2017 Mar 9^th

Scott Pruitt is a lawyer; he is also the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) whose charge it is to protect the environment. He was previously the attorney general of Oklahoma whose job it was to protect and promote the oil and gas interests in Oklahoma. He took that job very seriously and sued the EPA many times because of their insistence on enforcing onerous regulations on his state’s favorite industry. Pruitt made it clear at his confirmation hearing that he did not agree with Oklahoma’s Senator Inhofe that global warming was a hoax, or with President Trump that it was a fraud cooked up by the Chinese.  (We point out that Senator Inhofe has received a cool 2 million dollars from the industries who profit from his ignorance about the environment.)

Pruitt, at least, does not claim that global warming is a hoax; he has decided however that carbon dioxide, the result of burning fossil fuels is not the reason for this warming. His background in chemistry is non-existent; his college major was political science. His opinion is contrary to the opinion of almost all climate scientists. Carbon Dioxide is well known as a trapper of heat, as is water vapor. It is the nature of these compounds to trap heat unlike the other gasses, Nitrogen and Oxygen that surround us. We can trace the increase in Carbon Dioxide and the increase in the planet’s temperature as they rise in parallel. The only way to get rid of Pruitt is to get rid of Trump…and likely Pence as well.

How likely is it that our national embarrassment will have found other work before the end of this year? Betting on such things is illegal in this country but the odds on Trump surviving until the year is out are available on British betting sites. The odds that Trump will still be president by the end of the year are given by Ladbroke, a British betting parlor, as  even money. Whoa! This is a largely unbiased outfit with no political ax to grind and they see Trump’s continuing to the end of the year as a 50/50 proposition.

The people who work in the administration are not hopelessly naïve, at least they aren’t when their own welfare is involved. This means that Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer, Stephen Miller Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon and the King of the Hill himself, are given just a 50/50 chance of being employed by New Year’s Day. I’m sure Trump isn’t worried at all; if he isn’t president, assuming he isn’t in jail, he can play golf every day, tweet his paranoid musings as much as he likes and continue looking for President Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate.