SCI SUPPRESS 3 bak

---

wuhan lab benghazi bs

https://www.alternet.org/kevin-mccarthy-anti-science-resistance/

---

OMFG CONTEXT

Trump dismantles critical ocean-floor observation network

The Trump administration is dismantling a $370 million ocean-floor observatory network installed a decade ago to collect critical climate data on coastal environments, marine ecosystems, and powerful global ocean currents.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced it will begin removing more than 900 deep-sea instruments this June. The decommissioning will pull monitoring hardware from the waters of Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, North Carolina, and a critical region between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) began full operations in 2016. The monitoring system was engineered to provide continuous, real-time climate data to global researchers for 25 years.

Jim Edson, a marine meteorologist who led the initiative, described the network as “the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems.”

The closure of this climate data network follows policy laid out by conservative strategist the Heritage Foundation. The shutdown was recommended in their Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” document – a 900-page document designed specifically to act as a blueprint for the Trump presidency.

In 2024, Project 2025’s authors explicitly targeted the network, claiming the OOI was “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and advising that “the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”

Since taking office, Trump’s administration has consistently targeted the network’s budget, and proposed 80% funding cuts in both 2025 and 2026. While Congress successfully pushed back on both occasions to restore the necessary money, the NSF moved ahead with decommissioning, despite managers previously attempting to save the network by limiting data collection to cut costs....

‘Project 2025’ Would Be Disastrous for Our Nation and Our Climate - Union of Concerned Scientists

The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” is a dangerous and detailed guide to undermining our democracy and a broadside attack on our health and well-being, not to mention our economic prosperity. Among other things, it takes specific aim at the federal government’s ability to address the climate crisis and instead doubles down on actions to worsen it. Anyone sobered by the relentless rise in global average temperatures and the spate of devastating and costly extreme weather and climate disasters we’ve been experiencing, anyone who thinks policies to benefit the public should be informed by robust, independent science, should take this threat very, very seriously.

Project 2025 has four pillars: a policy agenda, a Presidential Personnel Database, a Presidential Administration Academy, and a (yet to be released) playbook for the first 180 days of the next Administration. For the purposes of this blogpost, I will focus on the policy agenda.

So, what’s in this 920-page monstrosity of a document?

The first thing that strikes one as one reads the policy agenda document is that it is rooted in opposition to many hard-fought social gains, especially advances in civil rights, and instead panders to the interests of the rich and powerful. The document is littered with harmful mischaracterizations and attacks against the rights of Black, Brown and Indigenous people, women, LGBTQ+ people, people forced to migrate, and more. While claiming to uphold the interests of ordinary people, the document seeks to eviscerate protections crucial to guarding against money and power being the ultimate arbiters of policy decisions.

Another strong undercurrent is the attack on multilateral organizations and our nation’s interest in, and responsibility for, helping to solve global challenges through diplomacy and fair, joint agreements. Instead, an insular and militaristic approach emerges from the document—one that would take us back to a nasty, brutish world order, completely out of step with what this moment in time calls for. In a deeply interconnected world with complex global challenges—including the threat of autocratic governments and the dangerous proliferation of misinformation and disinformation—rising above short-sighted self-interest and working together with other nations is essential to our shared well-being.

Quite simply, the recommendations, which are listed agency-by-agency, are designed to undermine the institutions and governance structures our democracy relies upon to protect the public interest. If implemented, “Project 2025” would make addressing issues like climate change—which touches practically every aspect of our lives and is an urgent, collective global challenge—practically impossible.

Cliched phrases like “woke agenda” and “climate fanaticism” are used liberally throughout the document, demonstrating the unseriousness of the proposals and the intended targets of this destructive agenda.

Below are a few specific examples that highlight the harms, using direct quotes from the document (*Fair warning: these quotes contain highly misleading or downright false information!):

Attacks on the process of advancing climate science to inform policymaking

In a blatant effort to politicize climate science, Project 2025 states that ‘The President should also issue an executive order to reshape the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and related climate change research programs… The next President should critically analyze and, if required, refuse to accept any USGCRP assessment prepared under the Biden Administration. Downsize the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research…’And then it goes on to spread disinformation:‘OAR is, however, the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.’*

Here are the facts: The USGCRP is tasked by Congress (under the 1990 Global Change Research Act, passed under the Bush administration) to produce regular updates on the state of climate science via the National Climate Assessment (NCA), with the Fifth NCA being released last year. As my colleague Rachel Licker and former UCS-er Andrew Rosenberg point out in this blogpost, the NCA provides exactly the kind of information policymakers need, without being policy-prescriptive. The NCA is produced through the work of hundreds of scientists, relying on research done by thousands more. It is not a political document. Suggesting that a new President “critically analyze” the work of scientists or reject their work just because it was done under a different administration is a blatant attempt to politicize science and would leave us all worse off.

NOAA scientists are doing essential work to keep us safe, including generating the science we need to understand and prepare for the rapidly worsening impacts of climate change. Good governance and leadership require facing hard facts—like the reality of climate change—head-on and taking decisive action to address problems rather than pretending they don’t exist.

A polluting fossil-fueled energy agenda....

---

GGL 6 26

AI Overview

The quote originates from the ⁠Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership published by the Heritage Foundation. It specifically targets the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), labeling its Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research as the source of "climate alarmism" and calling for the bulk of its climate change research to be disbanded.

Environmental Data and Governance Initiative +3

Broader Impacts of the Directive

Ocean Observation: In line with these recommendations, hundreds of deep-sea sensors from the Ocean Observatories Initiative were dismantled, cutting off real-time data used to monitor the absorption of greenhouse gases.

Oceanographic Magazine +1

Weather Forecasting: Organizations including the ⁠National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado have faced aggressive downsizing and breakup efforts.

NBC News +1

National Climate Assessment: The administration dismissed researchers working on the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, which tracks local and regional impacts.

NRDC +1

Scientific and Legislative Pushback

Scientific Consensus: Leading scientific bodies maintain that the data gathered by these agencies is vital for public safety, storm forecasting, and the fundamental understanding of Earth's systems.

PBS +1

Legislative Action: While the administration has continually targeted the budgets of these climate and weather research networks, Congress has routinely pushed back to restore funding or mitigate sweeping closures.

The Maritime Executive +1

If you would like to explore this topic further, I can provide information on:

The specific funding battles between the administration and Congress
How the loss of ocean-floor sensors affects coastal regions
The economic impacts of reducing severe-weather forecasting budgets

---

GGL 6 26

[### Project 2025' Would Be Disastrous for Our Nation and Our ...

The Equation - Union of Concerned Scientists

https://blog.ucs.org › rachel-cleetus › project-2025-wou...](https://blog.ucs.org/rachel-cleetus/project-2025-would-be-disastrous-for-our-nation-and-our-climate/)

Jun 14, 2024 — The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.' Here are the facts: The USGCRP is tasked by Congress (under the 1990 ...Read more

[### Project 2025 — National Oceanic and Atmospheric ...

Environmental Data and Governance Initiative

https://envirodatagov.org › project-2025-national-ocea...](https://envirodatagov.org/project-2025-national-oceanic-and-atmospheric-administration-annotated/)

OAR is, however, the source of much of NOAA's climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded. OAR is a large network of ...Read more

The Environmental Historians Action Collaborative, an EDGI working group, annotated select chapters and sections of Project 2025 related to the environment,providing important context and fact-checking for the public. See the project summary and other Project 2025 annotations here.

The authors of this annotation are Scout Blum and Christopher Sellers.

VIEW ANNOTATIONS: Click on the text that is highlighted in yellow below; the relevant annotations will appear on the right side of the browser window.

NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION (CHAPTER 21 EXCERPT)

Break Up NOAA. The single biggest Department of Commerce agency outside of decennial census years is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and other components. NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the department’s $12 billion annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department’s personnel in non-decadal Census years (2021 figures).

NOAA consists of six main offices:

The National Weather Service (NWS);
The National Ocean Service (NOS);
The Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR);
The National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS);
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS); and
The Office of Marine and Aviation Operations and NOAA Corps.

Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity. This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.

NOAA today boasts that it is a provider of environmental information services, a provider of environmental stewardship services, and a leader in applied scientific research. Each of these functions could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality.

Focus the NWS on Commercial Operations. Each day, Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by local radio stations and colleges that are produced not by the NWS, but by private companies such as AccuWeather. Studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable than those provided by the NWS.

The NWS provides data the private companies use and should focus on its data-gathering services. Because private companies rely on these data, the NWS should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.

NOAA does not currently utilize commercial partnerships as some other agencies do. Commercialization of weather technologies should be prioritized to ensure that taxpayer dollars are invested in the most cost-efficient technologies for high quality research and weather data. Investing in different sizes of commercial partners will increase competition while ensuring that the government solutions provided by each contract is personalized to the needs of NOAA’s weather programs.

The NWS should be a candidate to become a Performance-Based Organization to better enforce organizational focus on core functions such as efficient delivery of accurate, timely, and unbiased data to the public and to the private sector.

Review the Work of the National Hurricane Center and the National Environmental Satellite Service. The National Hurricane Center and National Environmental Satellite Service data centers provide important public safety and business functions as well as academic functions, and are used by forecasting agencies and scientists internationally. Data continuity is an important issue in climate science. Data collected by the department should be presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.

Transfer NOS Survey Functions to the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Geological Survey. Survey operations have historically accounted for almost half the NOS budget. These functions could be transferred to the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Geological Survey to increase efficiency. NOS’ expansion of the National Marine Sanctuaries System should also be reviewed, as discussed below.

Streamline NMFS. Overlap exists between the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Overly simplified, the NMFS handles saltwater species while the Fish and Wildlife Service focuses on fresh water. The goals of these two agencies should be streamlined.

Harmonize the Magnuson–Stevens Act with the National Marine Sanctuaries Act. Under the auspices of NOS, marine sanctuaries (including no-fishing zones) are being established country-wide, often conflicting with the goals of the Magnuson–Stevens Act fisheries management authorities of NOAA Fisheries, regional fishery management councils, and relevant states.

Withdraw the 30×30 Executive Order and Associated America the Beautiful Initiative. The 30×30 Executive Order and the American the Beautiful Initiative are being used to advance an agenda to close vast areas of the ocean to commercial activities, including fishing, while rapidly advancing offshore wind energy development to the detriment of fisheries and other existing ocean-based industries.

Modify Regulations Implementing the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. These acts are currently being abused at a cost to fisheries and Native American subsistence activities around the U.S.

Allow a NEPA Exemption for Fisheries Actions. All the requirements for robust analysis of the biological, economic, and social impacts of proposed regulatory action in fisheries are contained with the Magnuson–Stevens Act, the guiding Act for fisheries. NEPA overlays these requirements with onerous, redundant, and time-consuming process requirements, which routinely cause unnecessary delays in the promulgation of timely fisheries management actions. The Department of Commerce and the Council on Environmental Quality should collaborate to reduce this redundancy.

Downsize the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. OAR provides theoretical science, as opposed to the applied science of the National Hurricane Center. OAR is, however, the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded. OAR is a large network of research laboratories, an undersea research center, and several joint research institutes with universities. These operations should be reviewed with an aim of consolidation and reduction of bloat.

Break Up the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations and Reassign Its Assets to Other Agencies During This Process. The Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, which provides the ships and planes used by NOAA agencies, should be broken up and its assets reassigned to the General Services Administration or to other agencies.

Use Small Innovation Prizes and Competitions to Encourage High-Quality Research. Lowering the barriers of entry for startups and small businesses will also provide greater innovation without excessive increases in spending. Reaching beyond traditional partnerships for innovative engagement tools that encourage entrepreneurial innovation will allow NOAA’s research programs to adapt more quickly to the world’s changing needs. Multiple competitions should take place in cities to attract a variety of innovators and investors to propel innovation forward in a way that benefits the needs of NOAA.

Ensure Appointees Agree with Administration Aims. Scientific agencies like NOAA are vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims if political appointees are not wholly in sync with Administration policy. Particular attention must be paid to appointments in this area.

Elevate the Office of Space Commerce. The Office of Space Commerce is the executive branch advocate on behalf of the U.S. commercial space industry. This office should be the vehicle for a new Administration to set a robust and unified whole-of-government commercial space policy that cements U.S. leadership in one of the most crucial industries of the future. The Office’s current mission has been lost owing to its position within NESDIS, which sees no role for itself in advancing the industry and the space economy, including ensuring global competitiveness. OSC is, by law, the Department of Commerce’s lead on space policy and must therefore link directly to all the bureaus and other organizations within the department. The Office needs to be returned to OS, within which it existed for the first two decades of its existence. From OS, the Office could serve as a coordinating entity for the whole-of-government commercial space policy desperately needed to secure America’s place as the global leader in commercial space operations.

There presently exists no unified U.S. government policy on commercial space operations, with the Federal Communications Commission largely responsible for establishing space policy by default through its regulation of radio spectrum licenses. Now that routine space operations are commercially viable, it is critical that a new Administration establish reasonable government policies that ensure the U.S. will continue to be the flag of choice for commercial space activities. The President should, by executive order, direct the Office of Space Commerce, working with the National Space Council, to establish a whole-of-government policy for licensing and oversight of commercial space operations.

---

[### White House Plan Calls for NOAA Research Programs ...

The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com › noaa-research-budget-cuts](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/climate/noaa-research-budget-cuts.html)

Apr 13, 2025 — ... the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.” Advertisement. SKIP ADVERTISEMENT. “It would take the U.S. back to the ...Read more

NO LNX

White House Plan Calls for NOAA Research Programs to Be Dismantled

A Trump administration budget proposal would essentially eliminate one of the world’s foremost Earth sciences research operations.

By Austyn Gaffney

Published April 11, 2025

Updated April 13, 2025

See more of our coverage in your search results.

Trump administration officials are recommending the elimination of the scientific research division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times and several people with knowledge of the situation.

The proposal from the Office of Management and Budget would abolish the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research office at NOAA, one of the world’s premiere Earth sciences research centers.

A budget allocation of just over $170 million, down from about $485 million in 2024, would hobble science as varied as early warning systems for natural disasters, science education for students in kindergarten through high school, and the study of the Arctic, where temperatures have increased nearly four times as fast as the rest of the planet over the past four decades.

“At this funding level, O.A.R. is eliminated as a line office,” the proposal states.

Programs that retained funding, including research into tornado warnings and ocean acidification, would be relocated to the National Weather Service and National Ocean Service offices.

The outline for the 2026 budget passback, which would need to be approved by Congress, suggests “significant reductions to education, grants, research, and climate-related programs within NOAA” and comes after the dismantling of other agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the United States Agency for International Development, and the removal of mentions of climate change from federal websites.

Under the proposal, the total budget for the Commerce Department would be nearly $7.7 billion, a reduction of more than $2.5 billion from 2025 levels. According to the document, the budget would refocus on activities more in line with the Trump administration’s agenda, including enforcing trade laws and collecting scientific observations like ocean and weather data to support forecasting.

“This Administration’s hostility toward research and rejection of climate science will have the consequence of eviscerating the weather forecasting capabilities that this plan claims to preserve,” Representative Zoe Lofgren, the senior Democrat on the House Sciences Committee, said in an emailed statement.

NOAA, which takes up more than half of the Commerce Department budget, would receive just over $4.4 billion, a reduction of $1.6 billion from 2025.

“It’s not surprising, but it’s very disturbing,” said Rick Spinrad, who led NOAA under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

That includes reducing the budget for the National Marine Fisheries Service by one-third. The office would be split from NOAA and moved to the Interior Department’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Grants that fund species recovery and habitat conservation would be eliminated.

Funding for National Ocean Service, a branch of NOAA, would be cut in half. Programs like the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, an office within the ocean service that studies corals, pollution, and the effect of climate change and sea-level rise on coastal communities, would not be funded.

The National Centers for Environmental Information, which archives climate data, would lose a quarter of its funding.

The proposal would also alter NOAA’s satellite and space programs.

It would gut the Office of Space Commerce and relocate the Space Weather Prediction Center to the Department of Homeland Security. A program called the Traffic Coordination System for Space that was set to take over the monitoring of satellite traffic from the Department of Defense, a kind of traffic police for outer space, would also lose funding. The passback suggests having such work done by the private sector.

