert last month when air in the UK capital hit the maximum score of 10 on the Air Quality Index, equivalent to PM10 in excess of 101μg/m³. NOx pollution causes 5,900 early deaths a year in the city, and most air quality zones across Britain break legal limits.

"This is the highest level of alert and everyone — from the most vulnerable to the physically fit — may need to take precautions to protect themselves from the filthy air,"Khan warned.

The point at which air pollution becomes so bad that the harm from cycling to work outweighs the health benefits

Guardian Cities is dedicating a week to investigating one of the worst preventable causes of death around the world: air pollution. Explore our coverage at The Air We Breathe and follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook to join the discussion

SEE ALSO: The best and worst countries in the world when it comes to air pollution and electricity use

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NOW WATCH: This Cold War-era technology could safely power the world for millions of years

One person's disgusting vehicle exhaust is a clever entrepreneur's treasure.

At least that's how the two co-founders of Graviky Labs, a startup that sprang out of MIT Media Lab, are approaching the problem of air pollution from cars, trucks, and buses with their product "Air-Ink".

Their process starts with a device called a Kaalink, shown above as a see-through illustration and below attached to a car's tailpipe. It's a glorified filter that grabs black carbon soot from the burning of gasoline, diesel, and other fuels.

Each Kaalink is reusable and allegedly filters "between 85-95%" of soot emissions from a vehicle, according to an email the company sent to Business Insider.

"[B]y preventing particulate matter from entering into the air, we are able to prevent the health hazards associated with the inhalation of particulate matter," Graviky Labs co-founder Anirudh Sharma and technical lead Nikhil Kaushik tell Business Insider in a joint email.

A Kaalink won't stop carbon dioxide gas from going into the air and exacerbating climate change, but the carbon soot it does capture would otherwise contribute to dangerous form of pollution called PM 2.5.

The "PM" stands for "particulate matter," and the "2.5" stands for 2.5 microns in diameter or smaller — roughly the size of a single bacterium. Such pollution is so nasty, as Business Insider's Lydia Ramsey explained in 2016, because it "can get lodged in the lungs and cause long-term health problems like asthma and chronic lung disease."

PM 2.5 levels are so toxic in some cities that daily outdoor exercise like walking, running, or biking outside poses more of a health risk than staying home.

Sharma, Kaushik, and two others have been refining their technology for more than a year and recently soft-launched their Air-Ink product as a Kickstarter project with a nearly $10,000 goal.

In terms of improving air quality on a massive scale, it's highly unlikely that making ink out of car, truck, and bus exhaust will ever match the impact of regulations and pollution-scrubbing technologies built into nearly all modern cars.

Nevertheless, it's an interesting idea for the millions of older vehicles out there, particularly in developing nations where pollution ordinances are rare — or rarely enforced.

Sharma and Kaushik also hope to make black-ink production more sustainable and environmentally friendly.

"We are replacing the consumption of fossil fuels to make carbon black [inks]," they say.

Graviky Labs claims the whole process — manufacturing the Kaalink exhaust caps, harvesting the soot from them, purging heavy metals from that gunk, and creating an industrial-grade black ink product — is carbon-neutral.

Put another way: Air-Ink allegedly captures more carbon emissions from vehicles than it takes to produce the ink.

They say it depends on which vehicle is being filtered and how dirty its exhaust is, but typically each 1-ounce (30-mL) bottle of Air-Ink represents about 45 minutes' worth of soot emissions being "canceled out."

"A Kaalink unit attached to an old Euro 3 car should become neutral after running for approx. 200-300 kms [124-186 miles]," they say.

Graviky Labs' Kickstarter runs through Tuesday, March 7, and you can read more about the backstory that led to Air-Ink here.

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NOW WATCH: This Cold War-era technology could safely power the world for millions of years

A powerful series of rainstorms is headed for California Thursday and through the weekend — arriving after a period of already severe weather in the state.

A flash flood watch is in effect throughout Los Angeles, Ventura, and souther Santa Barbara counties.

Up to a foot of rain is expected in some places, as the storms drench a region from Northern California down to San Diego, raising safety concerns. Those concerns are perhaps most serious at the Oroville Dam, where unusually high waters damaged an emergency spillway February 9, forcing 188,000 residents to flee the area.

Efforts have been underway through the week to buttress the spillway, but a new rush of rainwater poses risks.

Los Angeles in particular will experience unusual weather, which is expected to begin Thursday night. Two to six inches are expected in the area, with up to an inch of rain falling per hour.

The forecast for Los Angeles has a 10-year return interval, according to Tom Dang, a National Weather Service meteorologist based out of Sacramento. That means that there’s only a one-in-ten chance of seeing a storm this powerful in the area any given year, so that it would be expected about once a decade, or ten times in a century.

Torrential rain and wind also poses a risk of mudslides, wind damage, and road closures in parts of California, according to AccuWeather.

Flooding is possible across a swath of the state, with heavy snow expected high in the Sierra Nevadas.

