Former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt might be smiling these days after his own EPA cleared him following a complaint filed by one environmental group.
Pruitt gets the green light in an investigation of whether he violated the Agency’s science integrity policy for his comments on climate change.
It’s reported a panel of senior agency staffers at the EPA’s Scientific Integrity Committee investigated complaints of environmentalists that Pruitt’s climate comments had violated agency policy. But the panel cleared Pruitt and word of the determination came in a letter sent to attorneys at the Sierra Club.
The Washington Free Beacon reported about the letter in which the senior staffers found Pruitt had simply voiced his opinion and the agency encouraged the sharing of such opinions about science.
“This expression of opinion, which was not made in a decisional context, is fully within the protections of EPA’s Scientific Integrity Policy,” wrote Thomas Sinks, director of EPA’s Office of the Science Advisory.
His letter and the investigation came after the Sierra Club complained in March that Pruitt had violated an agency policy that politics cannot interfere when EPA employees communicate science to the public.
The complaint was filed after Pruitt made comments in a TV interview.
“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there is tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet—-We need to continue the debate and continue the review and analysis.”