A U.S. district judge has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to release all documents which Administrator Scott Pruitt used as a basis to make his public statement that human behavior is not the “primary contributor” to climate change.
According to The Hill, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Beryl Howell, issued a ruling last Friday ordering the EPA to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request which was filed last year by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). PEER last year publicly requested from Pruitt to share which scientific research he used to make the statement on climate change.
“I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,” Pruitt said during an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last March. He also added on the show that “there’s a tremendous disagreement” on the impact of “human activity on the climate.”
Howell gave the EPA a deadline of 31 days to search for and find the documents, which should then be disclosed “promptly to the plaintiff.” The judge set a second deadline which requires from the EPA to “produce to the plaintiff, an explanation for any documents withheld in full or in part,” until June 12.
The EPA had argued that the FOIA request was time consuming and unneeded burden. The agency later issued a statement saying that Pruitt’s statement was a personal opinion and not an EPA policy.
“The public statements of an agency head about the causes of climate change, even if those statements do not reflect an ‘Agency decision,’ but merely ‘personal opinion,’ may nonetheless guide the agency’s regulatory efforts and, to the extent any agency records provide the basis for such public statements, those agency records are a perfectly proper focus of a FOIA request,” Howell wrote in her ruling.
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