SEE ALSO: Part of the tallest dam in the US is on the verge of collapse — and California was unprepared

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NOW WATCH: This startling animation shows how much Arctic sea ice has thinned in just 26 years

• Environmentalists have serious concerns about Trump's pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt.
• Nearly 800 former EPA officials  publicly oppose Pruitt.
• The Senate just moved him one step closer to confirmation.
• His path to confirmation looks clear, despite one Republican Senator's opposition — especially because one Democrat said she would vote for him.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly 800 former Environmental Protection Agency officials urged the U.S. Senate to reject President Donald Trump's nominee to run the agency as the chamber moved closer on Thursday to approving his pick, Scott Pruitt, the attorney general of oil-producing Oklahoma.

The 773 former officials signed a letter organized by the nonprofit group Environmental Integrity Project. Business Insider reported on the letter February 7, when the count stood at 447.

The letter, reprinted below, said Pruitt's record and public statements suggest he does not agree with underlying principles of environmental laws.

As attorney general, Pruitt sued the EPA fourteen times on behalf of Oklahoma — in one instance to block a cleanup of Maryland's Chesapeake bay, 1,400 miles from the state he represents.

He has also cast doubts on the science of climate change, and may have made a false statement under oath about his environmental record during his Senate confirmation hearings.

"Mr. Pruitt has shown no interest in enforcing those laws, a critically important function for EPA," the letter said.

A spokesman for Pruitt did not immediate respond to a request for comment about the letter.

Pruitt's efforts to challenge the EPA's authority reflected "a fundamental lack of understanding and respect for the vital role that EPA plays in ensuring clean air and water for every American no matter where they live or their color or creed," said Joseph Santarella, an EPA enforcement lawyer under former Republican and Democratic administrations, who signed the letter.

Republican Senator Sue Collins came out against Pruitt on Wednesday saying his actions left her with doubts about whether his vision for the agency was consistent with its mission to protect human health and the environment.

Unless more Republicans join Collins, Pruitt's nomination is likely to succeed.

Senator John Barrasso, a Republican of coal producing Wyoming and head of the Senate energy committee, said Pruitt had "led the charge to rein in big government and Washington overreach."

The Senate advanced Pruitt's nomination on Thursday by a vote of 54 to 46, clearing the way for 30 hours of debate before a final vote, expected on Friday.

The path to stopping Pruitt became even steeper on Thursday after Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, said she would vote for him, even though she had "concerns" about his commitment to a wide energy strategy that includes renewable power like solar and wind and his commitment to reduce emissions from energy operations.

Here's the full text of the former EPA officials' letter:

Dear Senator McConnell and the U.S. Senate,

We write as former employees of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to share our concerns about Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s qualifications to serve as the next EPA Administrator in light of his record in Oklahoma. Our perspective is not partisan. Having served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, we recognize each new Administration’s right to pursue different policies within the parameters of existing law and to ask Congress to change the laws that protect public health and the environment as it sees fit.

However, every EPA Administrator has a fundamental obligation to act in the public’s interest based on current law and the best available science. Mr. Pruitt’s record raises serious questions about whose interests he has served to date and whether he agrees with the longstanding tenets of U.S. environmental law.

Our nation has made tremendous progress in ensuring that every American has clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and uncontaminated land on which to live, work and play. Anyone who visits Beijing is reminded of what some cities in the U.S. once looked like before we went to work as a people to combat pollution. Much of EPA’s work involves preserving those gains, which should not be taken for granted. There are also emerging new threats as well as serious gaps in our environmental safety net, as the drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan, painfully demonstrates.

Our environmental laws are based on a partnership that requires EPA to set national standards and gives states latitude when implementing them so long as certain minimum criteria are satisfied. This approach recognizes that Americans have an equal right to clean air and water, no matter where they live, and allows states to compete for business without having to sacrifice public health or environmental quality.

Our environmental laws include provisions directing EPA to allow for a “margin of safety” when assessing risks, which is intended to limit exposure to pollutants when it is reasonable to expect they may harm the public health, even when all the scientific evidence is not yet in. For example, EPA’s first Administrator, Bill Ruckelshaus, chose to limit the amount of lead in gasoline before all doubt about its harmfulness to public health was erased. His action spared much of the harm that some countries still face as result of the devastating effects of lead on human health. Similarly, early action to reduce exposure to fine particle pollution helped avoid thousands of premature deaths from heart and lung disease. The magnitude and severity of those risks did not become apparent until much later.

Mr. Pruitt’s record and public statements strongly suggest that he does not share the vision or agree with the underlying principles of our environmental laws. Mr. Pruitt has shown no interest in enforcing environmental laws, a critically important function for EPA. While serving as Oklahoma’s top law enforcement officer, Mr. Pruitt issued more than 50 press releases celebrating lawsuits to overturn EPA standards to limit mercury emissions from power plants, reduce smog levels in cities and regional haze in parks, clean up the Chesapeake Bay and control greenhouse gas emissions. In contrast, none of Mr. Pruitt’s many press releases refer to any action he has taken to enforce environmental laws or to actually reduce pollution. This track record likely reflects his disturbing decision to close the environmental enforcement unit in his office while establishing a new litigation team to challenge EPA and other federal agencies.

