The president-elect’s EPA head may not believe in climate change

IT BRIEFLY looked as if Donald Trump, having denounced global warming as a hoax and sworn to dismantle Barack Obama’s environmental legacy, might have had a rethink. Now it seems he has not. As The Economist went to press, Mr Trump was reported to be about to nominate Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney-general, to head the Environmental Protection Agency. He would be hard-pushed to find anyone more hostile to that department or committed to tearing up the environmental rules that are perhaps the main achievement of Mr Obama’s second term.

To get around an obstructive Republican-controlled Congress, Mr Obama’s environmental policies were almost all promulgated as regulations, mostly by the EPA. His marquee rule, issued last year, is a scheme known as the Clean Power Plan (CPP), designed to force the states to curb greenhouse-gas emissions from coal- and gas-fired power stations. On the trail, Mr Trump denounced the Plan as a “war on coal” and promised to scrap it. Mr Pruitt, who has sued the EPA unsuccessfully several times, is leading a legal challenge to the CPP by 27 states and some firms in the federal appeals court in Washington, DC. The challengers say it infringes states’ rights.