The satellite program that provides data for weather forecasting and modeling would also be downsized. The longstanding relationship that helps NOAA acquire satellites through NASA would also be terminated.

Dr. Spinrad said the likelihood that this budget, as proposed by the White House, would pass Congress was low. “I don’t think it will withstand congressional scrutiny.”

The passback is part of balancing the federal budget, according to the document, which includes “eliminating the federal government’s support of woke ideology.”

Project 2025, a document that has been used as a blueprint for an overhaul of the federal government under the Trump administration, included a goal to break up NOAA and downsize its research arm.

“It begs the question, is the Trump Administration intentionally breaking our weather forecasting capabilities as an excuse to carry out the dangerous Project 2025 proposal to privatize the Weather Service?” Ms. Lofgren said in a statement.

Project 2025, which was published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy research organization, called NOAA Research “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and said “the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”

“It would take the U.S. back to the 1950s in technical and scientific skill,” said Craig McLean, chief scientist at NOAA under both the first Trump presidency and President Biden, of the proposed budget.

Alexandra McCandless, an OMB spokesperson, said “No final funding decisions have been made.”

The agency has until noon on April 15 to appeal the proposal. And it has until April 24 to submit plans for many of the overhauls the passback suggests, even before the proposal has been addressed by Congress.

On Thursday, probationary government employees who had been fired in February, and then reinstated by a judge, received an email from the Department of Commerce firing them again after the decision was reversed by a higher court. A so-called reduction in force plan could slash an additional 20 percent of its work force in the coming weeks.

Austyn Gaffney is a reporter covering climate and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.

A version of this article appears in print on April 13, 2025, Section A, Page 25 of the New York edition with the headline: Plan Calls for End to NOAA’s Research. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Share full article

---

[### White House outlines plan to gut NOAA, smother climate ...

E&E News by POLITICO

https://www.eenews.net › Articles](https://www.eenews.net/articles/white-house-outlines-plan-to-gut-noaa-smother-climate-research/)

Apr 11, 2025 — ... the “preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.” The OMB document outlines a plan to break up NOAA's space weather ...Read more

---

LI --> 10 25 ~ pielke

“Petrostates, polluters, politicians”, or “plutocrats, pros, propagandists” and sometimes also “the press”; there is no lack of aliterations when it comes to Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez new book “Science Under Siege: How To Fight The Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World”.

The dynamic duo of academic heavy hitters are no strangers to sparring with many of the forces of anti-science aggression they outline in their book.

:{:{Michael Mann, a destinguished climate scientist most famous for introducing the now iconic Hockey-stick graph into public climate awareness learned first what it meant to become a target in the information age. Ever since hackers stole and misrepresented scientists’ — including Mann´s — emails to cast doubt on climate research right before the 2009 global climate summit in Copenhagen to sabotage international collaboration, Michael Mann has found himself at the center of the public storm over truth in science.}:

Though multiple independent investigations cleared him and his colleagues of any wrongdoing, the “Climategate” smear campaign cast him as an early villain in what we know understand to be the desired manipulative mirrorworld created by coordinated disinformation networks that Science Under Siege describes. Rather than retreating into the safety of academia, Mann turned outward, becoming one of the most visible defenders of climate science and of scientists’ right to speak without fear.}:

Peter Hotez, a renowned vaccine scientists, has fought a parallel battle on another front: public health. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the vaccine scientist and pediatrician found himself vilified by anti-vaccine activists — most notably, now HHS secretary RFK Jr cast him as the “OG villain” for writing his deeply personal book about how vaccines did not cause the autism of his daughter, but that autism is a complex genetic disease.

Like Mann, Hotez experienced firsthand the personal cost of promoting evidence-based medicine and confronting misinformation — harassment, threats, and the relentless distortion of his work, which just escalated beyond recognition during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet Hotez, too, refused to withdraw. His advocacy for vaccines and global health equity, and his insistence that science must serve humanity rather than ideology, echo throughout this book.

*“the most profound impression lingering is the uncharacteristically sharp and plain-speaking tone and tenor the two bring into its pages”

Despite the depths of consideration for the human condition - to preserve human health and a livable planet - and appeals to the better angles of humanity shining throughout the book, the most profound impression lingering is the uncharacteristically sharp and plain-speaking tone and tenor the two bring into its pages.

With scathing commentary and righteous fury, the authors rejected to beat around the bush or the all-too-common academic retreat to euphemisms, rather opting for refreshing — even scorched-earth — clarity of where they stand and who their opponents are. One can not help escape the conclusion that the book is drawing a line in the sand with every chapter; a rebuke to the silent and accomodating institutions that rather surrender academic independence than put up a fight.

There is no appeasement when the fight is existential, the authors remind us; often with some heavy leaning into fictional metaphors, such as The Lord of the Rings:

“The battle for Middle Earth wasn´t won by appeasing the dark lord and his forces. It was won by defeating them”

From fossil fuel magnates and billionaire tech pros to the US congress and a captured SCOTUS, or autocratic petrostates and their agents, to home-grown propagandists and media makers, the authors do not shy away from implicating key players and their malevolent activities that pose a threat to our health, our planet, and more and more, our democracy and freedom.

What malevolant activities? The anti-science ecosystem has long grown beyond shadowy think tanks and closed-door fundraisers to lobby politicians; state-actor sabotage, plutocrat campaigns and dark-money sponsorship has since extended to prop up the “pros” and “propagandists” on social media (or “anti-social media and the bots of war”, one subtitle reads); empowering and amplifying their use of emotional myths and conspiracy theories to dominate online discourse, sway bystanders, and with it indirectly how the “press” covers these events.

“For propagandists, a key feature of the antiscience playbook is its reliance on conspiracy theories and conspiracy-filled rhetoric”

Hotez and Mann do a fantastic job in exposing pay-for-play connections, dirty relationships and how they led to inauthentic outcomes in supposedly democratic real-world events. Much of the book is concerned with the important task of correcting the record on some of the misleading highlights of the last years; which for many people not in the weeds of it, might be as surprising as devastating to learn. From COVID-19 lab leak conspiracies to climate doomism fostered by the mainstream press, from New York Times to Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal and Fox News and most mainstream outlets inbetween, the seasoned authors hold a special grudge to previous bastions of evidence-based reporting and good-willed truth-seeking institutions that seem to be no more, or at least, strongly diminished when it comes to uphold science. Worse, some like the New York Times actively have become powerful allies of aggressors, justifying the rightwing assault on science and scientists:

With both COVID and climate, the mainstream media have helped keep alive a pernicious but misguided narrative that - to the extent there is distrust of the science by some members of the public - it is the scientists´ fault.

The book describes the “collapse” of the fourth estate and the rise of “client journalism” that has been felt society-wide, and unfortunately, scientists have lost a critical ally in the press when expertise gets discarded or subverted in favor of media content serving vested interests. Even worse, our recent shift into a new dark age of myth, manipulation and magical thinking has made scientists canaries in the coalmine of democracy, and when reading this book, one is left with the sinking feeling that the carbon monoxide has already filled the chamber.

“Our list of allies is growing thin”

The authors report, another reference to The Lord of the Rings. And yet, rather than concede, the authors end the book with broad strokes outlining how the war can still be won, offering “battle plan” and urgency for all of us who want to defend science, democracy and an evidence-based worldview.

The “antiscience superstorm packs a one-two-three punch, and each of the threats must be addressed in concert with the other”, they caution, but for all of them, they advise a 3-pronged strategy for scientists. Communicating constructively because the “best defense is indeed a good offense”; proactively addressing the “triple threat” of invisible scientists, missing science journalism and performative press neutrality head-on. Protecting scientists is another key ingredient, institutionally and legally, that become targets of anti-science assault. And lastly, destroying the disinformation machine; which of course is a challenge that extends far beyond science. On that part, “punishing the pros, propagandists and the press”, “pressuring the plutocrats” and “mending the media”, with the force of the law, new regulations, and ultimately, our pocketbooks and democratic organizing might not surprise the avid reader and democratic citizen who likely has asked themselves the same question at least since the 2024 US election.

“We have to be the change we want to see in the world“

the authors credibly advise, given their own personal trajectories and accomplishments, before ending with another The Lord of the Rings rallying cry that it is worth fighting for what is good in the world, for us, our children and future generations.

Even in dark times, my suspicion is that the furious and clear-eyed moral argument advanced by “Science under siege” will age as well as the science it defends — not because the good guys always win, but because truth and integrity never go out of style.

---

Thanks for reading Protagonist Science! This book review is public so feel free to share it.

---

Science Under Siege: A Conversation With Dr. Peter Hotez & Dr. Michael Mann

Find tickets & information for Science Under Siege: A Conversation With Dr. Peter Hotez & Dr. Michael Mann. happening at Rice Universitys Baker Institute for Public Policy, Houston, TX on Tue, 09 Sep, 2025 at 12:00 pm. Register or Buy Tickets, Price information.

---

3 24 r reich scopes trial

---

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

Commentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize winner.

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.

LATEST FROM MICHAEL HILTZIK

Column: The false centrism of political group No Labels

Column: By the standards of their peers, Hollywood CEOs aren’t all that overpaid. That’s the problem

Column: RFK Jr. gets around to blaming the Jews

---

poster but also academic suppr?

CLIFFSNOTES SHORTFORM EXCERPT:

What was Roger Revelle’s impact on the climate change debate? How did doubt-mongering threaten to discredit him?

In their book Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway take on individuals or groups who seek to discredit science that they perceive to be a threat to their agenda. One of the targets of a doubt-mongering campaign was Al Gore’s mentor—Roger Revelle.

Read more to learn about Roger Revelle and the merchants of doubt.

:{:{}:

Roger Revelle Enters the Climate Change Debate

In 1965, Roger Revelle summarized the possible impacts of the warming caused by CO2. There were still a lot of unknowns, so he focused on the sea-level rise because it seemed the most certain. He estimated that by 2000, there could be notable changes in climate because there would be 25% more atmospheric CO2. As the planet warmed, sea ice would increase in size due to thermal expansion (volume increases when material warms up), and this would push water farther inland.

Lyndon Johnson read the report but had bigger problems (such as the Vietnam War) and didn’t do anything about it. The next president, Nixon, did consider atmospheric changes, but he was focused on the greenhouse gas effects of water (from supersonic transports (SSTs)), not CO2.

Discrediting Roger Revelle

Roger Revelle was an important voice in the climate change discussion. He was also Al Gore’s mentor, so if the merchants of doubt (MODs) could make it look like Revelle had changed his opinion on global warming, it would not only sow doubt, it would hurt Gore’s 1992 presidential campaign, which focused on the environment.

Fred Singer attended one of Revelle’s talks and approached him about writing an article together that would be called “What To Do about Greenhouse Warming: Look Before You Leap.” Revelle agreed but shortly after, he had a heart attack. An operation saved him, but there were further complications and his health deteriorated. He and Singer continued working on the article (though Revelle appeared to have lost enthusiasm), and Revelle may not have been able to look closely or check changes due to his health.

While still working with Revelle, Singer wrote his own article with almost the same title (“What To Do about Greenhouse Warming”). This article reused the Marshall Institute’s work and focused on uncertainty.

In February 1991, Singer and Revelle met to discuss their paper. They argued about how sensitive the climate was to CO2. The current draft of the paper claimed that the warming would be “well below the normal year to year variation” and less than 1 degree Celsius. Revelle corrected the numbers in the margin. Singer ultimately cut the numbers, so the next draft read that a “modest average warming” and still contained the phrase about the warming being below the normal variation. The historical record doesn’t show whether Revelle ultimately agreed to this wording, but everyone who knew him expected he hadn’t. Revelle was well aware of natural variability because he was a geologist (natural variability is determined from paleoclimate data).

The article appeared in Cosmos (a non-scientific journal with low circulation) and because Revelle was listed as the second author, it looked like he had agreed that the warming wasn’t significant or outside of normal. One of Revelle’s colleagues stated that Revelle was embarrassed by the paper (Revelle died shortly after it came out).

While few scientists read Cosmos, the article made its way into public consciousness. In 1992, Al Gore’s critic Gregg Easterbrook attacked him for failing to mention that Revelle had ultimately concluded that there was too much uncertainty to act. The quote Easterbrook used to support this was from Singer’s solo1990 paper with a similar title to the co-authored one. Other critics repeated the attacks.

Setting the Record Straight

Several people tried to set the record straight about Roger Revelle.

1. Revelle’s daughter published an op-ed.

2. Two of Revelle’s colleagues wrote to Cosmos. They wrote that Singer had written the paper, not Revelle, and that Singer had probably only included his name as a thank-you for advising and reviewing. Cosmoswouldn’t publish their letter, so they sent it to Oceanography(a scientific journal mainly read by scientists).

3. Justin Lancaster, a colleague and close friend of Revelle:

Wrote to the journal that had published Easterbrook’s attack. The journal refused to publish Lancaster’s letter.
Tried to get Singer to remove Revelle’s name from the paper when it was republished. Ultimately, the republication had a footnote to another of Revelle’s papers that presented his thoughts on climate change.
Complained about the Cosmosarticle at Revelle’s memorial symposium and continued to go public about Singer pressuring Revelle. Singer filed a libel lawsuit. Lancaster tried to fight it, but he didn’t have the money and had to settle.

Revelle probably didn’t actually change his mind about global warming. In November 1990, he wrote an unpublished introduction to a meeting (Oreskes and Conway found it in his papers), which states that he thought that climate was serious and we should act.

...

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/michael-knowles:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{/daily-wires-michael-knowles-science-mostly-fake

---

singer BS 15 pp

https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/0817939326_283.pdf

---

no cut paste, looks good

https://yalereview.org/article/weaponizing-reputation

---

How Much Of A Lying Asshole Was The Now-Dead Denier Fred Singer? This Much Of A Lying Asshole

By this time, climate scientists were also in Singer’s sights. In early 1991, just a few years before inventing the whaling controversy, Singer had shown up at the office of oceanographer Roger Revelle, a pioneering and widely respected climate researcher with the University of California, San Diego. Singer wanted to discuss a draft paper that he’d written, and which Revelle had received months earlier and ignored. Singer argued in the paper that climate change wasn’t real, even though by 1991 this position was already contrary to the growing body of scientific evidence that it was, which included Revelle’s own climate research and findings.

At the time, Revelle was a frail 82-year-old recovering from recent triple-bypass heart surgery, and just months from the grave. But that didn’t deter Singer, who over the course of many hours talked Revelle into making some minor modifications to Singer’s draft. Singer then published the paper with Revelle listed as a co-author, not in a peer-reviewed and reputable science journal, but in an obscure magazine called Cosmos, put out by an equally obscure Washington-based social organization called the Cosmos Club. But because the article had Revelle’s name on it, it helped to keep the public doubting climate science, instead of debating what the nation needed to do to stop climate change.

Further, as Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway recount in their book Merchants of Doubt, the article served as a weapon the following year against one of Revelle's most famous protégés, then-Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore.In a 1992 article in The New Republic, climate contrarian Gregg Easterbrook cited the Cosmos article, observing that Gore hadn't mentioned in his recent climate change book, Earth in the Balance, that “before his death last year, Revelle published a paper that concludes: ‘The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.'" Singer then managed to quash an effort by another scientist to clear Revelle’s name. A Harvard post-doc named Justin Lancaster challenged Singer’s unethical behavior and the dishonest article. Singer responded in typical Singer fashion: He forced Lancaster to shut up by filing a libel lawsuit against him, and coerced Lancaster into signing a retraction.

The full details of this especially enraging chapter in Singer’s career only came to light in 2006, when Lancaster broke his silence [same yr as easterbrook 180?]

and published documents online that fully backed up his denunciations of Singer. Calling the retraction he’d been forced to sign “the worst decision I ever made in my life,” Lancaster stated that he’d been confident that he would have won the lawsuit, but backed down because of its effect on his wife. “She was terrorized by this lawsuit,” he wrote, “scared we could lose our house and all our assets.” More than any other, this series of actions in the early 1990s exemplified the Singer method: bullying and falsely discrediting the work of a dying scientist, and then protecting himself from the consequences by terrorizing the family of another scientist who called out his wicked behavior.

