hiltzik, Michael lat
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/08/23/harvard-study-confirms-exxonknew-and-misled-public-about-climate-threat-decades#
quite good on lamar smith exxon
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3X JOB WHAMMY, DOGE CUTS, SHUTDN, TECH CUTS AI 11 25
AN 11 25
'Really hurting': US job cuts surge to decades-high level amid Trump recession fears
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Business Columnist Follow
Oct. 24, 2022
Fox Business talking head Larry Kudlow was over the moon on Sept. 23.
“The new U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss has laid out a terrific supply-side economic growth plan, which looks a lot like the basic thrust of Kevin McCarthy’s ‘Commitment to America’ plan,” he told viewers of his daily program that day.
What got Kudlow vibrating was Truss’ release of a budget plan that included cutting corporate taxes and slashing the top tax rate on the wealthiest Britons to 40% from 45%.
It’s just very exciting that we finally got Thatcher back in Britain under the name of Liz Truss.
— Economist Arthur Laffer, shortly before Truss was ousted as Prime Minister
Kudlow, a former economic advisor to former President Trump, was correct that the Truss plan closely resembled Republican economic orthodoxy, which begins and ends with tax cuts for the rich.
What prompted him to mention House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield), was a bit of a mystery, however, since the published version of McCarthy’s program is devoid of the details needed to make the comparison.
Get the latest from Michael Hiltzik
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No matter, no matter. The point is that far from being “terrific,” the Truss economic plan was a disaster from the start. The United Kingdom bond market plummeted, sending officials at the Bank of England scurrying to try to rectify the damage.
Britain’s entire political establishment, from right to left, was aghast at Truss’ proposal to pare the country’s tax revenues by about $3.4 billion a year without offering any clue to how she would make up the deficit. The idea that the largest tax cut since 1972 would inspire a wave of entrepreneur-driven growth was widely derided.
Truss and her then-Chancellor (or treasury chief) Kwasi Kwarteng reversed course on the tax cut plan on Oct. 3, nine days after they proposed it. Truss fired Kwarteng 11 days after that. And on Oct. 20, a mere 44 days after taking office, Truss herself was forced to resign, marking the shortest tenure of a prime minister in British history.
If there’s a lesson in all this, Kudlow hasn’t voiced it. Whether he has commented at all on the fall of Liz Truss isn’t clear — no clip of him doing so turns up in a search of the Fox Business channel website. (Fox Business did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Voices
Hiltzik: A billionaires tax is a necessity. Even the White House knows it
March 28, 2022
But the Fox Business archives are chockablock with praise for Truss by other right-wing economic pundits, all aired in the first days of her premiership.
Here’s economist Art Laffer on Kudlow’s show on Sept. 28: “Now you’re going to watch Britain perform — outperform — the rest of the world year-in, year-out going forward,” Laffer exulted. “It’s just very exciting that we finally got Thatcher back in Britain under the name of Liz Truss.”
On Kudlow’s Sept. 26 show, Stephen Moore, senior economist at the right-wing think tank FreedomWorks and another former member of the Trump economic brain trust, anointed Truss as a “hero” and a “superstar.” Moore said, “It’s hard to find anything not to like about what she has done so far.”
All this cocksure commentary was accompanied by smirking sideswipes at what Kudlow called “business lefties” who were sounding the alarm about Truss at the outset.
We’ve reported before on the unerring talent of Laffer and Moore for being wrong about economic policy. The burst of praise for Truss and the rapidity with which her program collapsed is something new, however.
To paraphrase the late Joan Didion, they were offering analysis in which “measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.” The great press critic A.J. Liebling might have described it as “the futility of flapdoodle.”
Didion was taking a swipe at Bob Woodward’s vacuous books, Liebling at the lengthy period of uninformed speculation about the health of Joseph Stalin while he lay on his deathbed in 1953.
The wrong calls on the Truss program reflected a knee-jerk impulse of supply-siders to react to anything even remotely resembling the policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan with sedulous adoration.
