This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience while browsing it. By clicking 'Got It' you're accepting these terms.
Most recent
Trending
The best of EcoWatch, right in your inbox. Sign up for our email newsletter!
Energy Sec. Rick Perry said in an interview with CNBC Monday that he doesn't believe carbon dioxide is the "primary control knob" driving climate change.
"Most likely the primary control knob is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in," Perry explained to host Joe Kernen, elaborating that the "debate" over man-made climate change should be about "just how much" humans are influencing the climate "and what are the policy changes that we need to make to effect that."
Perry's comments come just over three months after EPA chief Scott Pruitt told Kernen that he doesn't believe carbon dioxide is a "primary contributor" to climate change. Pruitt and Perry's comments go against established science as well as scientific findings from multiple government agencies, and elicited widespread criticism and outrage from the scientific community. Since Pruitt's comments, the EPA webpage directly rebutting his stance on carbon dioxide has been removed.
As reported by the Houston Chronicle:
Perry's comments drew attacks from environmental groups, which called the former Texas governor a "climate denier."
"Rick Perry's outrageous comments are the latest indication that this administration will do everything in its power to put polluter profits ahead of science and public health," Sierra Club Climate Policy Director Liz Perera said.
For a deeper dive:
Washington Post, AP, CNBC, InsideClimate News, Market Watch, Gizmodo, Mashable, Houston Chronicle. Commentary: ThinkProgress, Joe Romm column)
For more climate change and clean energy news, you can follow Climate Nexus on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for daily Hot News.
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
By Carey Gillam
For the last five years, Chris Stevick has helped his wife Elaine in her battle against a vicious type of cancer that the couple believes was caused by Elaine's repeated use of Monsanto's Roundup herbicide around a California property the couple owned. Now the roles are reversed as Elaine must help Chris face his own cancer.
The last 50 years have been brutal for wildlife. Animals have lost their habitats and seen their numbers plummet. Now a new report from a British conservation group warns that habitat destruction and increased pesticide use has on a trajectory for an "insect apocalypse," which will have dire consequences for humans and all life on Earth, as The Guardian reported.
Sales of electric cars are surging and the world is generating more and more power from renewable sources, but it is not enough to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to stop the global climate crisis, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
By Jake Johnson
A Greenpeace report released Tuesday uses a hypothetical "Smart Supermarket" that has done away with environmentally damaging single-use plastics to outline a possible future in which the world's oceans and communities are free of bags, bottles, packaging and other harmful plastic pollutants.
Trending
By Irene Banos Ruiz
Pediatricians in New Delhi, India, say children's lungs are no longer pink, but black.
Our warming planet is already impacting the health of the world's children and will shape the future of an entire generation if we fail to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius (35.6°F), the 2019 Lancet Countdown Report on health and climate change shows.
The FBI is looking into how the state of Pennsylvania granted permits for a controversial natural gas pipeline as part of a corruption investigation, the AP reports.
Trending
Three cows who were washed off their North Carolina island by Hurricane Dorian have been found alive after swimming at least two miles, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
The fight between the Standing Rock Sioux and the owners of the Dakota Access Pipeline is back on, as the tribe opposes a pipeline expansion that it argues would increase the risk of an oil spill.