EDIT

https://www.drillednews.com/post/fred-singer-obituary-climate-denier

---

alex b acsh twt thugswarm?

alex sci suppress

https://news.mongabay.com/2019/11/science-prevails-as-suspension-of-award-for-herbicide-research-is-reversed/

---

gmail 2 23

:{:{documents show how Monsanto, Bayer led attacks on scientists, journalists - USRTK.org}::{}:

USRTK.org

“You can't be afraid of the absolute hand-to-hand combat, metaphorically.” — Marc Morano, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.

---

aha doh on covid, part of larger rejection of expertise; in emergency pandemic only gov't can protect us, but seen as rights infringe/tyranny; maybe // heartlAND reverse engr

mma 922

not sure what to say beyond fox job 1 trash dems; tails you lose? if pandemic still, it is b/c dems failed to fix, or claim lockdn --> perm power tyranny

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): People on the left are freaking out because Biden claimed the pandemic is over, regarding covid. Pandemic's over. We still have a problem with covid, we're doing a lot of work on it, but the pandemic is over.

Don't viruses mutate, and aren't there some things called new variants? Can anyone say scientifically with any degree of certainty that new variants, more virulent variants aren't possible?

I'm not so sure I'm trusting doctor Joe on anything, or the NIH, or Doctor Fauci, or the CDC, which finally admitted, "We were wrong about those vaccine things we were telling you to take day in and day out."

---

===

https://www.desmog.com/2022/12/09/pesticide-industry-science-denial-monsanto-glyphosate-cancer/

As regulators in the United States and European Union prepare to review and potentially reauthorize the controversial weedkiller glyphosate, anew report reveals the stealth tactics and narrative spin deployed by the chemical’s manufacturer to discredit inconvenient science and protect profits.

The report, published by Friends of the Earth and nonprofit investigative organization U.S. Right to Know, uses the case study of Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) and its widely used glyphosate-based product Roundup to illustrate the pesticide industry’sdeceptive tactics and communications strategies — which mirror those of the tobacco and fossil fuel industries.

“The pesticide industry is not just following in the footsteps of Big Tobacco and Big Oil, they co-wrote the playbook,” Stacy Malkan, lead report author and co-founder of U.S. Right to Know, said.

The pesticide industry used this PR strategy, which involves tactics like distorting science and disseminating misleading messaging through third party allies, to convince regulators and the public that its products were safe and necessary, the report explains.

“This case study provides an important window into how one company worked with many partners across the pesticide and processed food industries, academia, PR firms, and various front groups to sell the world on a toxic pesticide,”said author and advocate Anna Lappé, who contributed to the report. “These disinformation tactics are critical to understand because they have been used to push the entwined myths that we need pesticides to ‘feed the world’ and that they are totally safe.”

Despite mounting scientific evidence of their harms to human health and the environment, pesticides have proliferated, withglobal usage up by about 80 percent since 1990. The most widely used pesticide in the world is Roundup, which is alleged to have caused cancers. Litigation over this cancer link is ongoing, spurred by a 2015 finding from the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm classifying the chemical as a probable human carcinogen.

[twt]

the report, released December 5, brings together internal corporate documents revealed through this litigation, as well as documents obtained through public records requests filed by U.S. Right to Know, to illuminate the extensive campaign by one of the world’s leading pesticide manufacturers — Monsanto, acquired by Bayer in 2018 — to disseminate disinformation and manipulate science regarding the health and environmental impacts of glyphosate.

These strategies have been “used by the pesticide industry for decades now and [their] impact on public health is enormous,” Nathan Donley, PhD, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told DeSmog via email.

Litigation concerning the health hazards of various pesticides, including glyphosate, stems from companies hijacking the regulatory process, he explained. “This can happen multiple ways, from pressuring decision makers at the EPA to producing enormous amounts of biased data that guide the actions of regulators. It’s been very effective unfortunately.”

For example, as noted in the report, under pressure from Monsanto in 1986, EPA overturned its own decision made the previous year to classify glyphosate as a possible human carcinogen. To this day, EPA maintains the position that glyphosate is not carcinogenic and does not pose human health risks if used according to its label. However, the agency is planning to conduct a new review of the chemical after a federal appeals courtstruck down EPA’s previous designation of glyphosate as benign.

The report found that over a five-year period, seven front groups with links to Monsanto spent $76 million “to push corporate disinformation, including attacks on scientists.” During that same period, six industry trade associations that appear in Monsanto PR papers spent $1.3 billion, including on lobbying and PR around glyphosate regulation.

It also argues that the pesticide industry’s current business model “would not be possible if pesticide products were subject to rigorous, independent research and if there were widespread public understanding of the harms and risks of many of these products.”

“It’s clear from this report and all the work that’s been done in this field that corporate influence in science-based decision-making is way too common,” said Genna Reed, director of policy analysis in the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and lead author of a2021 study exploring ways to protect scientific integrity from the corporate “disinformation playbook.”

“This isn’t just a wonky policy problem,” Reed added. “This is a massive institutional rot that needs to be fixed to protect public health.”

Fossil Fuel and Pesticide Industry Parallels

In addition to pressuring regulators, Monsanto deployed other strategies to discredit evidence of health and environmental harms of its glyphosate-based product. The report found that Monsanto undermined or even shaped the science, attacked public health experts, bought influence at academic institutions, and used third party messengers to pollute the public discourse. These are the same strategies — and in some instances involved the same actors — that the tobacco and fossil fuel industries used to generate doubt and to deceive the public about the harmful consequences of their products.

According to the report, Monsanto covertly contributed to the scientific literature examining the health risks of glyphosate, ghostwriting papers in toxicology journals, including an influential paper published in April 2000 that concluded that glyphosate-based Roundup “does not pose a health risk to humans.” Internal company emails reveal that Monsanto employees played critical roles in data collection, drafting, editing, and relationship-building with the paper’s authors. In the wake of the 2015 glyphosate classification from the World Health Organization’s cancer research agency, Monsanto ghostwrote scientific manuscripts published in a prestigious journal as an “independent review” on the science of glyphosate. The company also orchestrated a campaign to intimidate cancer researchers and enlist Republican lawmakers to try to defund the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm.

[twt]

monsanto’s influence extended to academia.The report details how the company funded academics and universities to promote educational messaging supportive of pesticides and genetically engineered organisms (GMOs) — seed traits designed to resist toxic chemicals. Emails obtained from records requests reveal that the University of Florida, for example, “had plans for ‘educating the masses’ about GMOs and pesticides with messaging that was ‘harmonious’ with Monsanto’s,” Malkan explained.

This co-opting of academia was part of a larger pro-pesticide PR strategy. As the report explains, PR firms that helped Monsanto defend glyphosate and promote GMOs have worked with other polluting industries, including tobacco and fossil fuels. For example,FTI Consulting,which has worked extensively with the oil and gas industry, has also worked closely with Monsanto/Bayer to discredit the science on glyphosate.

Furthermore, as the report details, one industry front group that worked to attack cancer scientists and dispute the evidence linking glyphosate to cancer was the Genetic Literacy Project. Its founder Jon Entine has worked in defense of chemicals, plastics, fracking, and oil companies, and the group’s funding sources “trace back to some of the largest, most consistent funders of climate science denial.” These include foundations like Donors Trust, Scaife Foundation, and Charles Koch Foundation. Other institutions that engaged in climate denial — including Competitive Enterprise Institute,Heartland Institute,Cato Institute, andCommittee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) — also attacked scientists who raised concerns over glyphosate, according to the report.

“This is not surprising since nearly all agricultural chemicals are derived from fossil fuels,” Malkan said, adding that both industries are continuing to mislead the public in portraying their business or products as essential to climate and sustainability solutions.

“Just like Big Oil, pesticide companies are using disinformation tactics to push false solutions for the climate crisis, and stalling action on real solutions,” Malkan added. ADeSmog investigation published in November 2020 described how pesticide companies are now marketing themselves as climate-friendly.

“Pesticide companies are desperately trying to, and in many instances are successfully greenwashing the poisons they make billions of dollars selling,” Lori Ann Burd, senior attorney and environmental health program director at Center for Biological Diversity, said via email. She added that many U.S. government officials have adopted the pesticides industry’s position that their products are necessary.

“USDA, EPA and many members of Congress have largely bought in to industry rhetoric that dangerous pesticides are essential tools for feeding Americans, ignoring the reality that many countries, including Brazil, China and nations within the E.U. continue to eat despite having banned dangerous pesticides that are still widely used in the U.S.,” she explained. UN human rights experts have also pushed back against the claim that pesticides are necessary to feed the world.

Bayer did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.

Countering the Disinformation Playbook

The report concludes with some recommendations and steps to take to counter the pesticide industry disinformation playbook. According to this advice, which is aligned with that of other experts in fighting disinformation, exposing the tactics and strategies and enforcing strong disclosure and accountability rules are important steps to mitigate undue industry influence.

“We need to continue to shine a light on these practices and actively work on policies that can serve as firewalls,” Reed of the Union of Concerned Scientists said.

Other recommendations include challenging corporate influence in academia and holding PR firms accountable. Just as there are now campaigns to do just that for fossil fuels, the report calls for similar action and pressure for combatting pesticide industry influence and enablers.

“While the propaganda tactics of Big Oil and Big Tobacco are well-documented and their grave impacts well understood, the pesticide industry’s similar role in widespread disinformation, and its extensive scope and impact, has not been as well documented or publicly understood. We hope this report, and the chorus of recent reporting, will change that,” the report states.

===

CSLDF

During the Trump administration, we saw a disturbing increase in the number of scientists targeted with political interference through censorship, rules to restrict science, as well as budget cuts for research and environmental programs. While Biden has promised that “[s]cience will always be at the forefront of [his] administration,” recent data from the Silencing Science Tracker, a database maintained by CSLDF and Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, reveal a dispiriting trend of continued anti-science actions at both the state and federal levels through his first year in office – with a majority of the attacks aimed at climate and COVID-19 researchers.

Read more about these findings in our blog here.

---

3 22

Dr. Shukla’s story is an example of how scientists are threatened or silenced for being outspoken on climate misinformation.

Professor Jagadish Shukla is a prominent climate scientist and a distinguished professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University. He has also been the recipient of targeting, including through hate mail, invasive open records requests, smear campaigns by blogs and news outlets, and a lengthy investigation launched by then-Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX).

Read Dr. Shukla’s story here. Check out the rest of our Scientists’ Stories here.

---

ICS

December 2015

Lord Christopher Monckton reported that he would be part of a “expert team” setting out to “prosecute the climate fraudsters.”[8]

Monckton’s “expert team” appeared to consist largely of those who attended a “counter-conference” hosted by the Heartland Institute that took place shortly before the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP21).

The so-called Paris Climate Challenge, taking place from December 1 – 3, 2015, was reported as an associated project of the Heartland Institute, newly-formed Independent Committee on Geoethics, and Collectif des Climato Réalistes. The conference’s website offered the following summary: [9]

“We call on governments, NGOs and universities to stop pursuing policy and dogma based ‘evidence’ gathering.

“That they stop scaremongering.
“That they dissolve the IPCC and the UNFCCC.
“That governments focus instead on encouraging means of ensuring that under-developed and developing nationshave full access to the cheapest reliable energy (particularly electricity), regardless of whether fossil fuels are used, so as to improve their access to clean water, low pollution cooking facilities and good medical services.
“That once respected academic institutions and scientific publications put their own houses in order and once again allow the free exchange of scientific ideas and results without prejudice.
“That those involved in alleged cases of scientific fraud, which have resulted in huge financial costs, causing greater poverty and many deaths among the poorest, be brought before the relevant Court of Law.” [9]

According to Monckton, Heartland’s conference “came to a unanimous conclusion that a fraud investigation team should be established to gather evidence of outright criminality on the part of the surprisingly small scientific clique that has until now got away with foisting its anti-scientific nonsense on just about all nations.”[8]

Monkcton said the group would “assemble the evidence into a prosecution fileand then to submit the file to the professors for their consideration.”

---

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/noam-chomsky-on-science/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/science-myths/

no lnx good graph

Every disaster movie seems to open with a scientist being ignored. “Don’t Look Up” is no exception – in fact, people ignoring or flat out denying scientific evidence is the point.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play astronomers who make a literally Earth-shattering discovery and then try to persuade the president to take action to save humanity. It’s a satire that explores how individuals, scientists, the media and politicians respond when faced with scientific facts that are uncomfortable, threatening and inconvenient.

The movie is an allegory for climate change, showing how those with the power to do something about global warming willfully avoid taking action and how those with vested interests can mislead the public. But it also reflects science denial more broadly, including what the world has been seeing with COVID-19.

The most important difference between the film’s premise and humanity’s actual looming crisis is that while individuals may be powerless against a comet, everyone can act decisively to stop fueling climate change.

Knowing the myths that feed science denial can help.

As research psychologists and the authors of “Science Denial: Why It Happens and What to Do About It”, we recognize these aspects of science denial all too well.

Myth #1: We can’t act unless the science is 100% certain

The first question President Orlean (Meryl Streep) asks the scientists after they explain that a comet is on a collision course with Earth is, “So how certain is this?” Learning that the certitude is 99.78%, the president’s chief of staff (Jonah Hill) responds with relief: “Oh great, so it’s not 100%!” Government scientist Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) replies, “Scientists never like to say 100%.”

This reluctance to claim 100% certainty is a strength of science. Even when the evidence points clearly in one direction, scientists keep exploring to learn more. At the same time, they recognize overwhelming evidence and act on it. The evidence is overwhelming that Earth’s climate is changing in dangerous ways because of human activities, particularly the burning of fossil fuels, and it has been overwhelming for many years.

When politicians take a “let’s wait and see” attitude toward climate change (or “sit tight and assess,” as the movie puts it), suggesting they need more evidence before taking any action, it’s often a form of science denial.

Myth #2: Disturbing realities as described by scientists are too difficult for the public to accept

The title phrase, “Don’t Look Up,” portrays this psychological assumption and how some politicians conveniently use it as an excuse for inaction while promoting their own interests.

Anxiety is a growing and understandable psychological response to climate change. Research shows there are strategies people can use to effectively cope with climate anxiety, such as becoming better informed and talking about the problem with others. This gives individuals a way to manage anxiety while at the same time taking actions to lower the risks.

:{:{}:

A 2021 international study found that 80% of individuals are indeed willing to make changes in how they live and work to help reduce the effects of climate change.

:{:{}:

Myth #3: Technology will save us, so we don’t have to act

Often, individuals want to believe in an outcome they prefer, rather than confront reality known to be true, a response that psychologists call motivated reasoning.

For example, belief that a single technological solution, such as carbon capture, will fix the climate crisis without the need for change in policies, lifestyles and practices may be more grounded in hope than reality. Technology can help reduce our impact on the climate; however, research suggests advances are unlikely to come quickly enough.

Hoping for such solutions diverts attention from significant changes needed in the way we work, live and play, and is a form of science denial.

Myth #4: The economy is more important than anything, including impending crises predicted by science

Taking action to slow climate change will be expensive, but not acting has extraordinary costs – in lives lost as well as property.

Consider the costs of recent Western wildfires. Boulder County, Colorado, lost nearly 1,000 homes to a fire on Dec. 30, 2021, after a hot, dry summer and fall and almost no rain or snow. A study of California’s fires in 2018 – another hot, dry year – when the town of Paradise burned, estimated the damage, including health costs and economic disruption, at about $148.5 billion.

When people say we can’t take action because action is expensive, they are in denial of the cost of inaction.

Myth #5: Our actions should always align with our social identity group

In a politically polarized society, individuals may feel pressured to make decisions based on what their social group believes. In the case of beliefs about science, this can have dire consequences – as the world has seen with the COVID-19 pandemic. In the U.S. alone, more than 825,000 people with COVID-19 have died while powerful identity groups actively discourage people from getting vaccines or that could protect them.

Viruses are oblivious to political affiliation, and so is the changing climate. Rising global temperatures, worsening storms and sea level rise will affect everyone in harm’s way, regardless of the person’s social group.

How to combat science denial – and climate change

A comet headed for Earth might leave little for individuals to do, but this is not the case with climate change. People can change their own practices to reduce carbon emissions and, importantly, pressure leaders in government, business and industry to take actions, such as reducing fossil fuel use, converting to cleaner energy and changing agricultural practices to reduce emissions.

In our book, we discuss steps that individuals, educators, science communicators and policymakers can take to confront the science denial that prevents moving forward on this looming issue. For example:

Individuals can check their own motivations and beliefs about climate change and remain open minded to scientific evidence.