Voices
Hiltzik: GOP promises to gut your Social Security, Medicare if it takes power
Oct. 19, 2022
This is a habit that only the most rock-ribbed conservatives in Britain itself continued to display, until “a new generation” of Conservative Party members of parliament, including Truss and Kwarteng, “called for a return to the free-market Thatcherite principles of low tax and supply-side reforms,” observed the Financial Times, which no one would mistake for a liberal newspaper.
Their thesis, as it was under Thatcher and Reagan, was that “tax cuts would pay for themselves if they enabled the economy to grow.”
The truth is that the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions did not allow the British and U.S. economies to grow in a way that benefited everyone. Their policies benefited only the rich. Moreover, today is not the 1980s and Truss is not Thatcher, whose nearly 12 years in office made her the longest-serving prime minister since 1885.
Among British economic observers, there were widespread doubts that the Truss tax cuts would have any measurable effect on growth, especially given the self-imposed head winds facing the British economy. Comparing the impact of Thatcher’s tax cuts to Truss’ was sheer folly.
“Under Thatcher, the top rate was slashed from 80 percent to 40 percent,” recalled Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times. “It is debatable whether even that improved performance significantly. This mouse of a change surely cannot do so.... For economic performance, these changes are totemic, not real. For income distribution, however, they will be perfectly real, not totemic.”
Added Paul Johnson, head of the London-based Institute for Fiscal Studies, “It is a lack of productivity growth that has led to the stalling of earnings and living standards.... To a large extent, that lack of growth has been a choice. We have chosen not to invest in education, liberalise the planning system or stay in the European single market. The combined cost of this is huge.”
Voices
Hiltzik: Proof the IRS targets the poor for tax audits while leaving millionaires alone
March 14, 2022
Truss and Kwarteng surely knew that their policy would be ineffective and ruinously expensive. Days before announcing their plan, they fired Tom Scholar, the top civil servant at the Treasury, presumably because they knew he would speak out against the tax cuts. They refused to allow the Office for Budget Responsibility, an independent government fiscal watchdog akin to our Congressional Budget Office, to examine the plan.
As a result of these maneuvers and its basic structure, the Truss plan almost produced an immediate political pushback. The reduction of the top tax rate would directly affect only about 600,000 Britons with annual incomes over about $170,000 — almost exactly the top 1%.
As Johnson calculated, the very richest households, the 0.1% with incomes over about $680,000, would get a tax cut of about $22,500 each. Everyone else would see their basic tax rates cut only to 19% from 20%.
Meanwhile, most Britons would face cuts in government services as the government struggled to cover its increased deficit.
There are lessons in all this for the U.S., particularly for Republican policymakers. One is that clinging to Reagan-style economic policymaking won’t help create growth. It didn’t do so in the past and won’t do so now. Another is that continuing to feed fat cats with tax cuts while impoverishing the rest of America has limited appeal, and eventually the public will get wise.
A third is that serious political leaders admit their mistakes. Truss did so, telling the BBC, “We went too far and too fast.” (Not that her confession was enough to save her job.)
Kudlow, Laffer and Moore were spectacularly wrong about Truss and her policies. If they were honest analysts, they’d admit it. Supply-side economics has been a failure for most Americans. They and their GOP followers should stop clinging to the wreckage.
AN 11 25
It’s not just President Donald Trump’s claims about Thanksgiving prices at Walmart that are under scrutiny. According to a new analysis from the*Los Angeles Times*, “faulty arithmetic” plagues the administrations claims about everything from inflation to mortgages to weight loss.
"On inflation, healthcare, mortgages and much more, the Trump administration offers bogus math," according to the Times.
In a new column from Tuesday, business columnist Michael Hiltzik cited numerous examples of “suspect” math and figures claimed by the Trump administration “deliberately aimed at portraying some condition as better than the real numbers show.” The first example was Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz’s recent claim at a White House event this month that cuts to prescription costs for weight loss drugs would lead to an estimated 135 billion collective pounds lost in the U.S., a figure that would require every single person in the country to lose over 340 pounds.
