Does the name Scott Pruitt mean anything to you yet? If it doesn’t it soon will, because there is a fair chance he is about to kill off the planet.
He’ll kill off America first and then there’s that thing about when America sneezes, the rest of us catch a cold.
Mr Pruitt is the attorney general for Oklahoma, in which capacity he is in the throes of suing America’s Environmental Protection Agency over its regulationary framework for, among other things, providing clean air and water, limiting toxic emissions from power stations, constraining the excesses of industrial giants and combatting the worst excesses of climate change.
He doesn’t like the EPA very much and neither, for that matter, does President-elect Trump.
You may remember, he said back in the election campaign that he would scrap almost all of the EPA, that he would leave some “little titbits” of it but that most of it would go. With that in mind, guess who he has just appointed as head of the EPA?
Correct – Scott Pruitt.
So as things stand, Mr Pruitt is effectively suing himself. Talk about your chickens coming home to roost.
I like America. I like Americans. I like their generosity, their hospitality. I like their writers, their jazz musicians, Frank Sinatra, Meryl Streep.
I have a handful of American friends. They are finding it every bit as hard as I am to understand what the hell just happened back there.
One of them, an Alaskan writer called Nancy Lord, wrote a book in 2011 about climate change, called “Early Warming – Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed North”.
That sub-title is the point of the book. While the Trumps and Pruitts of the world shrug off the threat of climate change as a mischievous invention coming soon to a screen near you, while their backs have been turned, the north of the world is already climate-changed.
Early warming has already happened, it’s still happening and, as Nancy Lord puts it, “what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic”.
Science uses the term “polar amplification” as a kind of shorthand for the tendency of temperature change to increase with latitude.
“As the climate and environment of the north changes,” writes Nancy Lord, “so will the climate and ocean systems that regulate the entire world.”
And the first part of that process is already in place.
“In the north, we live with disappearing ice, melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, drying wetlands, dying trees and changing landscapes, unusual animal sightings and strange weather events.
“Our universities and other institutions support research and publish information they hope will be useful at all levels, including that of policy making.
“Governments respond – slowly, hampered by bureaucracy and the political strength of certain industries and sceptics.”
Seven years later, the Obama administration’s environmental agenda is about to be holed below the waterline by the incoming government.
Pruitt, a friend of the oil industry and devoted reader from the Trump hymn-sheet, said: “I intend to run this agency in a way that fosters responsible protection for the environment and freedom for American businesses.”
It has apparently escaped his notice that these two ambitions are pretty well mutually exclusive.
Nancy Lord quotes John Holdren, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an energy and climate expert at Harvard and science adviser to President Obama: “We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be.
“The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.”
The EPA is at the heart of the Obama environmental philosophy. President-elect Trump and Scott Pruitt are about to reduce it to titbits.
It remains to be seen how much damage can be achieved by unconstrained American business in the first term of the Trump administration, how much adaptation and suffering will flow from the almost total absence of mitigation. The consequences of a hobbled EPA will flow around the world.
All along the north coast of Alaska, not only is the sea ice melting, the land is breaking up, whole chunks of it falling into the sea, often taking houses and parts of villages with it.
Tribal elders were worried about how small their offshore island was becoming. Burial grounds were washing into the sea as well as houses and that impacted on their culture and history as well.
The sea ice melting is well documented and the consequences for polar bears have become symbolic of the process. On a visit to that same north Alaskan shore, John Muir could observe that the polar bears moved “as if the country had belonged to them always”. Not any more they don’t.
Nature is restless. It is trying to tell us something. We must listen. But the most powerful nation on earth just turned a deaf ear.