Educators can teach students how to source scientific information and evaluate it.

Science communicators can explain not just what scientists know but how they know it.

Policymakers can make decisions based on scientific evidence.

As scholars who work to help people make sound decisions about complex problems, we encourage people to consume news and science information from sources outside their own identity group. Break out of your social bubble and listen to and talk with others. Look up.The Conversation

Gale Sinatra, Professor of Education and Psychology, University of Southern California and Barbara K. Hofer, Professor of Psychology Emerita, Middlebury

---

10/21

how 'anti-science' Republicans are 'torturing the truth' with their Fauci hysteria: journalist

Alex Henderson

---

an hunter kos 10 21

Here's an entire New York Times story about a genuinely bad, malevolent person. It's not framed that way, of course, because Neutrality, but the Times tossed a reporter in the direction of Great Falls, Montana, to give us another report from the Trumpian underbelly of America and once again, it's a paranoid, conspiracy-obsessed, strategically dishonest sh-tshow that explains a lot about why the True Americans nesting comfortably in Trumpism have steadily been gravitating toward fascism as a matter of natural course.

The Times story is a long explainer about Rae Grulkowski and her quest to keep local civic-minded Montana residents from getting a token amount of federal funds by designating a chunk of the state a "national heritage area." It's a largely meaningless designation that provides minor federal funds to help preserve local points of interest and boost history-minded tourism.A bunch of Montana folks got a bee in their bonnets about it, part of the general True American suspicion that the federal government is evil and just out to trick people (thanks again, Ronald Jackass Reagan), and it became the local version of critical race theory, and hydrocorto-whateveritall, and ingesting horse dewormer because some friend of a friend of a cousin of an Online Influencer said horse paste cures gunshot wounds or whatever the latest version of that theory is.

But here's the thing: Rae Grulkowski—hero of the paranoid Montana class and partial impetus for Montana's reporter-attacking Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte's theatrical ban on the federal government from creating any such heritage designation in the state—attacked the civic-minded proposal by lying her ass off, constantly, inventing or perpetuating a web of fabricated claims that the tourism designation would, in the Times'telling, "forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells, or use fertilizers." It would ban septic systems! It would raise taxes!

And it was all utter bullshit. As the Times noted and gave evidence of, Grulkowski was lying about all of it.

It was a local campaign dependent on crafting outright propaganda against something she didn't personally like, disseminating it to people who didn't give a damn whether it was true or it was false, rallying a crowd of like-minded liars to attack the opposition with furious disinformation, and turning it into the nextFarm Bureau and Republican paranoia campaign in which allies compared the National Heritage Area program to Hitler and nobody involved can stammer their way through any plausible defense of the nonsensical claims they're making.

So then, what are we to make of this? Well, Grulkowski and her allies are flat-out liars, that's for sure. They have disseminated provably false information as a political strategy, and local Republican (Trump) voters snorted it all up like ideological cocaine.Team Lying Bullshit has done its level best to make the lives of those evil civic do-gooders miserable.

It's only in the very last quarter of the story that we get to the kicker that explains all the rest of it: Rae Grulkowski is apparently a "QAnon" devotee, according to The New York Times. She claims to believe in conspiracies about "child trafficking that leads to everything," and believes that Donald Trump won the November election even though he most demonstrably got flattened, and thinks Black Lives Matter supporters were the actual culprits behind the Jan. 6 insurrection, and there we go. She appears to be someone who read a lot of hoaxes on Facebook and turned them into a personality, just one of a new "movement" of Americans radicalized by a single company's eagerness to monetize the nation's most deep-seated paranoias.

Well of course someone who believes an assortment of the most malevolent, antisemitic, racist, pro-fascist conspiracy theories being passed around the internet is going to be similarly loose when inventing anti-government reasons to oppose whatever her neighbors are doing. But—and this is the crux of the Times story and the lesson to be taken from all of this—it worked.

It worked, because of course it did. The propaganda effort was overwhelmingly successful, enough to gain the support of conservative state lawmakers who did not give a damn whether the claims were true. Nobody involved appears to have given a damn whether they were promoting lies. The invention of propaganda was the core strategy: taking a minor civic issue and turning it, through lies, into a new conservative touchstone.

The lying part is the most consequential "value" at play here. "Heritage" designations have nothing to do with any of it. Nobody gives a flying damn whether or not local historic landmarks get new plaques or whether they don't. The important part is for local Republicanism to stick it to anyone who tries to do an inch of good by inventing whatever lies are necessary to do it.

In battling a largely meaningless recognition of the area's rich history, Grulkowski was following the playbook of Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump himself. It is the fascist playbook: If the facts are against your beliefs, ignore those facts and lie. Create new "facts" that will galvanize the movement despite their fraudulence; rather than seeking the consent of the governed by explaining why the movement's ideas will solve current problems, manufacture a new reality in which the "problems" are whatever hoaxes the movement needs to produce in order to justify taking whatever actions the movement wants to take.

We are in a world of danger when flagrant political lies can so swiftly result in success rather than condemnation. That is the endgame to all of this. If a government can be established that governs the nation through fraud—and it is happening, in each Republican-held state using provably false election hoaxes to justify new voting restrictions, and in the establishment of Facebook as the nation's new news source, one in which false information is treated by the company as marketable entertainment rather than a poison, and in the pre-disgraced thug of a Montana governor adopting ananti-government propaganda campaign to attack a federal government program instituted by Ronald Reagan himself as a supposed secret attack on True American rights—then elections are already irrelevant.

Central to battling all of it, however, is to recognize that Rae Grulkowski disseminated lies in order to attack an action she didn't like; she did so while wallowing in an absolute sea of other lies. She succeeded in mustering a populist revolt against better people and better ideas by lying, outright, about the thing she was fighting against.Now, says the Times, she has further political ambitions, given that her equally toxic and cowardly neighbors proved to be so furiously supportive of her campaign of lies.

This is a person who should be scorned. This is a person who should be shunned, boycotted, considered a crackpot, and treated with universal contempt. This is a person who is attacking democracy itself, by attacking it at its root premise: Whatever civic challenges are presented to the voters, they must be based on truth. Democracy is meaningless, is absolutely meaningless, if each election is a competition not of competing solutions to civic problems but of the inventiveness of each campaign in creating new hoaxes and convincing the governed to believe them.

Instead, we get national debates over whether some of the most infamously dishonest people in government have been treated too roughly if private restaurant owners do not want to serve them. The pressure is not to shun liars as anti-American, anti-democracy propagandists seeking to manipulate public opinion through rampant dishonesty, but whether we are allowed to direct any scorn their way at all.

How did it come to this?

The short answer might be Bernard Goldberg. Goldberg was one of those who made a name for himself insisting that American journalism was intrinsically "biased" against conservatives, a claim which is now taken as a central movement tenet because it fits pleasingly with every other movement theme of displacement and victimhood. The evidence for this "bias," even decades into the claims, was almost always an assertion that because conservative ideologues were not given exposure equal to actual issue experts, it amounted to oppressing the conservative "side" of an argument.

Ideological claims, in other words, were being shortchanged because journalists were looking to scientists, medical experts, historical data, and other providers of hard facts rather than letting lobbyists, think-tank heads, and other professional political provocateurs speak with equal authority and at equal volume.

From there conservatism moved to a very successful crusade to reformulate "news" so that facts were always debatable, so long as there was a single professional spinner who could be paid to claim they were. The cable networks, especially, transitioned from that into new forms that rarely gave scientists or other experts a voice at all, preferring instead to pit one pre-determined ideologue against another for orchestrated spats in which nobody could beproven to have lied because the segment would be over before any actual journalist or expert could even phone the studio.

We moved on to public bellowing about "the elites must respect my beliefs," where "beliefs" consisted of believing that climate scientists were sabotaging world government or, eventually, that livestock dewormer was a miracle cure for a pandemic hospitals themselves could not keep up with.

But it was the Goldberg camp that insisted that liars and propagandists should not just be heard from but also treated with respect.That if there was a conflict between facts and conservatism, then it was biased to highlight one over the other. It was treated as a given, from the beginning, that conservatism was a counter to scientificand policy expertise. It was treated as a given that conservatism was the rightful and just opposition to such expertise.

We have reached that conservative promised land. All of the news now follows the formula of pitting ideologue against ideologue, the facts wedged in somewhere—or not, depending on the journalist—but with no reproach given to those who insist that the facts are something else. The paid propagandists and crafters of outlandish, impossible lies are now treated with impeccable respect by the media. The American people are taught to treat professional liars as dignified combatants—nay, true Americans, speaking powerful emotions in the face of uncomfortable, irritating data.

And, after hounding media relentlessly into giving respect to professional fraudsters, the conservative movement itself has now shed from itself everything but the professional fraudsters. The lies are the movement; the movement is defined by the lies, and shifts as rapidly as required to adopt new ones. tucker 1/6 false flag]

You need not look at anything beyond the last election to see that. Respecting, or actively propagating, the anti-American hoax that claims Republicans secretly "won" the last election only to have it stolen by invisible forces, is now a requirement inside the so-called "conservative" movement.Trump lied constantly, about everything, in genuinely malevolent ways, and he was a product of both Bernard Goldberg's insistence that sneering know-nothings be given media respect and the shouter who finally erased all further attempts to pretend Republicanism was anything but a collection of spite-based antipathies and hoaxes.

But Rae Grulkowski is, genuinely, a bad person. Steve Bannon is a liar, a propagandist, and a hack. Stephen Miller is a white nationalist who crafts propaganda demonizing immigrants to justify brutality against them. Mitch McConnell is a relentless liar, one who flaunts his absolute contempt for whatever ideal he blustered about a month, a week, or a day beforehand in order to invent an entirely opposing one. Sarah Huckabee Sanders promoted fraudulent information as a professional, and ideological, career move. Donald Trump is quite possibly the most loathsome sack of malignant neuroses to ever have shuffled through Washington and that is saying something.

Creating hoaxes for the purpose of manipulating public opinion is contemptible, evil behavior. It deserves fury. It deserves the scorn of the entire nation; journalism, and political media especially, should have such seething contempt for the propagandists that exposure of each lie and value judgments about those that perpetrate them should be, as they once were, the profession's central ambition.

It is not enough to point out that this or that person is fabricating a hoax in order to deceive their fellow Americans into holding a new political position. Those that do so are enemies of democracy. They are, in the true sense of the word, anti-American. They are frauds. They are doing direct harm to their neighbors, their towns, their states, their nation. They are ideological soldiers seeking to do harm to the government by taking, from the public, the ability to use their vote as means of steering that government. They are anti-civil rights. Their propaganda is stealing democracy by stealing votes by stealing political debate itself so that voters simply cannot discern what government is doing, what the parties are doing, what the issues are, where the dangers are, and where the future catastrophes lie.

These are all bad, evil, rotten people who need to be shunned with ferocity. They do not warrant respect. They do not warrant civil treatment. They do not warrant malicious burbles about how dare Americans seek consequences for their fraud; newspaper editors should be devoting themselves to identifying each face and name and lie and treating them as public enemy, not both sides denizen.

These are the footsoldiers that will end democracy, if we cannot throw them from our civic spaces and treat them with the contempt that hoax promoters deserve. These are not the days of tar and feathers, but they can certainly be the days of belittlement, consequences, and public reproach. These are the vapid, self-serving cowards whose lies spur domestic terrorists to violence, and who kill Americans by the thousands by pushing fraudulent information about a deadly pandemic. These are not people who lie of happenstance or impulse, but people who specifically seek to bend government through a pattern of anti-American deceit.

There is no neutrality to be had in reporting like this. Someone who manipulates American politics by lying to the American public is acting with malevolence; reporters should feel a civic duty not just to expose them, but to strip them of the usual deference and pleasantries. Treat propagandists with more scorn than those who craft financial hoaxes to prey on the elderly, or those who hide the deadly effects of a product so that they may sell more of them. The propagandists are attacking the soul of our very democracy. To hell with them. Shun them and those who enable their plots out of greed, ideology, or apathy.

Conservatism has now reached Bernard Goldberg's promised land in which facts and malevolent fictions are treated as equals. The movement itself has become a mass of hoaxes cowering under a red hat. If it cannot be condemned as a fraud, it will grow in power until it strips all truth from around us.

---

scisuppr3

10/17

err msg fail

see SCIENCE

CORONA

html cater

bak 120

---

Missouri Republican Senate candidate Eric Schmitt on Monday defended the legacy of Christopher Columbus with a historically illiterate rant that also took a subtle shot at scientists.

"In 1492 the 'consensus' among scientists was that the earth was flat," Schmitt wrote on Twitter. "Christopher Columbus challenged that notion and changed the world forever."

Multiple scholars, however, jumped in to point out that Schmitt has his history completely wrong.

"Nope, absolutely wrong. Any scholar of the Middle Ages knew the earth was round," wrote University of Pittsburgh professor of religion Brock Baher. "The myth that they believed it was flat came from 19th Century when anti-Catholic propagandists like John William Draper & Washington Irving who wanted to claim religion was in conflict thesis with science."

Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of Medieval history at Grand View University, made similar points about Europeans' general knowledge of the Earth's shape at the end of the 15th century.

"In 1492, almost everyone in Europe knew that the earth was round, and were closer to the accurate size than Columbus was," he wrote. "Columbus followed an incorrect line of reasoning, based on bad exegesis, and only survived due to luck. No one thought the world was flat."

Rebecca Anne Goetz, an associate professor of history at New York University, pointed out that "knowledge of a spherical Earth was widely discussed as early as the 5th century BC" through translated writings of Greek philosopherAristotle.

And Princeton historian Kevin Kruse delivered an even pithier reply to Schmitt by writing, "Congrats on never reading a book after the second grade."

---

note: this includes just denigration of sci, eg they are paid to lie cf santorum.

aha note nexus to dereg, pvt of sci, cult corrupt

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

House panel renews probe into Trump administration's interference ... ›

Trump Administration Partners with CVS and Walgreens to Provide ... ›

Trump administration influenced CDC guidance to suppress Covid ... ›

---

resistance

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27122020/trump-climate-science-epa-wheeler-biden

see series: https://insideclimatenews.org/project/the-anti-scientists-2/

sci comm skill ~ univ PR

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/anti-vaxxer/

---

TOOL:

https://climate.law.columbia.edu/Silencing-Science-Tracker

How science has suffered since November 2016.

We’ve documented 388 attacks on science by federal, local, and state governments since November 2016 in the Silencing Science Tracker, a database we maintain with the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. The newest entry, based on a report by The Washington Post, describes how hundreds of federal scientists have been forced out, sidelined, or muted since President Trump took office.

...

2019-12-31

Fewer Scientists Employed in Federal Government During Trump Presidency

All, Federal

Personnel Changes

Climate, Other

During the first three years of the Trump administration, 1,600 scientists left the federal government. That represents 1.5 percent of the total federal scientific workforce.

2019-12-24

Online Pollution Tracking Database Removed

HHS

Government Censorship

Other

The National Library of Medicine, within the National Institute of Health, removed a publicly accessible interactive pollution-tracking map from its website.

2019-12-16

EPA Scientists' Advice Disregarded

EPA, Federal

Bias and Misrepresentation

Other

A majority of EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) rejected agency scientists' finding that existing limits on fine particulate matter (PM) may not adequately protect public health. That finding was based on scientists assessment of recent studies on the health impacts of exposure to PM. CASAC members labelled the assessment "inadequate." No CASAC member is, however, an expert on air pollution epidemiology.

2019-12-03

Climate Change Omitted from FEMA Report

DHS, Federal

Government Censorship

Climate

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) did not discuss climate change in its 2019 National Preparedness Report. The report, which is published annually, evaluates the adequacy of measures taken to prepare for natural disasters and other hazards. Previous versions of the report, including those published during the Trump administration, discussed resources available to local governments and others to prepare for the impacts of climate change.

2019-11-14

Ohio Abortion Bill Would Force Doctors to Reimplant Ectopic Pregnancies or Face Murder Charges

OH, State

Bias and Misrepresentation

Other

A new abortion bill in Ohio calls for harsh sentences for performing or having an abortion and would require doctors to reimplant ectopic pregnancies into the uterus despite the fact that this procedure does not exist in medicine.