The faulty math doesn’t stop there, and some of it hits much closer to home amid the current concerns around affordability. Trump recently touted the introduction of 50-year mortgages as a solution to the difficulty Americans have with buying homes. While such a policy would lower monthly payments compared to 30-year plans, many have pointed out the it would also drastically increase the amount of interest paid over the life of the mortgage.
Using a $400,000 home as an example, Hiltzik calculated that a 50-year plan would cost buyers $650,000 in total interest, up from $461,000 on a 30-year option. For all that, buyers would only save a little less than $300 on their monthly payments.
Back on the subject of prescriptions, Hiltzik also highlighted Trump’s tendency to exaggerate the amount that he’s allegedly cut their costs to impossible degrees. In August, the president claimed that he had helped cut drug prices by “by 1,200, 1,300 and 1,400, 1,500 percent,” even though cutting prices by any percentage over 100 percent would result in the company having to pay consumers to use their product.
All this wonky math comes amid surging concerns about affordability for everyday Americans. It’s an issue credited with helping get Trump reelected in 2024, but which also led to huge wins for Democrats in the 2025 elections.
In attempting to address the issue this month, Trump tried to claim that costs were dropping during his presidency, citing only a 25 percent drop in the cost of Walmart’s Thanksgiving basket. While the selection of items is cheaper this year compared to 2024, many have been quick to point out that this is because it contains 15 products, down from 22 last year, many of which were also swapped for Walmart-brand alternatives.
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AN 11 25 LAT
Los Angeles Times Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist Michael Hiltzik writes that President Donald Trump has reversed the trend of President Joe Biden's booming economy and it's only getting worse.
Tuesday night's election boon for The Democrats, Hiltzik writes, only proves his point.
"The lesson delivered by the results is that Americans sense that the economy is reeling," he writes. "Most economic indicators are flashing yellow or even red."
Polls also point to Trump's abysmal economy, he notes, adding, "the indicators of economic pain are all around us. Every one of the leading opinion polls taken since Oct. 1 has shown Donald Trump’s approval rating on the economy to be deeply underwater, with the average calculated by RealClearPolling at negative 13.4 points."
Inflation, he writes, is "unmistakably on the rise again," as the consumer price index rose to 3.0 percent in September from a low of 2.3 percent in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
An increase in food prices — up from 2.1 percent in May to 3.1 percent — "has potent political implications, since food is an expense experienced by consumers on almost a daily basis," Hiltzik says.
Job growth has also ebbed, he says, with monthly job creation "fading since Trump took office, with the figures turning negative in June, August and September," he writes.
Farm bankruptcies are rising, too. "Prices of such key crops as corn, wheat and soybeans have been falling as Trump’s trade war shrinks foreign demand for American produce," Hiltzik says.
Consumer spending is also down in "a serious slowdown from the 3.7 percent and 4.0 percent growth rates in the third and fourth quarter of last year, before Trump took office, Fitch Ratings calculated in September," he explains.
As the historic government shutdown continues, "headwinds threaten to keep building" against the economy, one which was thriving under Biden, he says.
"It’s proper to note that the economy Trump inherited from Biden was strong and getting stronger," Hilzik says.
”In truth, Biden inherited an unemployment rate of 6.8 percent from Trump’s first term, and bequeathed second-term Trump a rate of 4.1 percent, the lowest rate since the election of George W. Bush. Annual job growth fell to negative 6 percent during Trump’s first term, and Biden brought it up to an average of 1.4 percent."
Under Biden, "real gross domestic product growth per capita had fallen to an annualized rate of negative 1.8 percent under Trump 1.0; Biden brought it up to positive 2.1 percent," he notes.
Trump 2.0 also inherited an excellent employment to population ratio for workers 24 to 54 years old.
"When Biden took over, it was 76.2 percent, rising to to 80.5 percent when he ceded the White House to Trump — the highest handover value since 2000, according to the labor-affiliated Economic Policy Institute."
