Air Pollution Control District Hears from Climate Change Denier

In a meeting that left everyone a bit confused, the Santa Barbara County Air Pollution Control District (APCD) Board of Directors heard a 20-minute speech Thursday from Bob Hinnrichs, a Santa Ynez Valley resident whose résumé impressed the board but made some members question the credibility — and purpose — of his presentation topic: climate change.

Hinnrichs, an engineer who helped design rocket engines for NASA and said he began studying climate change data in 2000 after he retired, was asked to give his presentation by the board’s outgoing chair, Solvang Mayor Jim Richardson. Ahead of the meeting, environmental groups, including the Community Environmental Council, expressed concern both with Hinnrichs’s speech — which cast aspersions on the scientific community’s consensus that climate change is not only happening but happening because of humans — and that a climate scientist was not also asked to speak.

It further worried environmental groups that the APCD board — a group composed of the five county supervisors plus elected representatives from each of the county’s eight incorporated cities and is in charge of looking out for the county’s air quality — was hearing from a climate change denier in the first place.