As Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, was preparing to defend himself before Congress last week against charges of extravagant spending and other improprieties, he found time to travel to Cochran, Ga., to address the Georgia Forestry Association.

On the day after Earth Day, he announced yet another policy that will damage the environment he is supposed to be protecting. He told the group that the E.P.A. would now declare the burning of wood from managed forests for energy production by power plants and other stationary sources to be “carbon neutral.”

By that, he meant that, in the agency’s view, there would be no net release of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, because replanting the forest that had just been cut and burned could offset those emissions. This determination could make it easier for wood-burning power plants to win regulatory approval.

But Mr. Pruitt’s declaration contradicts some basic facts. Burning wood from forests to generate electricity is not carbon neutral when the direct emissions from combustion, plus emissions from soil and logging and processing the wood, are considered. Scientific studies have shown that it will worsen the consequences of climate change for decades or through the end of this century. This was not a decision based in science, but in politics, a giveaway to the forest products industry. As Mr. Pruitt has put it, it will provide the industry with “certainty” in the “agency’s permitting process.”