Conservatives "viewed Trump’s impending second term with a certain level of trepidation," Hilzik notes, saying some expected “the actual policies [would have been] less severe than suggested by Trump’s blustery campaign platform.”
They were more severe, he writes.
"The strongest headwind against growth is the uncertainty that Trump has imposed on the economy," he says.
About 71 percent of CEOs polled by Yale said that Trump's tariffs"were harming their business, 62 percent said the tariffs weren’t prompting them to invest more domestically and 59 percent said they expected no results from domestic investment as a result of the tariffs."
Despite the White House insisting the economy is strong, Hilzik says "the signs are that the near future, at least, will be economically bleaker than the present," and that "the one unmistakable positive sign in the economic landscape —a stock market reaching record highs — may be less encouraging than it appears on the surface."
Those highs, he says, are gains concentrated "among seven stocks associated with spending on artificial intelligence, and whether they can be sustained is an open question."
Trump's economic future looks bleak, Hilzik says, with no economic development "visible on the horizon that might relieve consumers of the feeling that they’re paying more for necessities and that their very livelihoods are under threat."
Tuesday's election sounded the alarm bells, Hilzik writes, but he's not sure the White House is listening.
"What Tuesday’s election results show is that consumers are voters. A rational administration would take that as a warning siren and reconsider its policies. This administration? Who knows?" he says.
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Column: House Republicans give a crash course in how to concoct a conspiracy theory about COVID’s origin
covid origins
Virologists Robert Garry, left, and Kristian Andersen listen patiently at a Congressional hearing Tuesday as a gang of politicians tell them their scientific method was flawed. (House Oversight Committee)
BY MICHAEL HILTZIK
BUSINESS COLUMNIST
JULY 11, 2023
Opening Tuesday’s House subcommittee hearing on the origin of the COVID virus, the panel’schairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), promised an impartial inquiry.
“This is not an attack on science,” he said. “And it’s not an attack on an individual.”
He and his GOP colleagues proceeded over nearly three hours to accuse Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — one of the most respected such scientists in the world — of having masterminded the creation of the virus, with the connivance of Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health.
Misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories...have resulted in significant harassment and threats....Online there are so-called kill lists and I have found myself on those lists.
— Virological expert Kristian G. Andersen
The Republicans’ main “evidence,” such as it is, involves a seminal paper in the scientific study of the virus.
Published as a letter in the journal Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, under the title “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the paper weighed the two major theories of COVID’s origin: that it reached the human population from infected wildlife (known as zoonosis) or that it leaked from a government lab in Wuhan, China, the teeming metropolis where the first COVID outbreak occurred in late 2019.
Get the latest from Michael Hiltzik
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The paper’s authors noted that all the features of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, are observable in nature, coinciding with the zoonosis hypothesis. They added, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
For years, Republicans have asserted without a scintilla of evidence that Fauci and Collins manipulated the scientific consensus away from the lab-leak hypothesis.
Why have they seized on this theory? Its provenance may offer a clue: It flowered during the Trump administration among political appointees in the State Department, who saw it as a cudgel with which to beat the Chinese government, which they viewed as an economic threat to the U.S. It was also useful to undermine the authority of Fauci, whose skepticism about Trump’s COVID policies was manifest.
Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan as members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus make a visit to the institute in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on February 3, 2021. (Photo by Hector RETAMAL / AFP) (Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via
Column: U.S. government debunks COVID lab-leak conspiracy theory, enraging conspiracy theorists
June 26, 2023
Soon enough, it became Republican orthodoxy.
Lab leak proponents in government and Congress have smeared and vilified Fauci and Collins, among other scientists, in the service of purely partisan claims, ignoring the utter absence of any scientific evidence for a lab leak and the mounting evidence that it first reached humans through interactions with susceptible animals being sold illegally at a wildlife market in Wuhan.
The foils for this phase of the GOP effort to construct an evidence-free narrative of COVID’s origin were two of the five authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper, Robert F. Garry of Tulane and Kristian G. Andersen of Scripps Research in La Jolla.