2019-10-01

Trump Administration Axes Federal Advisory Committee at the Department of Commerce

DOC, Federal

Personnel Changes

Other

NOAA’s Marine Protected Areas Federal Advisory Committee has been discontinued at the direction of the Trump administration.

2019-10-01

Trump Administration Axes Federal Advisory Committee Focused on Invasive Species

DOI, Federal

Personnel Changes

Other

The Department of the Interior’s Invasive Species Advisory Committee was discontinued at the direction of the Trump administration.

2019-10-01

White House Strikes Climate Change Language from Vehicle Emissions Proposal

Federal, White House

Government Censorship

Climate

The White House deleted references to climate change from a proposal limiting California’s ability to set stricter vehicle emissions standards.

2019-09-25

Interior Department Arctic Drilling Study Concludes there is not a Climate Crisis

DOI, Federal

Bias and Misrepresentation

Climate

The Bureau of Land Management released the final environmental impact statement for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and concluded that there is not a Climate Crisis

2019-09-03

President Trump Falsely States that Alabama May be Under Threat from Hurricane Dorian...

eg tool

fewer Scientists Employed in Federal Government During Trump Presidency

On January 23, 2020, the Washington Post reported that over 1,600 scientists left the federal government during the first three years of the Trump administration. That represents 1.5 percent of the total federal scientific workforce. According to the Washington Post report, "[t]he exodus has been fueled broadly by administration policies that have diminished the role of science as well as more specific steps, such as the relocation of agencies away from the nation’s capital."

---

720

---

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/12/8/headlines/police_raid_home_of_data_scientist_who_blew_whistle_on_florida_covid_19_reporting

Florida, armed police raided the home of Rebekah Jones on Monday. She is the data scientist who was forced to resign in May as the lead software developer for Florida’s coronavirus data portal after she refused to censor information about Florida’s COVID-19 outbreak. Police seized her computers and pointed guns at her children. Jones posted video of the raid on Twitter.

Police officer 1: “Police! Come down now!”

Police officer 2: “Search warrant!”

Rebekah Jones: “Do not point that” —

Police officer 1: “Bring your children!”

Police officer 2: “Come down the stairs!”

Rebekah Jones: — “gun at my children! He just pointed a gun at my children!”

Rebekah Jones accused Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis of sending the Gestapo after her. She wrote on Twitter, “This is what happens to scientists who do their job honestly. This is what happens to people who speak truth to power.” Florida authorities said the raid was part of a probe into a recent hack of the Florida Health Department’s website, but Jones said she hasn’t had access to the site in six months.

an 1220

an see dn cover story was hack investigation, but she has not had access 6 mos; she posted covid info gov wanted to suppress

"gestapo"

cOVID whistleblower blames Ron DeSantis after cops raid her home: 'They pointed guns at my kids'

David BadashThe New Civil Rights Movement

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-anti-science/

alexh

Of more than 1.3 million deaths from COVID-19 worldwide, over 257,900 of them have been in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore — and the worst might be yet to come this winter. Dr. Irwin Redlener, founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, Columbia University, candidly discussed the United States' response to the pandemic during an interview with MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace and slammed President Donald Trump and his allies for the "anti-science" views that have been coming from the White House.

When Wallace asked Redlener where the U.S. is "heading" on its "current path" with COVID-19, the medical expert responded, "really, the trajectory is out of control right now and heading, basically, straight up. Many of us were predicting that we'll be seeing 200,000 cases per day by or before Thanksgiving, and I'm afraid that's where we're heading. The hospitalization rates are particularly important because these are reflecting the data that's suggesting that people are getting quite sick, going into ICUs, having to be admitted to the hospital. So, the immediate prospects are not good…. This is not going to be a good winter by any stretch of the imagination, Nicolle."

The 48-year-old Wallace — who served as White House communications director under President George W. Bush and is now a Never Trump conservative — brought up the parts of the U.S. that view the pandemic through a "partisan lens" and have rejected "simply and non-invasive" measures like "mask wearing and social distancing." And Redlener had a blunt response.

"I don't think any of us in public health would have imagined a year ago, even with Donald Trump at the helm, that this level of incompetency and toxic messaging that we've seen with Donald Trump over these last eight or nine months would have actually been possible under any president's leadership," Redlener told Wallace. "But here you have a president who's firmly opposed to science and evidence in developing policies to deal with this very deadly disease."

Redlener added that even after Trump leaves office in January, the type of "toxic messaging" he has pushed during the pandemic won't be going away.

"Donald Trump will not give up in promotion of horrible, erroneous, anti-factual, anti-science messages," Redlener told Wallace. "This has poisoned the atmosphere to a point where there's going to be a big job here for the new president and vice president and their administration to turn around narratives that the president has deliberately created that are completely erroneous and very, very dangerous. So, it's the science, of course, but it's also how this is articulated to people that's going to make a lot of difference."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Historian: Trump isn't fighting science — he's stealing its authority ... ›

Paul Krugman's dismal diagnosis: America's 'anti-science' streak is ... ›

New report reveals how Trump's anti-science views are warping ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

150 Attacks on Science and Counting: Trump Administration's Anti ... ›

Trump has shown little respect for U.S. science. So why are some ... ›

What caused the U.S.' anti-science trend? – Harvard Gazette ›

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trumpism--young-earth-flat-earth-anti-vax-qanon/

no lnx anti-vaX mama meme graf // stop steal to vax

anti-vax advocacy groups online are helping to radicalize the QAnon movement

The unhinged QAnon conspiracy cult has become a ‘new constituency’ for the Republican Party: report

]

Meaghan Ellis November 28, 2020

The alliance between anti-vaxxers and QAnon followers is rapidly increasing as they continue their plight to spread massive amounts of disturbing misinformation amid the pandemic. One glaring example centers around one incident that occurred last week.

Facebook opted to nix a massive anti-vaccination propaganda group with more than 200,000 members last week. However, the group was not shut down for the dangerous public health misinformation its members posted, but rather, the disturbing promotion of QAnon, reports Huffington Post.

On Monday, Larry Cook, the founder of the "Stop Mandatory Vaccination" movement took to Facebook in his final Facebook Live video before the group was removed to warn that vaccines were a plot "to literally enslave every human on the planet," In the video, Cook also included the QAnon hashtag #WWG1WGA in the upper left corner and the QAnon logo in the upper right corner.

"The purpose of vaccination is to literally slaughter the population and dumb everyone down and render them helpless," Cook said. "It is a global plan to literally enslave every human on the planet."

As he spoke, comments poured in from viewers who expressed gratitude for the "truth" and "awakening" he shared in his video. Like Cook, other anti-vaxxers including David Wolfe along with Ty and Charlene Bollinger have all begun to expose their large followings to the QAnon rhetoric.

Laura Muhl, one of Instagram's most popular anti-vax influencers has also shared relatively dangerous claim insisting the government "engineered" many of the problems currently plaguing the United States. In a meme, she criticized the media with a comparison of covering up the so-called "rigged election" to an attempt to cover up "the truth about vaccines."

"The virus is engineered. The pandemic is engineered. The second wave is engineered. The need for a vaccine is engineered," said the mother of five.

Now, the anti-vaccination pushback and in misinformation rapidly circulating on social media has accelerated with groups joining forces with QAnon. The result is accelerating the effort to discredit science and the integrity of public health.

Related Articles Around the Web

How QAnon Conspiracy Is Spreading In Christian Communities ... ›

He's a former QAnon believer. He doesn't want to tell his story, but ... ›

QAnon conspiracy theory gaining ground in UK, analysis shows | US ... ›

---

NEW

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trumps-sharpiegate-grudge-may-have-led-to-noaas-acting-chief-scientist-losing-his-job/

---

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/trump-white-house-recruited-climate-science-critics-work-noaa

Trump White House recruited climate science critics to work at NOAA

By Scott Waldman, E&E NewsSep. 28, 2020

Originally published by E&E News

At least three prominent researchers who question the severity of climate change rebuffed the opportunity to take a senior position at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The White House has been quietly working in recent weeks to reshape the leadership of NOAA with a goal of criticizing climate science, according to people who were contacted about the job.

The revelation that administration officials approached multiple researchers with long records of casting doubt on human-caused climate change points to a political campaign to undermine mainstream science at one of the world’s leading climate agencies, experts and observers said.

After the initial candidates declined the position, the White House turned to David Legates, a geography professor at the University of Delaware who rejects the basic principles of climate science. Legates, now the deputy assistant secretly for observation and prediction at NOAA, has claimed that rising carbon dioxide levels would make the earth more hospitable to humans.

John Christy, an atmospheric science professor at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, told E&E News that a White House official promised him he would be given a free hand to change the way NOAA approaches climate research.

“The pitch was I would have new influence on the future direction of the agency,” Christy said, adding that if he had accepted the job, “I would redirect money from the climate modeling project into the weather modeling project.”

Christy, who downplays the severity of rising temperatures, said he was unable to take the job due to his academic commitments. His colleague Roy Spencer, a meteorologist affiliated with the Heartland Institute, also was mentioned as a possibility, but he did not pursue the opportunity.

Christy reached out to Judith Curry, the former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, to see if she would be interested in the NOAA position, Curry told E&E News. She, too, rebuffed the offer.

“I’m totally uninterested in anything having to do with D.C. and government,” Curry said.

In addition to Legates, the White House installed Ryan Maue, a former employee of the Cato Institute, as NOAA’s chief scientist, and Erik Noble, who worked as a data analyst for President Donald Trump’s campaign, as the agency’s acting chief of staff.

The changes symbolize a coordinated effort to reshape NOAA’s senior leadership in the dusk of Trump’s first term. Until now, the agency has remained relatively unscathed by the president’s embrace of conspiracy theories about climate change.

But the moves being taken now by administration officials could outlast Trump’s presidency even if he loses the November election to Democratic nominee Joe Biden, according to Andrew Rosenberg, who served as a deputy director at NOAA in former President Bill Clinton’s administration.

Rosenberg, who now runs the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the political appointments could be a strategic way to get climate denialists “burrowed” in at NOAA. If the political appointees are offered career positions, they will be much harder to dismiss after Trump is gone because of protections for federal workers, Rosenberg said.

“They’re packing these positions, and I’m worried they’re going to get burrowed into career positions in NOAA. First of all, getting appointed in the first place is sending a very strong signal that we are not interested in the overall scientific evidence of climate change; we’re going to go with the view of the fringe. That’s very distressing, not only to climate change, but everything NOAA does.”

Two of the new hires—Legates and Maue—have a record of downplaying climate science and have published claims in direct contradiction to NOAA peer-reviewed research.

Outside advisers to the White House have said Legates is expected to attempt to influence the next National Climate Assessment, the congressionally mandated body of research that informs policymakers around the country about how climate change is affecting their regions.

The climate “lie”

Some NOAA employees are nervous about what the moves herald if Trump wins a second term. Climate scientists seem particularly nervous that their work will be affected. In recent months, political appointees at the Commerce Department, which includes NOAA, have been monitoring climate research more closely, according to NOAA employees.

“If your morale is not already sapped, you aren’t paying attention,” said one NOAA staffer who requested anonymity to avoid repercussions.

A NOAA spokesman did not respond to a request seeking comment, and the White House declined to comment on the record.

NOAA has not been entirely immune to politicization. A year ago, the agency was engulfed by a scandal when acting Administrator Neil Jacobs and senior staff criticized agency forecasters at the National Weather Service. The controversy began when Trump incorrectly tweeted that Alabama was threatened by Hurricane Dorian in September 2019.

After receiving panicked phone calls, the Birmingham office of the National Weather Service put out a statement that correctly said the storm would not hit Alabama. Jacobs nevertheless criticized the forecasters.

The episode became known as “Sharpiegate” after Trump refused to acknowledge his mistake and later pointed to a map in the Oval Office that appeared to have been altered with a Sharpie marker to show the path of the hurricane hitting Alabama.

A recently concluded investigation by the department’s inspector general determined that senior NOAA officials were pressured by the White House to issue the statement that unduly criticized the Birmingham forecasters. The agency’s acting chief scientist, Craig McLean, called for an investigation into the statement and supported the agency’s weather forecast. McLean is now set to be replaced by Maue.

On Thursday, 85 Democrats in the House of Representatives sent a letter to Jacobs and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross protesting the appointment of Legates, saying he would “clearly be in a position to seriously damage the agency’s scientific integrity.”

“While Legates promotes the fossil fuel industry’s agenda and derides taxpayer dollars spent on mitigating the ‘undetectable effects of climate change,’ the staggering cost of failing to address climate change is terrifying to the rest of us working to save a livable future for our children and grandchildren,” they wrote.

Legates will have a senior role at an agency whose scientists he deeply disagrees with. In many cases, they’ve proved Legates’ unfounded claims wrong in peer-reviewed studies. By contrast, Legates has relished his role as a fringe researcher, collaborating with a number of groups that have received funding from the fossil fuel industry, Trump donors and foundations that oppose government regulations.

A documentary that was released last week and features Legates provides a window into the scientific priorities he might bring to NOAA.

The film, “Climate Hustle 2,” is connected to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which has received energy industry funding. It cycles through a familiar miasma of debunked and cherry-picked scientific claims that paint the relatively small number of researchers who doubt the extent of human-caused climate change as Galileo-like figures, while climate scientists publishing peer-reviewed research are portrayed as compromised elites.

The movie is introduced by “Mini AOC,” a girl dressed to resemble Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

“Like, I hope you learned a lot about climate change in this movie; I know I did. Like, I used to not believe in climate change either. Like, I thought it meant Mother Nature was transgendering into Father Nature,” she says in the online presentation, which charged viewers $15 to watch.

Legates features prominently in the film, which compares those who want more aggressive climate policy to the authoritarian government of George Orwell’s “1984” and claims that those who question climate science face persecution and jail under organized crime statutes.

The movie claims that people who are worried about climate change want to place limits on the number of children born in America, that steaks will be made illegal and that environmentalism is a “church” that targets heretics.

It portrays climate contrarians as being up against a multibillion-dollar industry of renewable energy companies and environmental groups while ignoring its own connections to the energy industry.

The film also features Legates’ co-author on a number of published studies, astrophysicist Willie Soon, who claims the sun is fueling global warming. Soon says he cried after The New York Times exposed that his research was secretly funded by energy companies and suggests that climate activists should be jailed. Maue’s research on hurricanes is also cited in the film.

Cutting down on carbon emissions would mean that developed nations “would head toward the undeveloped world, and we would bring everybody down to the lowest common denominator,” Legates says in the film. He says teaching young people about human-caused global warming is indoctrinating them into believing a “lie.”

“The idea behind carbon dioxide rationing is that what it essentially says is that to survive as a planet, what we really need to do is not use any energy, and what that’s going to take us back is to a condition where people have the basic necessities of life, food, clothing, shelter and security,” Legates says in the movie

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-fires-noaas-chief-scientist-for-asking-political-appointees-to-follow-scientific-integrity-rules/

The Chief Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is out.

Craig McLean, who until recently was the acting chief scientist, had sent a memo to political appointees at NOAA requesting that they, like everyone else, observe the agency's scientific integrity rules, The New York Times reports.

The next day one of President Donald Trump's political appointees, Erik Noble, told him he was out and had already been replaced.

The NOAA is the federal government's premier scientific agency. It oversees vital agencies including the National Weather Service.

The Times reveals that Trump's new political appointees at the agency "have questioned accepted facts about climate change and imposed stricter controls on communications at the agency."

It's a formula Americans have seen at other federal agencies under this president, including the scandal surrounding Health and Human Services spokesperson Michael Caputo.

"Mr. McLean had sent some of the new political appointees a message that asked them to acknowledge the agency's scientific integrity policy, which prohibits manipulating research or presenting ideologically driven findings," The Times reports.

"Respectfully, by what authority are you sending this to me?" Noble replied to McLean.

It's a formula Americans have seen at other federal agencies under this president, including the scandal surrounding Health and Human Services spokesperson Michael Caputo.

"Respectfully, by what authority are you sending this to me?" Noble replied to McLean.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

NOAA staffers received agency-wide directive warning against ... ›

NOAA leaders backed Trump's hallucinations over their own ... ›

Revisiting 'Sharpiegate': Investigative panel says NOAA chief ... ›

---

OMG inside the wire

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/10/trump-climate-change-denial-noaa

w/ Election Day just a single-digit number of days away, the Trump administration is moving on what could be their final chance to undermine government action against climate change. President Donald Trump recently delivered a series of blows to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the New York Times reported, starting with ousting the agency’s acting chief scientist last month.

