Senior Interior official denied there was an ozone hole and compared undocumented immigrants to cancer

Adrew Kaczynski

The acting director of the federal agency responsible for managing one in every 10 acres of land in the United States has repeatedly denied the existence of climate change and falsely claimed in a 1990s speech there was no credible evidence of a hole in the ozone layer. William Perry Pendley was appointed by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt as the acting director of the Department of Interior's Bureau of Land Management in July 2019. Prior to his appointment, Pendley was a conservative activist, commentator, lawyer and served as the longtime president of the conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation. Pendley's appointment has already drawn scrutiny from Democrats and environmental groups for his views on public lands. In recent years, he has said that "environmental extremists ... don't believe in human beings" and that "The Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold." "As someone in the public arena for nearly four decades, I've given countless statements and written scores of articles on a wide variety of topics. Cherrypicking a few of them out of context is neither useful nor connected to my current position. I'm focused now on implementing the policy priorities of the Trump administration and Secretary Bernhardt within the authorities and mission given this agency by Congress. My personal views are irrelevant in this context."In a lecture to the Heritage Foundation in 1992, a copy of which is available online, Pendley compared the environmental movement to communism and denied the existence of the hole in the ozone layer -- which had been scientifically well established by then. "'Environmentalism' is indeed the last refuge of the left, the last safe haven for those who trust, not the people, but big government, those who seek to place the power in the hands of federal bureaucrats," Pendley said. "No wonder the environmental message has became the cause of choice for the elitists of Hollywood. It should not surprise us that they have embraced environmentalism with the same self-righteous fervor as they once embraced socialism and communism."...MORE