Garry and Andersen sat patiently at the witness table in the committee room as the Republican members used cherry-picked quotes from their emails, misrepresented their research findings and ignored their painstaking explanations of how science is done in the real world. They listened stoically to committee members — some of whom have medical degrees but none any evident expertise in scientific research — harangue them about supposed flaws in their scientific methods.
“We do know something for certain,” Westrup said: “that the drafting, coordination and publication of ‘Proximal Origin’ and downplaying the lab leak was antithetical to science.”
One low note among many others during the hearing came fromRep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), who charged that “Dr. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins realized that they had been implicated in the creation of production or the creation of this virus and they were doing everything they could including both of you to come on board as tools or vehicles to undermine that theory.”
Truth to tell, however, the committee majority’s purpose was no secret from the start. The hearing was titled, after all, “Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover Up.”
It may be useful to examine the path the subcommittee’s GOP majority traveled to come to its assertions that the Proximal Origin paper was a sham.
[Dr. Scott Atlas speaks as President Donald Trump looks on
BUSINESS
Column: These ‘experts’ sold the U.S. on a disastrous COVID plan, and never paid a professional price
May 23, 2023]
As laid out in written testimony submitted to the subcommittee by Garry and Andersen, it started in January 2020, when almost nothing was known about the virus and not much about its genomic family.
The first examinations of its structure revealed several features unfamiliar to virologists. At first glance, they looked like nothing occurring in nature. Many thought this pointed to some sort of laboratory engineering.
When Andersen brought this concern to Fauci during a call on Jan. 31, Fauci urged him to write a scientific paper about the issue, and suggested that if confirmed, the matter should be referred to the FBI and the British intelligence service MI5.
Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease expert who is currently the chief scientist of the World Health Organization, convened a conference call on Feb. 1 among nine scientists, including Andersen and Garry. Fauci and Collins joined the call, but by all accounts merely listened in without contributing any opinions.
New data came to the scientific community in a torrent over the next few days and weeks. The unfamiliar features turned out to be more common in nature than many virologists had known, and the process by which they might become incorporated in SARS-CoV-2 progressively better understood.
By the end of February, when the authors of the Proximal Origin paper submitted an initial draft to Nature Medicine, they still did not have enough data to rule out either major theory but had become more certain that a laboratory role was plausible.
The subcommittee Republicans profess to be thunderstruck that a theory about COVID’s origin could be posed and discarded in the space of a few days, but Andersen and Garry tried to explain that they’re wrong.
The scientists started with no data, and incorporated new information into their viewpoints as it arrived. In any event, Andersen testified, the period between the conference and the publication of the paper wasn’t three days, as the Republicans kept insisting, but 45 days. Neither Fauci nor Collins played any role in guiding the authors’ conclusions, the witnesses said.
The published paper, moreover, made clear that the state of SARS-CoV-2 research was in its infancy. “More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another,” the authors wrote.
[Column: How Trump’s anti-science meddling erased 3 years of crucial COVID research
May 12, 2023]
But its general conclusion that a lab leak is implausible and the virus probably emerged by natural spillover from animals “has only been further supported by additional evidence and studies,” Andersen told the subcommittee. He and Garry said that if evidence emerged supporting a lab leak, they would examine it objectively and be guided by their findings. As of this moment, there is none.
Under prompting by subcommittee Democrats, the witnesses pointed to the long-term consequences of the Republican efforts to foment mistrust of science by mainstreaming conspiracies.
“Misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories around the paper have resulted in significant harassment and threats,” Andersen said. “Including everything from typical targets on social media to emails, to telephone calls to my office ... to death threats.... Online there are so-called kill lists and I have found myself on those lists together with my co-authors.”
The thrust of the subcommittee’s claims, he said, “is that the virus was created and that American scientists played a role in that and have been covering that up.... All of which, as the record clearly shows, is false.... The focus has been that there’s a need to blame someone.”