NOAA’s chief of staff Erik Noble, a former White House policy adviser and one of several employees recently installed by the Trump administration, removed agency scientist Craig McLean after McLean sent an email to some of the new appointees requesting their acknowledgement of the agency’s rules on scientific integrity, which “prohibits manipulating research or presenting ideologically driven findings.” Noble responded with an ask: “Respectfully, by what authority are you sending this to me?” McLean answered that as acting chief scientist, he was responsible for ensuring the scientific integrity policy was upheld. The next day, Noble wrote back to tell McLean that “you no longer serve as the acting chief scientist for NOAA” and that his replacement had already been appointed.

McLean’s replacement is Ryan Maue, a research meteorologist who, per the Times, “has criticized climate scientists for what he has called unnecessarily dire predictions.” Maue is not the only climate-change critic among the new political hires: David Legates, a University of Delaware professor who, like Trump, has long questioned the existence of human-caused global warming, joined as deputy assistant secretary last month, a role that reportedly did not exist before his appointment. “The positions that these individuals are in gives them the perfect opportunity to suppress, distort and cherry-pick information to make it whatever the party line is,” Jane Lubchenco, a former Obama-era NOAA administrator, said of the recent appointments. The eleventh-hour replacement is in line with Trump’s desired purge of the FBI, CIA, and Pentagon, post-election plans reported by Axios last week.

The Times notes that the NOAA “has, so far, remained remarkably independent in its ability to conduct research about and publicly discuss changes to the Earth’s climate” under an administration known for rolling back environmental protections and questioning climate science. But the freedom that the agency has enjoyed is now threatened under the administration’s recent changes, which are reportedly aimed at undercutting the National Climate Assessment, an account the government is legally required to issue every four years that sets the standard for American knowledge about climate change and underpins federal regulations to combat it.If Trump is re-elected, further changes at the NOAA reportedly include replacing longtime authors of the report with writers who argue against accepted facts about climate science, as well as “shifting NOAA funding to researchers who reject the established scientific consensus on climate change and eliminating the use of certain scientific models that project dire consequences for the planet if countries do little to reduce carbon dioxide pollution.”

Along with McLean’s removal, the installment of staff who have argued against accepted facts about global warming, and the threatened credibility of the climate assessment, the Trump administration is also placing restrictions on internal and external messages at the agency. The policy change requires all communications—from social media posts to press releases to agency-wide emails—to be approved by political staff at the Commerce Department at least three days before they are released, a move meant to ensure communications “serve the needs of your employees and mission while aligning with the over-arching guidance from the White House and Department,” a memo issued by the department said. The new limits underscore the environmental implications of next week’s vote—and offer a grim preview of what a second Trump term would look like for climate research.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-mocks-biden-for-vowing-to-listen-to-the-scientists

speaking to a largely maskless crowd of supporters on Carson City, Nevada late Sunday, President Donald Trump mocked Democratic nominee Joe Biden for vowing to "listen to the scientists" on the Covid-19 pandemic if elected in November and boasted about his own refusal to heed the advice of experts even as coronavirus cases and deaths continue to surge nationwide.

"If I listened totally to the scientists, we would right now have a country that would be in a massive depression," Trump said, neglecting to mention that the U.S. is, in fact, currently in the midst of an unprecedented economic downturn.

"We're like a rocket ship, take a look at the numbers," the president added, remarks that came just days after the Labor Department reported that another 1.3 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits during the week ending October 10. According to data from the Census Bureau, nearly 80 million U.S. adults are struggling to afford basic necessities such as food and rent.

Watch Trump's comments:

Trump mocks Biden for pledging to listen to scientists. Watch this clip and ask yourself if Trump was trying to kil… https://t.co/d9050P6n5p

— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar)1603064199.0

The Biden campaign and allies of the former vice president were quick to respond to Trump's attack, which was in line with the president's repeated dismissals of expert recommendations and basic public health guidelines as the coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage the country.

Ronald Klain, Biden's former chief of staff who led the Obama administration's Ebola response, tweeted, "Trump admits he doesn't listen to scientists. No wonder the U.S. leads the world in Covid deaths."

Biden campaign spokesperson Andrew Bates called Trump's remarks "tellingly out of touch and the polar opposite of reality."

"Trump crashed the strong economy he inherited from the Obama-Biden administration by lying about and attacking the science, and layoffs are rising," Bates said.

The president's anti-science rhetoric, policies, and personnel moves—which have included the installation of political officials at federal public health agencies—have led nonpartisan publications and groups like Scientific American and the National Academy of Sciences to publicly criticize Trump, in some cases, call for his ouster in November.

"Policymaking must be informed by the best available evidence without it being distorted, concealed, or otherwise deliberately miscommunicated," the nonpartisan National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine said in a joint statement last month. "We find ongoing reports and incidents of the politicization of science, particularly the overriding of evidence and advice from public health officials and derision of government scientists, to be alarming."

---

an 1020 vp wd have to approve

white House blocks medical experts on Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force from giving interviews

Elizabeth Preza

The White House refused to allow expert immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci or another medical expert on President Donald Trump's Coronavirus Task Force to appear on ABC's "This Week," Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl s

KID KILLERS

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-epa-allows-continued-use-of-a-neurotoxin-found-to-harm-kids-brains/

an 920

EPA allows continued use of a neurotoxin found to harm kids’ brains

Brett Wilkins / Common Dreams

no lnx 2 cid one pbs newshour

Dismissing extensive scientific evidence showing that even low levels of chlorpyrifos damage children’s brains, the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday released a risk assessment calling the toxic pesticide’s effects “unresolved” and allowing its continued use in a wide variety of agricultural products pending a future final decision on its use.

Reacting to the EPA’s move, Patti Goldman, managing attorney at Earthjustice, accused the agency of “ignoring decades of science by leading universities and in doing so, neglecting its duty to protect children from pesticides.”

“Ignoring the demonstrated harm to children doesn’t make chlorpyrifos safe, it just shows a commitment to keep a toxic pesticide in the market and in our food at all cost,” Goldman added.

The EPA’s third risk assessment (pdf) for chlorpyrifos, which is the result of litigation by environmental groups, stated that “the science addressing [the pesticide’s] neurodevelopmental effects remains unresolved.” This, despite the study finding some dietary risks to adults, children, and handlers of the chemical, as well dangers to animals.

Chlorpyrifos is an organophosphate pesticide applied to crops, animals, and buildings to eliminate insects and worms, killing them by attacking their nervous systems through acetylcholinesterase enzyme inhibition. Invented by Dow Chemical Company in 1966, it is classified as “moderately hazardous” (pdf) to humans by the World Health Organization. Chlorpyrifos was banned in 2000 for most household uses but is still applied to dozens of crops on over 40,000 farms.

Last December, the European Union voted to effectively ban chlorpyrifos. Thailand also tried to ban the pesticide, but backed down last year under pressure from the Trump administration to continue buying it.

In 2016 under the Obama administration, EPA scientists found that chlorpyrifos poisons food and drinking water and recommended a ban on the pesticide, citing extensive research of its effects on children and agricultural workers. The pesticide has poisoned farmworkers, and researchers at Columbia University (pdf), Stanford University (pdf), the University of California at Berkeley (pdf), and elsewhere have shown that it is neurotoxic and damages children’s brains by, among other harms, delaying development, damaging memory, lowering IQ, and reducing attention span.

However, in March 2017 then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt rejected his own agency’s scientific findings and issued a ruling (pdf) upholding use of the neurotoxin. The American Academy of Pediatrics said it was “deeply alarmed” by Pruitt’s decision, which came after consultations with lobby groups including the American Farm Bureau Association.

Corteva Inc., which is owned by Dow Chemical and is the largest producer of chlorpyrifos, has also been lobbying the EPA, according to Earthjustice, one of the groups suing to ban the chemical. Progressive Farmer reported Wednesday that Corteva will phase out chlorpyrifos production, citing declining demand as the primary factor in its decision.

In 2017, the attorneys general of seven states—New York, California, Washington, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Vermont—formally called on the EPA to take immediate action to ban chlorpyrifos. Absent action from the Trump administration, Hawaii in 2018 became the first state to ban pesticides containing the chemical, although the ban won’t go into effect until 2022. California and New York followed suit, while lawmakers in several other states have introduced bills to ban it.

In a major victory for chemical corporations, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced in July 2019 that the agency would not ban chlorpyrifos, prompting a lawsuit by a coalition of health and labor organizations.

“Trump’s EPA might want to dismiss the science and the law to protect corporate profit, but we are confident the courts won’t stand for this,” said Dr. Elena Rios, president of the National Hispanic Medical Association, at the time.

Many scientists have expressed alarm that the U.S. government is upholding chlorpyrifos use.

“Strong evidence now supports the notion that organophosphate pesticides damage the fetal brain and produce cognitive and behavioral dysfunction through multiple mechanisms, including thyroid disruption,” wrote Leonardo Trasande, a professor of pediatrics, environmental medicine, and population health at New York University School of Medicine, in 2017.

“A regulatory ban was proposed, but actions to end the use of one such pesticide, chlorpyrifos, in agriculture were recently stopped by the Environmental Protection Agency under false scientific pretenses,” Trasande added. “Scientists have a responsibility to rebut and decry these serious challenges to human health and scientific integrity.”

“There are all these studies that have been done of kids showing that chlorpyrifos harms their brains especially as they’re young or fetuses as they’re developing,” Erik D. Olson of the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC)—one of the groups fighting for a chlorpyrifos ban—told The Hill on Tuesday. “The very young are at much greater susceptibility than older people, and also more exposed.”

NRDC said that “EPA political appointees are pushing to not only ignore the epidemiological studies showing children are harmed by real-world uses of chlorpyrifos, but to also strip away the ‘uncertainty factors’ that are routinely applied to add a measure of protection for children, and to address uncertainties in the risk assessment.”

The EPA’s final decision on chlorpyrifos will be made at a future date, with most experts believing the latest risk assessment points to approval or an inadequate offer to limit its use.

“With how toxic it is you can’t mitigate the harm enough to make sure not really impacting people’s lives and health and the environment,” Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The Hill.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trumps-new-adviser-calls-himself-the-anti-dr-fauci-and-is-pushing-a-controversial-herd-immunity-approach-and-medical-experts-are-worried-report/

proponents of the “herd immunity” approach to the coronavirus pandemic have been arguing that if enough Americans are infected with COVID-19 and survive, the disease will be largely neutralized in the United States — an approach that many medical experts vehemently disagree with, including expert immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci. But according to Washington Post sources, this is an approach that is being aggressively pushed by one of President Donald Trump’s top coronavirus advisers: Dr. Scott Atlas, who joined the president’s team earlier this month.

Atlas, journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Josh Dawsey report in the Post, “is urging the White House to embrace a controversial ‘herd immunity’ strategy to combat the pandemic, which would entail allowing the coronavirus to spread through most of the population to quickly build resistance to the virus, while taking steps to protect those in nursing homes and other vulnerable populations, according to five people familiar with the discussions.”

Atlas’ approach, Abutaleb and Dawsey explain, “relies on lifting restrictions so the healthy can build up immunity to the disease rather than limiting social and business interactions to prevent the virus from spreading.”

The “herd immunity” approach to the pandemic has been used in Sweden, but it has been rejected and sharply criticized by medical experts in many other European countries — which, in contrast to Sweden, embraced comprehensive social distancing policies. Abutaleb and Dawsey note that “Sweden’s approach has gained support among some conservatives who argue that social distancing restrictions are crushing the economy and infringing on people’s liberties.”

Paul Romer, a professor at New York University, told the Post that the Trump Administration “faces some pretty serious hurdles in making” a herd immunity argument — noting, “One is a lot of people will die, even if you can protect people in nursing homes. Once it’s out in the community, we’ve seen over and over again, it ends up spreading everywhere.”

One of the Post’s sources, described by Abutaleb and Dawsey as a “senior administration official,” told the Post that Atlas considers himself the “anti-Dr. Fauci” and strongly disagrees with the social distancing recommendations of Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx — both of whom are part of Trump’s coronavirus task force in the White House. Fauci has warned that easing social distancing restrictions prematurely will have deadly results, and the summer surges of COVID-19 in Florida, Texas, Georgia and other Sun Belt states with Republican governors bear that out.

Eric Topol, the cardiologist who heads the Scripps Research Translational Institute in San Diego, slammed Topol as a source of “misinformation” — telling the Post, “This is really unfortunate to have this fellow Scott Atlas, who was basically recruited to crowd out Tony Fauci and the voice of reason. Not only do we not embrace the science, but we repudiate the science by our president — and that has extended by bringing in another unreliable misinformation vector.”

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/the-gops-distrust-of-science-has-made-the-us-a-petri-dish-of-infection-during-the-coronavirus-crisis-journalist/

Some Republican governors have been as proactive as their Democratic counterparts in responding to the coronavirus pandemic — including Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan. And while President Donald Trump is the Republican who is criticized the most when it comes to coronavirus, journalist Jonathan Chait, but in a lengthy essay published in New York Magazine on July 20, stresses that Trump is hardly alone when it comes to handling the crisis badly. As Chait sees it, the United States’ COVID-19 death count is an indictment of the GOP in general and underscores its “anti-science” tendencies.

The U.S., Chait writes, is “a viral petri dish of uncontained infection. By June — after most of the world had beaten back the coronavirus pandemic — the U.S., with 4% of the world’s population, accounted for 25% of its cases. Florida alone was seeing more new infections a week than China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia and the European Union combined…. The United States is now the sick man of the world, pitied by the same countries that once envied its pandemic preparedness — and, as recently as the 2014 Ebola outbreak, relied on its expertise to organize the global response.”

Anti-science attitudes, Chait laments, were plaguing the GOP long before Trump was sworn into office in January 2017.

“The distrust and open dismissal of expertise and authority may seem uniquely contemporary — a phenomenon of the Trump era, or the rise of online misinformation,” Chait explains. “But the president and his party are the products of a decades-long war against the functioning of good government, a collapse of trust in experts and empiricism, and the spread of a kind of magical thinking that flourishes in a hothouse atmosphere that can seal out reality. While it’s not exactly shocking to see a Republican administration be destroyed by incompetent management — it happened to the last one, after all — the willfulness of it is still mind-boggling and has led to the unnecessary sickness and death of hundreds of thousands of people and the torpedoing of the reelection prospects of the president himself."

chait emphasizes that Republicans weren’t always anti-science, noting that the Environment Protection Agency was created under President Richard Nixon. But more and more, Chait writes, a disdain for science has plagued the GOP in recent years — and that anti-science attitude makes its presence felt whenever Republicans rail against Dr. Anthony Fauci (who is part of Trump’s coronavirus task for) or refuse to wear face masks in public.

“The truly remarkable thing about the right-wing revolt against public health is that it has taken place under a president whom conservatives trust and adore,” Chait writes. “From the standpoint of running the government, these have been awful conditions for handling a pandemic. But from the standpoint of persuading citizens to cooperate, they have been almost optimal. When we look back a year from now at the frenzied, angry revolt against science, the spring and summer of 2020 may seem like halcyon days.”

---

brad johnson 2x? lamar, enstrom am ind ist, huffpo

https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/max.beauregard/research-topics-for-papers/global-warming-climate-change/us-congress-opinions

api knew?

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08042020/science-denial-coronavirus-covid-climate-change

American science denialism, deployed for years against climate change and, most recently, the coronavirus, can be traced back to the early 1950s during the fight over smog in Los Angeles.

When a Cal-Tech biochemist fingered nitrogen oxide emissions and uncombusted hydrocarbons from automobiles and refineries as the cause of the thick smog that often blanketed the city, the American Petroleum Institute counter-attacked by highlighting the alleged uncertainty of his science. The tactic was a test run for the fossil fuel industry's assault 40 years later on climate science.

Decades of climate denial now appear to have paved the way for denial of Covid-19 by many on the right, according to experts on climate politics. After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars attacking climate scientists and accentuating the supposed uncertainty of climate science, it isn't hard to understand how that happened.

President Trump, who denies climate change, has brushed off Covid-19's seriousness until recently by relying on many of the same arguments he uses to dismiss global warming, such as ignoring government scientists or blaming China. ...

