Scott Pruitt is perhaps an unconventional choice, shall we say, to head Donald Trump's EPA, considering how often he sued the agency during his tenure as Oklahoma's attorney general. But the fact that his agenda for addressing climate change might differ from that held by progressives doesn't make him unfit to lead the agency or anything like that. After all, reasonable people can disagree about the best policy responses to a given problem. What's important is that by working from the same set of basic facts, we can work together to arrive at an optimal—wait, WHAT DID THAT MAN JUST SAY?

If you're sitting there fervently wishing that your ears deceive you:

ANCHOR: Do you believe that it's been proven that [carbon dioxide] is the primary control knob for climate? Do you believe that?

PRUITT: 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 it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don't know that yet. We need to continue the review and analysis.

Sure, except for the fact that after dedicating decades of exhaustive research to this issue, the scientific community long ago concluded that carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuels are absolutely behind the alarming, distressing, holy-shit-you-guys-can-we-go-to-Mars-yet spikes in global temperatures over the last half-century or so. There is no empirical support for the position that there is "disagreement about the degree of impact." For God's sake, as a withering Washington Post headline pointed out, Pruitt's statements are easily refuted by information available on the web site of the agency he runs.