What has been going on here has been nothing less than a partisan witch hunt. Westrup made clear that the Republican narrative was predetermined: “We’re examining any conflicts of interest, biases or suppression of scientific discourse regarding the origins of COVID-19,” he said. The record shows, however, that what occurred was the scientific method in action.
If the subcommittee members are truly devoted to protect Americans from a future pandemic, they couldn’t find a worse way to reach that goal. “If I was a future scientist, looking at the attacks directed at us, for example, maybe I wouldn’t go into infectious disease research.... It’s incredibly damaging,” Anderson said.
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https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-attack-on-climate-change-scientists-20151204-column.html
2015
no lnx
By MICHAEL HILTZIK BUSINESS COLUMNIST
DEC. 4, 2015
While 150 world leaders continue their efforts outside Paris to hammer out an agreement to address climate change, the concerted attack on scientists by conservatives in Congress has continued apace. We’ve reported on this campaign in the past, but recent developments warrant an update.
Ground zero for the attack on climate change scientists is the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. It’s headed by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), one of the most assiduous climate change deniers on Capitol Hill. For several months, Smith has been throwing a conniption fit over a report published by several government climate experts in the June 26 issue of the widely respected journal Science.
There is no discernable...decrease in the rate of warming between the second half of the 20th century and the first 15 years of the 21st century.
KARL, ET. AL., DEMOLISH THE MYTH OF THE GLOBAL WARMING SLOWDOWN
The article prompted Smith to demand emails and other correspondence from the scientists involved in the study, purportedly to ferret out evidence that they manipulated their data to help the Obama Administration make the case for climate change policy. This prompted a coalition of seven leading organizations including the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, the publisher of Science, to push back strongly. In a letter dated Nov. 24, they upbraided Smith for implying scientific misconduct “despite a lack of public evidence” and all but labeled Smith an irresponsible ideologue:
“Scientists should not be subjected to fraud investigations or harassment simply for providing scientific results that some may see as politically controversial,” they wrote. “Science cannot thrive when policymakers--regardless of party affiliation--use policy disasgreements as a pretext to attack scientific conclusions.”
(Their reference to party affiliation was a swipe at Rep Raul Grijalva (D-Az.), who earlier this year demanded records from universities about seven scientists who had challenged the scientific consensus on climate change during Congressional hearings.)
The authors of the Science paper, headed by Thomas R. Karl of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, conclusively demolished one of the cherished claims of the denialists: that global warming had experienced a slowdown, or “hiatus,” from 1998 through 2012. The denialists used this idea to foment doubt about whether climate change was as consistent as scientists contend or even whether it is happening at all.
Karl and his colleagues reexamined the 1998-2012 period, applying more comprehensive data from more precise measurements. Their conclusion is that no hiatus exists. In their words:
“There is no discernible (statistical or otherwise) decrease in the rate of warming between the second half of the 20th century and the first 15 years of the 21st century.”
The latest data show that the 1998-2012 "pause" in global warming so beloved by climate change deniers didn't happen.
The latest data show that the 1998-2012 “pause” in global warming so beloved by climate change deniers didn’t happen.(NOAA)
Specifically, they found that the warming trend in 1950 to 1999 was 0.113 degrees Celsius per decade; in 2000 to 2014 it was 0.116 C per decade. They devoted special attention to data from 1998, the start of the supposed pause. That was an exceptionally warm year, even within the overall trend, thanks to a strong El Niño effect.
Even when they incorporated 1998 in their calculations, which would tend to show a lower warming trend for the period, they determined that warming had slowed down only to 0.106 C per decade — and they believe that’s conservative, because it incorporates only spotty data from the Arctic, where warming trends show up especially strongly.
The refinements of climate change data made by scientists show minimal differences from earlier measurements, but enough to debunk the notion of a slowdown in warming earlier this century.
The refinements of climate change data made by scientists show minimal differences from earlier measurements, but enough to debunk the notion of a slowdown in warming earlier this century.(NOAA)
To Lamar Smith, there could be only one explanation for this finding: scientific fraud.
