New Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has said the agency’s recent focus on climate change is a departure from its core mission of ensuring clean air and water, but an opinion article written by UO law professor Greg Dotson says that working against climate change has in fact been intrinsically tied to the EPA almost since its formation.

“Within a month of the creation of the EPA 46 years ago,” Dotson writes, “President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act of 1970 into law. In that law, Congress gave the new agency the mission to protect the ‘public health and welfare’ from air pollution and specified that ‘welfare’ includes effects on ‘climate.’”

Read the full article, “Now under attack, EPA’s work on climate change has been going on for decades,” in The Conversation, or find it in SFGate, AP and other news outlets.

Prior to joining the UO faculty, Dotson worked in Washington, D.C., focused on energy policymaking as U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman’s lead energy policy staffer and as vice president for energy policy at the Center for American Progress, where he remains a senior fellow.