President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

In 1971, he strengthened the Clean Air Act and extended the Clean Water Act, and he banned the pesticide DDT the next year.

Nixon was a shrewd politician. He understood that his Republican Party had to embrace the environmental movement that was popular at the time.

Americans still support environmentalism and are even more dependent on environmental services than we were 50 years ago. Just ask residents of Toledo, Ohio, or Flint, Michigan, about their drinking water.

But Republican politicians have rejected Nixon’s insight that they should be on the right side of Americans' relationship with the environment.

A prime example of this about-face recently came when the new EPA director, Scott Pruitt, appeared on CNBC.

Pruitt said: “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so, no, I would not agree that (human activity is) a primary contributor to the global warming that we see."

In environmental biology, measuring anything with precision is a challenge. We pursue our science because it has so many moving parts. We can’t measure precisely many influences that we nonetheless know shape the biological systems we study, especially those on which humans depend.

As for Pruitt’s claim of “tremendous disagreement,” he’s simply wrong if he’s referring to the conclusions of biologists and other climate scientists. We might disagree on the rate of future environmental responses to human-caused climate change, but not on its reality and growing effects.

Since the start of the industrial revolution, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen exponentially because of fossil fuels. According to the American Chemical Society, the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide had never exceeded 280 parts per million over the past 650,000 years.

When Pruitt spoke on CNBC, that level stood at 406 parts per million. No one disputes this.

Physicist Richard Feynman captured the essence of the interface between physics and biology when he wrote that “trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the sun, which was bound in to convert the air into tree.”

The air to which Feynman refers is carbon dioxide, and we have released it for the past two centuries like never before.

Pruitt cannot appeal the laws of nature to the courts or Congress.

Nor can he appeal Moore’s law that describes how new alternative energy technologies become more efficient at an exponential rate. He also can’t appeal Wright’s law that explains how the costs of solar panels or wind turbines decrease with the quantity made.

These laws describe how the rates of change in technology favor the ongoing transition to alternative sources of energy and away from fossil fuels. This represents a classic case of creative destruction.

Effective public policies can provide retraining and other programs for displaced workers. That, however, requires recognition of our economic and environmental problems and the opportunities they present. Obstinate, unsupported denial by policymakers can't help that happen.

Steve Rissing is a biology professor at Ohio State University.

steverissing@hotmail.com