Before we address how he has relied on this conclusion to harass NOAA and its scientific staff, let’s examine what makes him such a devoted challenger of climate science. It’s money.
We’ve noted before that climate change denialism always has been rooted in economics. The idea is that we can’t afford the disruptions to our fossil-fuel-driven society required to reduce atmospheric emissions. It shouldn’t be surprising that this notion is promoted by the oil and gas industry, which would suffer most from restrictions on fossil fuel emissions and reductions in consumption that would result from greater reliance on alternative energy sources.
Guess which is Lamar Smith’s biggest contributor among major industries? Yes, oil and gas. Throughout his congressional career, which dates back to 1987, oil and gas interests have funneled more than $630,000 into his campaign coffers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
As chairman of the House science committee, Smith has taken a hatchet to funding for earth science. Sometimes he and his committee have concealed their real intentions behind an ostensible concern over the “intellectual merit” of government science grants. But their real goal always has been to undermine the objective evaluation of grant applications via government agency peer reviews and substitute political judgments from Capitol Hill.
When that failed, in part due to resistance from the National Science Foundation, Smith resorted simply to cutting agencies’ earth science budgets. As we reported in May, committee Republicans were so sneaky about this that they failed to clue in their Democratic colleagues to what they were planning, then described the results deceitfully.
The latest Science article appears really to have put Smith in a dither. He has accused NOAA’s scientists of manipulating their data to serve what he calls President Obama’s “extreme climate change agenda.” In a Thanksgiving Day op-ed in the conservative Washington Times, he called NOAA’s work “not good science, [but] science fiction.”
Meanwhile, he has subpoenaed data and email correspondence from NOAA and its scientists, supposedly to prove that they tailored their findings to reach a predetermined conclusion. NOAA Administrator Kathryn D. Sullivan, a former astronaut, has turned away his more intrusive demands. As she observed in a Nov. 20 letter, NOAA provided the committee with its raw data and has provided committee staff with extensive briefings, including one by Karl; the offer of a second briefing by Karl was rejected by committee Republicans.
But Sullivan has refused to provide internal emails, despite Smith’s threat to her and her boss, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, of “compulsory” legal action. “I have not and will not allow anyone to manipulate the science or coerce the scientists who work for me,” she told Smith.
In recent weeks, Smith has expanded his accusations of a conspiracy to manipulate the data. He has claimed that an unidentified “whistle-blower” has confirmed that NOAA “rushed” the Science article into print to meet an administration deadline.[bates daily mail rose?]
As the science committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), told Smith in a Nov. 19 letter, however, the accusation is absurd. The Karl paper was submitted to Science in December 2014 and was based on data that originally had been published in 2013. Science says the review process for the paper was more intensive and took nearly two months longer than usual, in part because Science knew the results would provoke a political reaction.
There shouldn’t be any confusion about what Smith is up to. The scientific process is seldom clean or free from debate; that’s how it advances. Smith is trying to use this debate, as it unfolds in professional discussions among researchers, as evidence of deliberate manipulation. His goal isn’t to perfect the process, but sow doubt in its results -- entirely because they conflict with his own political interests.
This week, Smith backed off from his campaign--a tiny bit. He dropped his demand for scientists’ emails, but he still wants NOAA’s internal documents.
It’s perfectly clear whose skin is being protected by congressional climate change deniers: Just as the climate talks were getting underway in France this week, the House voted twice to block President Obama’s order for carbon emission limits on new and existing power plants. The argument, as always, is that we can’t afford to take such steps, when the truth is we can’t afford not to.
Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see our Facebook page, or email michael.hiltzik@latimes.com.
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Michael Hiltzik
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik writes a daily blog appearing on latimes.com. His business column appears in print every Sunday, and occasionally on other days. As a member of the Los Angeles Times staff, he has been a financial and technology writer and a foreign correspondent. He is the author of six books, including “Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age” and “The New Deal: A Modern History.” Hiltzik and colleague Chuck Philips shared the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for articles exposing corruption in the entertainment industry.
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