320

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19032020/denial-climate-change-coronavirus-donald-trump

InsideClimate

no lnx graf

6 Ways Trump’s Denial of Science Has Delayed the Response to COVID-19 (and Climate Change)

Misinformation, blame, wishful thinking and making up facts are favorite techniques.

Katelyn Weisbrod

BY KATELYN WEISBROD

MAR 19, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the need for rigorous science, demonstrating—in realtime—what the consequences can be when world leaders pay inadequate attention to what that science says. In his response to COVID-19, Presdient Donald Trump has made statements that ignore, question or distort mainstream science. But long before the virus arrived—even before he became president—he was using similar techniques to deny climate change. Here are some examples:

Wishing Away the Science

Coronavirus

Feb. 28, 2020

"[Coronavirus is] going to disappear. One day—it's like a miracle—it will disappear."

Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview on CNN that the virus was likely here to stay, possibly for months.

Climate Change

September 2015

"I'm not a believer in global warming, I'm not a believer in man-made global warming. It could be warming and it's gonna start to cool at some point."

The scientific consensus is clear that global warming is happening and is a threat to the planet; The New York Times illustrates the basics of global warming and climate change here.

Misusing Scientific Data

Coronavirus

Feb. 10, 2020

"Now, the virus that we're talking about having to do—you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We're in great shape though."

Some coronaviruses are seasonal. But scientists still don't know whether the virus that causes COVID-19 will be. Findings of a recent study suggest that the virus is spreading most readily in cooler temperature zones, The Washington Post reports; however, the study does not conclude from that evidence that the virus will be significantly reduced in the summer.

Climate Change

Nov. 11, 2019

"You know, I actually heard the other day, some pretty good politician. I've seen him around for a long time. Nice white hair. Everything is like central casting. You could put the guy in a movie. He was talking. I don't know if he believes this—but he was a Democrat—he said, 'We have 11 years.' It's the first time I've heard it; I heard 12. But now, see, it's been a year, so now they think we have 11 years to live. I don't know, folks. I think these people have gone totally loco."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report in 2018 that said global carbon emissions would need to be cut by 45 percent by 2030 to keep temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius. This does not mean we have 11 years to live, as Trump asserted, but rather 11 years to shift energy production away from fossil fuels to keep warming within the goals of the Paris accord.

Making Stuff Up

Coronavirus

March 6, 2020

"Anybody that needs a test can have a test. They are all set. They have them out there. In addition to that they are making millions more as we speak but as of right now and yesterday anybody that needs a test that is the important thing..."

Contrary to Trump's assertion, patients and health care workers were complaining that they could not get access to coronavirus tests. A few days later, testifying to a House committee, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, acknowledged tests were not yet widely available. "The idea of anybody getting it easily the way people in other countries are doing it—we're not set up for that," he said.

Climate Change

Sept. 4, 2019

President Donald Trump during an Oval Office briefing on the status of Hurricane Dorian on Sept. 4, 2019. Credit: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images

In September, 2019, Trump showed the press an image of Dorian's projected trajectory that had apparently been altered using a Sharpie to include Alabama in the path of the storm.

Earlier, Trump had tweeted that Alabama would probably be hit by Hurricane Dorian. The National Weather Service in Birmingham, Alabama, then contradicted the president with a tweet saying Alabama was not at risk. Trump used the altered image a few days later.

Blaming China

Coronavirus

March 18, 2020 on Twitter

"I always treated the Chinese Virus very seriously, and have done a very good job from the beginning, including my very early decision to close the 'borders' from China—against the wishes of almost all. Many lives were saved. The Fake News new narrative is disgraceful & false!"

Trump has been urged to stop calling COVID-19 the "Chinese Virus," a term he has used repeatedly and that some have called racist and dangerous. And many public health experts have criticized the administration's lack of preparation and failure to act quickly when the virus was first recognized.

Climate Change

Nov. 6, 2012 on Twitter

"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."

There is a widespread scientific consensus about the reality of human-driven global warming.

Blaming the Democrats

Coronavirus

Feb. 28, 2020

"Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They're politicizing it ... And this is their new hoax."

By this time, the U.S. had confirmed 60 cases of coronavirus. The CDC had already warned the public to prepare for the virus to spread, assuring them that this was not a hoax.

Climate Change

Sept. 11, 2019

"Over 100 Democrats have signed up to support the $100 trillion Green New Deal. That's a beauty. No more cows. No more planes. I guess, no more people, right?"

A Washington Post fact check shows that the Green New Deal resolution supported by most Democrats did not include mention of halting air travel or doing away with cows.

Ignoring Expert Advice

Climate Change

Nov. 26, 2018, Commenting to reporters on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report saying climate change would hurt the economy.

"I've seen it, I've read some of it, it's fine. Yeah, I don't believe it."

The report, produced by climate experts and Trump's own administration, said climate change would damage the economy.

Coronavirus

March 13, 2020

Walgreens President Richard Ashworth shakes hands with President Donald Trump during a press conference on COVID-19 on March 13, 2020. Credit: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

This photo was taken during a press conference on the coronavirus. Trump is seen shaking hands with Walgreens president Richard Ashworth, despite CDC warnings that shaking hands can spread the virus and recommending elbow bumps instead.

Katelyn Weisbrod

Katelyn Weisbrod is a web producer for InsideClimate News based in Minnesota. She joined the team in January 2020 after graduating from the University of Iowa with Bachelor's degrees in journalism and environmental science. Katelyn previously reported from Kerala, India, as a Pulitzer Center student fellow, and worked for over four years at the University of Iowa's student newspaper, The Daily Iowan. She can be reached at katelyn.weisbrod@insideclimatenews.org.

---

from naomi heartland art'l

Health & Science

White House prepares to scrutinize intelligence agencies’ finding that climate change threatens national security

The proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security is being spearheaded by William Happer, a National Security Council senior director.

The proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security is being spearheaded by William Happer, a National Security Council senior director. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Juliet Eilperin and

Missy Ryan

Feb. 20, 2019

The White House is working to assemble a panel to assess whether climate change poses a national security threat, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post, a conclusion that federal intelligence agencies have affirmed several times since President Trump took office.

The proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security, which would be established by executive order, is being spearheaded by William Happer, a National Security Council senior director. Happer, an emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University, has said that carbon emissions linked to climate change should be viewed as an asset rather than a pollutant.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/06/08/white-house-blocked-intelligence-aides-written-testimony-saying-human-caused-climate-change-could-be-possibly-catastrophic/?tid=lk_inline_manual_34&itid=lk_inline_manual_34

no lnx

Climate and Environment

White House blocked intelligence agency’s written testimony calling climate change ‘possibly catastrophic’

Officials sought to excise the State Department’s comments on climate science because they did not mesh with the administration’s stance

According to the National Park Service, Glacier National Park’s ice sheets are a fraction of the size they were 100 years ago.

According to the National Park Service, Glacier National Park’s ice sheets are a fraction of the size they were 100 years ago. (Beth J. Harpaz/AP)

Juliet Eilperin,

Josh Dawsey and

Brady Dennis

June 8, 2019

White House officials barred a State Department intelligence agency from submitting written testimony this week to the House Intelligence Committee warning that human-caused climate change is “possibly catastrophic.” The move came after State officials refused to excise the document’s references to federal scientific findings on climate change.

The effort to edit, and ultimately suppress, the prepared testimony by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research comes as the Trump administration is debating how best to challenge the fact that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet and could pose serious risks unless the world makes deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade. Senior military and intelligence officials have continued to warn that climate change could undermine the United States’ national security — a position President Trump rejects....

---

https://www.ecowatch.com/war-on-science-epa-2645458348.html

Tara Lohan

The New York Times keeps a running list of all the environmental regulations that the Trump administration has worked to trash since taking office more than three years ago.

It's at nearly 100.

That's just the start. The administration's anti-environmental agenda has also involved undermining and unraveling key government agencies, most especially the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

There it's been death by a thousand cuts, with EPA staff facing untenable contracts, positions left unfilled and budget cuts across the board — not mention an appointed leadership that's opposed to the agency's own mission.

As bad as all this sounds, there's some important historical context to remember: It's been bad for a while, according to a new book, The War on the EPA: America's Endangered Environmental Protections, which tracks the "systematic propaganda campaign to discredit science" that began decades ago.

The book comes from the keyboards of husband-and-wife writing team William and Rosemary Alley, also the authors of two other environmental books on nuclear waste and groundwater.

"We wanted to write a good, readable book giving people more understanding of why this agency is important, what they do, and the difficulties involved in doing their job," says Rosemary.

They realized that in order to save the EPA, people need to know what it does — and a lot of people don't.

"We are trying to get people to understand how this matters to them in their daily lives," says William, who is also the director of science and technology for the National Ground Water Association and headed the office of groundwater for the U.S. Geological Survey for nearly two decades. "There's a lot that EPA does, like when we drink water from the tap, we're dependent on EPA."

Unfortunately, when people do talk about the EPA, it's usually misguided complaints.

"There's been a long demonizing of the EPA for over-regulating things, but the reality is that it's extremely difficult for EPA to regulate anything," Rosemary says.

Case in point: Despite a slew of new chemicals in our daily lives, it's been two decades since a new regulation addressed a drinking-water contaminant.

The Alleys also write about the complicated and time-consuming processes behind lots of other regulations — tracking how they were first established and what happened afterward. In many cases environmental regulations were loosened to accommodate industry after political pushback or legal challenges.

This plays out time and time again throughout the Alleys' book. Among the cases they cover: why feedlots continue to pollute waterways; what went wrong in Flint, Michigan; the long battle to remove lead from gasoline and continuing efforts to make cars cleaner; the continuing fight over what constitutes "waters of the United States"; President Obama's work to reduce mercury from coal plants and methane emissions from oil and gas operations — and Trump's push to undo those and many other regulations.

It's clear from the book that enacting protections to safeguard human health and the environment has always been an uphill battle — and that narrative runs alongside the agency's own successful creation story, as the Alleys also explain.

The 1970s saw the establishment of the EPA with bipartisan support from Congress (after a veto by Nixon) and the creation of bedrock environmental laws including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act.

And for the first 10 years things went pretty well.

Part of the early success of the EPA came from strong public involvement, the Alleys say. In those days many environmental problems were incredibly visible — gray clouds of smog and trash dumped along riverbanks — and there was public pushback to fix them.

But in 1981 President Ronald Reagan appointed Anne Gorsuch to lead the agency, and she threw down every speed bump and roadblock she could to impede the agency's work. Budgets were slashed, positions were cut and industry leaders were put in charge of environmental programs.

It's nearly identical to the tactics the Trump administration has used in recent years.

Things improved slightly after William Ruckelshaus, the agency's first administrator, was brought back in 1983. But when Newt Gingrich took control of the House of Representatives a decade later, the anti-science work began again and has continued ever since.

With Trump's election it kicked into high gear.

"We could have just as easily titled the book The War on Science, because science is just the absolute critical underpinnings of everything the EPA does, and that of course has been just tremendously damaged under the current administration," says Rosemary. "The war on science, of course, didn't start with Trump, but it's been exacerbated tremendously."

After detailing how this anti-science agenda influences making and enforcing environmental regulations, the Alleys' book ends with a look at why it will be critical to rebuild the EPA and the importance of scientific integrity.

"A lot of talent has been lost from the agency and that will be impossible to turn around overnight," says William. "If we have four more years of this, I have no idea how we'll get past that. [The Trump administration] is still rushing to try to get as much as they possibly can done. Or undone, as it seems."

Rosemary says she hopes that their book will provide an important jumpstart to conversations about the critical role of the EPA and efforts to fortify it.

"If you don't see what the agency does, it's hard to communicate the risk when it's damaged," she says. "We want people to understand why we need a strong EPA as much today as we did 50 years ago."

Reposted with permission from The Revelator.

epa science climate science climate crisis

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/epidemiologist-warns-that-distrust-in-science-makes-fighting-pandemics-so-much-harder/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/trump-white-house-orders-unnecessary-classification-of-coronavirus-related-meetings-at-hhs-leaving-some-state-and-local-officials-in-the-dark-report/

---

320

https://www.drillednews.com/post/fake-science-is-a-real-danger

Back in the mid-aughts, I was an editor at Environmental Science & Technology. It's the top peer-reviewed journal for researchers who study complex environmental problems and their impacts, including air, water, and toxic chemical pollution. I worked in the news section, making these studies understandable to average readers, as well as scientists and physicians who were unfamiliar with environmental research.

But over time, I noticed that much of the “new research” we published wasn’t terribly unique. If ES&T put out a study finding that a particular chemical seemed to be toxic to children, or The New York Times covered one of our “blockbuster” air pollution studies, I could search for 10 minutes and find multiple papers with similar findings. What was the point of spending all this time and money to study the environment and public health if nothing was being done to address the problems?

During this period, I started hearing complaints from some environmental scientists, that the industries whose products and technologies they studied were funding research to undermine findings that those products harmed public health. At first I thought this couldn’t be true. I had studied biology in college and believed that science was an objective process to reveal the world’s mysteries.

Then I met Fred Vom Saal.

Around 2004, I’d been chosen to attend an exclusive science conference on toxic chemicals, along with Vom Saal, a University of Missouri professor of reproductive biology. Vom Saal studied a chemical in plastics called bisphenol-A, or BPA. In humans and other animals BPA mimics estrogen, meaning it can disrupt our body’s hormonal system. According to Vom Saal, industry-funded scientists were attacking his research by repeating his studies, but with slight changes in the protocols so that the problems he’d discovered with BPA wouldn’t turn up. With these studies in hand, companies then claimed that Vom Saal’s research was shoddy.

I listened to Vom Saal rant for about 30 minutes one summer afternoon during a break in the conference, then exited politely. Science, like every profession, attracts its share of crazies. It was easier for me to accept that Vom Saal was a tad delusional than to believe that industry scientists manipulated research.

But then I started hearing about Tyrone Hayes, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Hayes was studying atrazine, a widely-applied herbicide that controls weeds and increases crop yields in corn and sorghum. Scientists were discovering that this chemical was the most common pesticide contaminant of ground and surface waters, and finding it in some drinking water wells, too. Hayes’ research showed that atrazine interfered with testosterone, chemically castrating some animals and turning males into females.

The next question should have been: What was atrazine doing to humans?

But like Vom Saal, Hayes contended that corporate scientists were publishing studies that nearly mirrored his own, with slight changes in protocol to get results that found no problems with atrazine. According to Hayes, these studies were part of an orchestrated campaign to make him appear incompetent. But Hayes struck me as an odd fellow and a bit eccentric. As with Vom Saal, I had my doubts about him.

Then along came climate scientist Michael Mann.

In the summer of 2005, Congressman Joe Barton, R-Texas, began investigating Mann, along with several other climate scientists, for allegedly making “methodological flaws and data errors.” Barton demanded information on their financial backing from government agencies and access to their data and computer codes. He questioned their relationships to organizations studying climate change. It seemed like a juicy story that was right in line with ES&T's science news coverage, so I contacted sources to learn more and begin writing stories.

Because ES&T didn’t cover climate change, I knew little to nothing about climate science. What I did know came from reading the mainstream news, which put across climate science as controversial, and climate researchers' many troubling claims about global warming as overblown. But I also knew that these outlets were probably getting the story wrong, because of an interaction I’d had the year before with some fellow reporters at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

One day at the conference, while six or seven of us were standing in a circle during a break, the conversation shifted to climate change. Because I didn’t know much about the subject, I kept asking the others questions, trying to understand whether the research was any good. A woman who covered the environment for a newspaper out west began laughing, saying that there were about a dozen scientists who said that climate science was nonsense. She kept contact information around for all 12 of them, she told us, because her editors required her to put one of these doubters in every story to provide journalistic “balance."

Several reporters in the circle giggled. This was my first hint that what I was reading in the media on climate science might be overemphasizing contrarian opinions. Because what everyone in that circle already knew, and I was learning, was that by 2004 thousands of climate experts around the world had published research showing global warming was real, and mostly caused by carbon dioxide pollution from burning oil, coal, and gas.

My article about Barton’s investigation of Michael Mann quoted several experts who told me the affair was a “witch hunt.” But a question kept nagging at me: Why had Barton started this investigation in the first place? It didn’t make any sense. So I began looking at the entire sequence of events that led up to it.

