WASHINGTON Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt said he doesnt know what it means to deny the climate in a defiant rebuke of his critics one day after President Donald Trump announced the United States withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.

People have called me a climate skeptic or climate denier, Pruitt said at a White House press briefing on Friday. I would say that they were climate exaggerators.

To back up his point, Pruitt read from Bret Stephens controversial debut column in The New York Times, in which the former Wall Street Journal opinion writer rebuffed environmentalists and climate scientists who took issue with his earlier work defending the conspiracy theory that manmade global warming is either overblown or a hoax.

I dont know if you saw this article or not, Pruitt said. He then read aloud a passage in which Stephens understated the findings of a 2014 United Nations climate report , a mischaracterization that forced the Times to append the article with a correction.

What the American people deserve is a debate objective, transparent discussion about this issue, Pruitt said.