He has claimed credit for an agreement to protect the Illinois River that did little more than confirm phosphorus limits established much earlier, while delaying their enforcement another three years.

In a similar vein, Mr. Pruitt has gone to disturbing lengths to advance the views and interests of business. For example, he signed and sent a letter as Oklahoma Attorney General criticizing EPA estimates of emissions from oil and gas wells, without disclosing that it had been drafted in its entirety by Devon Energy. He filed suit on behalf of Oklahoma to block a California law requiring humane treatment of poultry. The federal court dismissed the case after finding that the lawsuit was brought not to benefit the citizens of Oklahoma but a handful of large egg producers perfectly capable of representing their own interests. To mount his challenge to EPA’s rule to reduce carbon pollution from power plants, he took the unusual step of accepting free help from a private law firm. By contrast, there is little or no evidence of Mr. Pruitt taking initiative to protect and advance public health and environmental protection in his state. Mr. Pruitt’s office has apparently acknowledged 3,000 emails and other documents reflecting communications with certain oil and gas companies, but has yet to make any of these available in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed more than two years ago.

Contrary to the cooperative federalism that he promotes, Mr. Pruitt has suggested that EPA should refrain from trying to control pollution that crosses state lines. For example, he intervened to support a Farm Bureau lawsuit that would have overturned a cooperative agreement between five states and EPA to clean up the Chesapeake Bay (the court rejected the challenge). When asked how a state can protect its citizens from pollution that originates outside its borders, Mr. Pruitt said in his Senate testimony that states should resolve these disputes on their own, with EPA providing “informational” support once an agreement is reached. But the 1972 Clean Water Act directs EPA to review state water quality plans, require any improvements needed to make waters “fishable and swimmable,” and to review and approve plans to limit pollutant loads to protect water quality. EPA’s power to set standards and limit pollution that crosses state lines is exactly what ensures every American clean air and water, and gives states the incentive to negotiate and resolve transboundary disputes.

We are most concerned about Mr. Pruitt’s reluctance to accept and act on the strong scientific consensus on climate change. Our country’s own National Research Council, the principal operating arm of the National Academies of Science and Engineering, concluded in a 2010 report requested by Congress that human activity is altering the climate to an extent that poses grave risks to Americans’ health and welfare. More recent scientific data and analyses have only confirmed the Council’s conclusion and added to the urgency of addressing the problem.

Despite this and other authoritative warnings about the dangers of climate change, Mr. Pruitt persists in pointing to uncertainty about the precise extent of humanity’s contribution to the problem as a basis for resisting taking any regulatory action to help solve it. At his Senate confirmation hearing, he stated that that “science tells us that the climate is changing, and that human activity in some manner impacts that change. The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue, and well it should be.” This is a familiar dodge– emphasizing uncertainty about the precise amount of humanity’s contribution while ignoring the broad scientific consensus that human activities are largely responsible for dangerous warming of our planet and that action is urgently needed before it is too late.

Mr. Pruitt’s indulgence in this dodge raises the fundamental question of whether he agrees with the precautionary principle reflected in our nation’s environmental statutes. Faithful execution of our environmental laws requires effectively combating climate change to minimize its potentially catastrophic impacts before it is too late.

The American people have been served by EPA Administrators, Republicans and Democrats, who have embraced their responsibility to protect public health and the environment. Different administrators have come to different conclusions about how best to apply the law in view of the science, and many of their decisions have been challenged in court, sometimes successfully, for either going too far or not far enough. But in the large majority of cases it was evident to us that they put the public’s welfare ahead of private interests. Scott Pruitt has not demonstrated this same commitment.

Thank you for considering our views.

Join the conversation about this story »

Scott Pruitt, President Donald Trump's pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Attorney General of Oklahoma, has spent two years avoiding requests to release more than 3,000 emails between his office and fossil fuel companies.

On Thursday, one day before the Senate is due to vote on Pruitt's confirmation, an Oklahoma judge ordered their release. 

Pruitt's office now has to turn the emails over to the plaintiffs in a lawsuit or to the court, thanks to Judge Aletia Haynes Timmons' ruling. The office has until Tuesday to comply. At that point, barring any surprise votes or changes in Senate schedule, Pruitt will likely have already been confirmed as EPA administrator.

Here's how things got to this point:

More than a dozen "open records requests" seeking the emails had been filed in Oklahoma, dating back to January 2015, but Pruitt and his office did not respond to them.

A lawsuit filed February 7, 2017 by The Center for Media and Democracy, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, sought to force Pruitt to release the emails, alleging that withholding them violated state law. On Thursday, the judge sided with the plaintiffs.

Critics see Pruitt, a longtime opponent of environmental efforts at the EPA, as an ally of polluting industries.

Those alleged alliances have been at the center of a contentious confirmation debate in the Senate, which is expected to vote on his confirmation tomorrow.

Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senator from Massachussets, criticized her Republican colleagues on Twitter for moving forward on the confirmation vote before the emails' release:

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