The president was just cited in a criminal information involving Michael Cohen, his onetime personal lawyer, who now admits he lied under oath to Congress about plans to build a Trump Tower Moscow. That deserves a whole lot of attention, but don't let another world-historical disgrace pass you by.

13 agencies of the United States government partnered to produce a fourth National Climate Assessment this month, which—undoubtedly due to pressure from the top—was released on Black Friday in an attempt to bury it. But it did not stay buried. We all saw the conclusive finding: that humanity is presently overseeing its own destruction. This is what's happening. It is reality. The report echoes one from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last month, which found we have 12 years to save human civilization as we know it from the ravages of a changing climate—change that human activity is fomenting.

All this seems like it might be a concern to the Environmental Protection Agency, which is nominally charged with Protecting the Environment. Not this EPA. Here's one part of their response this week:

The Daily Caller. A government agency which helped put together the report is now attempting to undermine the same report, not with peer-reviewed scientific studies—the work of over 300 federal scientists which provide the backbone of the report—but with misinformation from Tucker Carlson's internet rag. (The founder made the news yesterday, but for his own reasons.) As reporter Rebecca Leber clarified, examining the worst-case scenario is standard practice—particularly because, as it stands, that's where we're probably headed.

The Caller, for those blissfully unaware, is a right-wing content farm that has a nasty habit of publishing the work of white supremacists, and which once interrupted its regularly scheduled propaganda about refugees to publish a gallery of “Syria-sly hot” ones the Caller’s editors said they’d welcome to the United States. It operates as The Daily Caller News Foundation for the tax benefits and the millions in donations it receives, though nearly all of its activity is through the for-profit website we’ve come to know and love. Tax experts told The Washington Post this arrangement violates the spirit of American nonprofit tax law.

The EPA's move would be embarrassing to the United States in any context, but we're talking about our response to an existential threat to civilization. The world's most powerful government cannot just seek out information that reinforces its warped view of reality when making decisions that will impact our actual reality. We can all eagerly await the Treasury Department switching the national currency to gold doubloons based on an exposé from Gateway Pundit.

Lukas Schulze Getty Images

Anyway, this all makes perfect sense when you remember that the Environmental Protection Agency is currently led by a former coal lobbyist. You might have thought things could improve after the departure of Scott Pruitt, the wannabe oligarch jetting around the world on private planes on the taxpayer dime and essentially serving as an arm of the industries he was tasked with regulating. You would be wrong: nothing gets better in this era. The Washington Post summed up some of Wheeler's achievements this month:

In the months since, Wheeler has continued to advance Trump’s agenda, proposing rules to loosen carbon limits on power plants and relax fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks. Those proposals, along with moves to change the way the agency calculates the health benefits of new air-pollution standards, have sparked sharp criticism from environmental and public health groups.

Maybe it's an improvement that Wheeler is not accepting sweetheart deals on prime Washington real estate from the spouses of energy-industry lobbyists. But does it really matter when he did work for one of the nation's largest coal outfits, various other fossil-fuel and mining companies, and Senator James Inhofe—the Brain Genius who threw a snowball on the floor of the Senate to disprove climate change?

Wheeler hinted that the Trump Administration may interfere in the next climate report (a not-unprecedented feat—just ask George W. Bush), and, in the process, seemed to lean on the same Daily Caller rationale. He said he “wouldn’t be surprised if the Obama administration told the report’s authors to take a look at the worst case scenario." The question seems to be whether the EPA chief is getting his pseudoscience from The Daily Caller, or whether his people fed that line to the Caller in the first place.

Is anyone even pretending this guy is concerned with protecting the environment? It's a question worth asking. Wheeler is currently the acting administrator of the EPA, but President Trump is reportedly set to nominate him to the position in a permanent capacity. That will require the approval of the Senate, whose members should be made aware that maybe an ex-lobbyist for one of the dirtiest fossil fuels there is—and who sows doubt about the scientific consensus that climate change is real and man-made—ain't the best guy for this job.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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