In his letter demanding information and records, Barton had referenced a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal that discussed research published by Stephen McIntyre, a retired mining consultant. In several of these papers, McIntyre had poked holes in Mann’s research. At this point in time, some journalists and activists were beginning to expose many of the scientists questioning climate science as industry lackeys. But McIntyre was retired, creating the appearance of independence from any extraction industry and greater credibility.

On a lark, I called up McIntyre’s former employer. Surprise! I caught him still working for industry. Then I looked into the journal Energy & Environment, where McIntyre had published some studies. It turned out to be a sad publication without any substantive peer review process, and operated by an editor without any science credentials — but who assured me that while she didn’t have any training in science, her husband had a doctorate in physics.

In short, Barton had launched an investigation based on a Wall Street Journal article with some pretty flimsy reporting. Commenting on this article, former Journal editor Frank Allen told me, “It was a strange story ’cause it had this bizarre undertone of being investigative but it didn’t investigate. And this piece — what I thought was bothersome about it — it purported to be authoritative, and it’s just full of holes.”

Fred Vom Saal, Tyrone Hayes, and Michael Mann: Three different academics, working in different fields, who didn’t know each other, but who each had a story about industry campaigns to undermine their research. Was I a magnet for paranoid fringe voices in science, or were they telling the truth?

Then I began noticing a link between climate change and smoking. Whenever a group or public expert said that climate change isn’t real, it turned out that about 10 years prior, in the mid-’90s, they were likely to have said that smoking isn’t harmful. I found this out by going through a new archive that the University of California, San Francisco had put online, called the Tobacco Archives.

Digging through these documents, I found that many prominent scientists had worked for the tobacco industry, and that cigarette companies had funded science organizations and nonprofits to cast doubt on the science that showed nicotine was addictive, and smoking a health hazard. It was all very confusing. So I began contacting other reporters and scientists, asking if they knew about this and what they thought it meant.

One winter afternoon, I got a call from a reporter named Mark Hertsgaard, asking what I knew about the links between tobacco defenders and climate denial. By this time, I had spent dozens of weekend and late night hours going through the Tobacco Archive. So I pointed him to documents showing that a scientist named Frederick Seitz had worked with R.J. Reynolds to downplay the dangers of tobacco. Seitz wasn’t some nobody: He had been president of Rockefeller University and president of the National Academies of Sciences. When Mark and I spoke, Seitz was still revered as one of the most prominent scientists in America.

Hertsgaard wrote about Seitz’s work for tobacco and other companies for a 2006 Vanity Fair cover story, confirming that some industries were corrupting the field of science.

I also began to see how corporations influenced the media. While reading the Tobacco Archive one night, I discovered that tobacco companies were paying a Fox News science columnist named Steven J. Milloy, who regularly attacked scientists and journalists reporting on chemical and tobacco harms. In my article about Milloy for The New Republic, I noted that Eamon Javers of BusinessWeek had caught Scripps Howard columnist Michael Fumento receiving about $60,000 in 1999 from Monsanto, a multi-billion-dollar player in the agricultural biotech sector that Fumento covered. The funding, which Fumento had not disclosed to Scripps Howard, had been routed through a conservative think tank called the Hudson Institute. *

The growing evidence eventually forced me to change my precious thinking that science is always an objective search for the truth. In fact, corporate money is often skewing that journey, and if we look hard enough, we can find disinformation campaigns designed to protect all sorts of harmful products.

In the years since I figured this out, the public television series Frontline has documented the disinformation operation that companies ran against Fred Vom Saal. The New Yorker magazine has profiled Tyrone Hayes and the corporate campaign to smear him. Michael Mann has detailed the fossil energy industry’s harassment of himself and other climate scientists in a best-selling book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars,

Industries create these campaigns because they are effective at confusing the public and the press about science, which helps to slow or stop policy changes that would require stronger anti-pollution laws, or taking products off the market. Today disinformation has become its own industry, one that distorts not only climate science, but most areas of research where studies might influence how the government regulates corporations.

* Scripps Howard later fired Fumento, who publicly denounced extreme right disinformation campaigns in 2012. He recently wrote a supportive opinion piece for Monsanto's glyphosate pesticide. Milloy remains a mouthpiece for industry, and was a member of Donald Trump's transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency.

dr david michaels sci bk triumph of doubt

David Michaels is an epidemiologist and Professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Milken Institute School of Public Health of the George Washington University. Wikipedia

https://www.drdavidmichaels.com/

https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Doubt-Money-Science-Deception/dp/0190922664

https://www.foodpolitics.com/

marion nestle Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception. ... at stake here, and we all should be responding right away to David Michaels' call for action.

slaughterhouse crazy # cuts/minute 140--> 170 min

dupont texas pesticide 4 kia osha fine 90K --> 230K$ (dupont sells uits safety services?!)

$ to visit 1x 165 years; fines raised in 2015 to 12K$ (walmart sec guard crushed to death, fined 7K spent millions on liars, got nearly to scotus]

https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-march-2-2020/

bill 1970 unions had in-house saFETY, NOW mostly gone; burton sp CA huge, not even on committee; nader big

aha -let :it gets tedious to repeat, but what wd happen if BO gagged?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/white-house-told-top-virus-expert-not-to-speak-publicly-on-the-coronavirus-without-permission-report/

no lnx

White House told top virus expert not to speak publicly on the coronavirus without permission: report

President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence and members of the Coronavirus Task Force, speaks to members of the press Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2020, in the James S. brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen)

Written by Cody Fenwick February 27, 2020

A top expert on viruses in the administration, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has been told by the White House not to speak publicly about the emerging coronavirus outbreak without permission, according to a report Thursday in the New York Times.

Fauci directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases, an agency within the National Institutes of Health.

The directive comes as a part of a broader effort from Vice President Mike Pence, who President Donald Trump has picked to oversee the administration’s crisis response, the Times found. Pence is reportedly trying to “tighten control” of the administration’s messaging about the outbreak, which thus far has been contradictory and scattershot.

The Times reported:

Officials insist the goal is not to control the content of what subject-matter experts and other officials are saying, but to make sure their efforts are being coordinated, after days of confusion with various administration officials showing up on television.

However, it’s hard to take such reassurances seriously. Trump himself has already made clear that he is trying to downplay the coronavirus threat, and he is undeniably spooked by the effect it has had on the stock market and the potential impact on his re-election chances. He has accused the media of hyping the threat and has broken with his administration’s experts by suggesting the virus is likely already in decline and that a vaccine could be developed “soon.”

With the president broadcasting what he hopes the science will show, any effort to limit what experts in the administration are allowed to say publicly should be viewed with suspicion. And Trump’s decision to put Pence in charge, given the vice president’s history of obsequiousness to the commander in chief, inspires even less confidence. Pence already bungled a public health crisis as governor of Indiana, and he was still denying the evidence that smoking caused cancer in 2000.

The Times also noted that, with the announcement of Dr. Deborah L. Birx as the Coronavirus Response Coordinator, there are now at least three people who have been named as leading some part of the coronavirus response effort, exacerbating the possibility for mismanagement:

But with Mr. Pence’s announcement, Dr. Birx becomes the third person to be designated as the administration’s primary coronavirus official.

Mr. Trump said that “Mike is going to be in charge, and Mike will report back to me.” Mr. Pence said it will be Dr. Birx. Meanwhile, Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary, remains the chairman of the government’s coronavirus task force.

And on Thursday at a public meeting, Pence himself only added to the confusion, saying: “I’m leading the task force. We’ll continue to rely on the [Secretary Azar’s] role as chairman of the task force.”

The Times report also gave more indication that Trump is prioritizing putting out a positive message rather than the truth, finding: “Mr. Trump has told people that he considers Mr. Azar to be too ‘alarmist’ about the virus.”

---

full txt

no lnx

Science ranks grow thin in Trump administration

Jeff Jorgenson examines young corn plants in May on a partially flooded field he farms near Shenandoah, Iowa. A USDA scientist was working on a tool to help farmers mitigate the impact of flooding and other effects from climate change when the Trump administration moved his agency to Kansas, prompting him to quit. (Nati Harnik/AP)

Annie Gowen,

Juliet Eilperin,

Ben Guarino and

Andrew Ba Tran

Jan. 23, 2020 at 12:45 p.m. PST

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Dozens of government computers sit in a nondescript building here, able to connect to a data model that could help farmers manage the impact of a changing climate on their crops.

But no one in this federal agency would know how to access the model, or, if they did, what to do with the data.

That’s because the ambitious federal researcher who created it in Washington quit rather than move when the Agriculture Department relocated his agency to an office park here last fall.

He is one of hundreds of scientists across the federal government who have been forced out, sidelined or muted since President Trump took office.

The exodus has been fueled broadly by administration policies that have diminished the role of science as well as more specific steps, such as the relocation of agencies away from the nation’s capital.

While the administration has come under fire for prioritizing the concerns of industry at the expense of science in government decisions, the cumulative effects are just beginning to appear after three years of Trump in the White House.

Some farmers said the USDA staff upheaval has made it harder to access information they need.

Torrential rains last spring dashed the plans of Liz Brownlee, who runs a livestock farm with her husband, to expand her pasture in Crothersville, Ind. Then an unseasonably dry autumn brought 90-degree days that baked the farmers’ seeds.

“With all this uncertainty from climate change, I need the best data possible” to know when to plant, she said. “I’m worried I’m not going to have it.”

In the first two years of the Trump administration, more than 1,600 federal scientists left government, according to Office of Personnel Management employment data analyzed by The Washington Post. That represents a 1.5 percent drop, compared with the 8 percent increase during the same period in the Obama administration.

One-fifth of the high-level appointee positions in science are vacant — normally filled by experts who shape policy and ensure research integrity.

Of those who departed, the numbers were greatest among social scientists, soil conservationists, hydrologists and experts in the physical sciences — chemistry, geology, astronomy and physics.

At the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly 700 scientists have left in the past three years, according to The Post analysis. The EPA has hired 350 replacements.

Linda Birnbaum, who spent four decades working on toxicology and public health issues at the EPA and National Institutes of Health before retiring in October, said the loss of expertise weakens the government’s ability to make sound decisions.

“It’s going to take a long time for government science to come back. There’s little doubt about that,” said Birnbaum, who serves as an adjunct professor at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She added that NIH has remained well- insulated because it enjoys bipartisan support in Congress.

“But when I look at colleagues in other agencies, especially any agency that has any regulatory role, they’re decimated,” she said.

Trump administration officials dismiss that notion, saying much of the criticism comes from activists outside the federal government.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt points out that he is the first secretary to enlist a career federal scientist to serve as his scientific adviser.

“I’ve got an ideas box, I haven’t seen that,” he said in an interview, referring to complaints that science has been de-emphasized. “I do hear that from advocates and external parties. And, you know, anybody that looks at these things objectively tends to find that they’re without merit.”

Last year, the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity accused Bernhardt of pushing aside the conclusions reached by career scientists at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regarding how a pesticide affected endangered species. Eight Democratic senators sought an investigation. Interior’s inspector general concluded there was “no evidence” Bernhardt abused his position.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump called climate change a “hoax.” Once in office, he began dismantling much of President Barack Obama’s climate plan. He has installed industry figures in regulatory roles and rolled back scores of rules and policies that he considers harmful to the fossil-fuel industry. Trump’s actions spurred scientists into the streets, joining protesters for a March for Science rally on the Mall in 2017 and again in 2018.

Many scientists who work for the U.S. government or rely on its funding say the changes brought by the Trump administration are being felt across the country.

After historic rainfall last spring swept away livestock and grain in the Midwest, crop planting was delayed by weeks. Andrew Crane-Droesch, 38, a researcher at the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service, started work on a data tool that could predict months in advance the impact of, say, heavy rainfall on crop prices or planted fields. He hoped that knowledge could help farmers, commodity traders and government disaster planners prepare.

But when Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue moved forward with his controversial plan to relocate the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture — two key research agencies — to Kansas City, Crane-Droesch headed for the exit.

He joined two-thirds of affected employees in his division who either retired or found other jobs rather than move to the greater Kansas City region. At the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which oversees $1.7 billion in scientific funding for researchers, nearly 8 of every 10 employees have left.

Crane-Droesch, who took a health-research job in Philadelphia, said there’s no one left at the USDA who has the time or the know-how to run the model he created or to finish the project.

“All that work was for naught, and they nuked the account,” he said. “Even if they hired somebody for my portfolio — which I don’t think they did — it would take that person quite a while to get up to speed, just as it took me several years.”

The move to Kansas City has also meant dozens of reports and millions in research funding have been delayed or scuttled as the Agriculture Department scrambled to keep up with departures.

The agency has been forced to hire back 21 retired employees on temporary contracts, to stanch its losses.

But experts on bee pollination, organic farming, commodity markets and trade are gone, setting back research that has been in process for months or even years.

“They never tried to refute our work; they tried to bury it by getting rid of the people who produced the work,” Crane-Droesch said.

To restore the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the Economic Research Service to their size under the Obama administration, the USDA would have to hire more than 400 people. One USDA official said the department has “well over 150 active recruitments in process between both agencies.”

Current and former employees interviewed said they felt the move to Kansas City was intended to diminish research areas such as trade policy, farm income and climate change; Perdue is a climate skeptic who recently described the problem as “weather patterns, frankly.”

A USDA spokesman defended the move, saying that Perdue believes the agencies can better serve “customers” — farmers, ranchers, academic institutions and agribusiness — by relocating to Kansas City, “a hub for all things agriculture in America’s heartland.”

The department estimates it will save $300 million over 15 years from employment and rent in Kansas City.

EPA pursues regulatory rollbacks, despite criticism from its scientific advisers

Some federal researchers said they left the Trump administration after concluding their work was being undermined.

Dan Costa, who worked at the EPA for 34 years before stepping down as director of its air, climate and energy research program in January 2018, said the tipping point for his retirement came when an EPA spokesman undercut a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that the agency had funded.

The study found that long-term exposure to levels of soot and smog lower than current national standards can cause premature death among older Americans. Such a finding suggests that current standards don’t adequately protect public health, which would have implications for industries that pollute. An unidentified EPA spokesman attacked the study in an interview with the Washington Times, an act Costa called “scientifically unethical.”

Peter Van Doren, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Insitute, said in an interview that scientists need to remember that they don’t set policy.

“When nerds and politicians disagree, nerds lose,” he said. “Scientists think, ‘We are smart, and we ought to decide.’ But we don’t get to decide.”

Elsewhere in the government, political appointees have delayed grants for scientific work.

At Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey, Director James Reilly “felt that he needed to personally look at every grant that went out,” according to Bernhardt’s science adviser William Werkheiser, who served as Reilly’s deputy before joining the secretary’s office. The process stalled grants at the agency’s climate adaptation science centers for more than six months.

The centers fund university research to help wildlife, lands and people adjust to a changing climate.

Robin O’Malley, who retired last month as director of one climate adaptation center, said in an interview that the slowdown in hiring and grant approvals has hampered the centers.

“They haven’t said no to us at any time, they’ve just made it difficult to move forward,” he said. “You’re up a creek.”

Across the government, the administration is scaling back advisory committees that offer input to policymakers from scientists and other experts. Last year, Trump required agencies to eliminate one-third of their advisory panels, with a few exceptions.

Will McClintock, a marine scientist who has helped dozens of countries establish marine sanctuaries, used to serve on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Protected Areas federal advisory committee.

After seeing that people were mailing in hand-drawn maps to nominate reserves, McClintock created a Google Maps-like program called SeaSketch that allows fishermen, divers and conservationists to propose sanctuary zones alongside scientists and government officials.

“I’m bringing lots and lots of expertise, for free, to our federal government,” said McClintock, a project scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who volunteered on the advisory panel. But before NOAA could adopt the software, his federal advisory committee was eliminated.

Some Republicans have supported the executive order to cut advisory committees. “Based on the characterization made by many of my colleagues and their friends in the media, you would think this order was a death blow to science at all the agencies,” said Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler at a hearing in September. “In reality it just seems like a common sense, nonpartisan way to eliminate wasteful committees.”

The Office of Management and Budget declined to estimate the cost savings from cutting the committees. "The administration is always looking for ways to end redundant and out of date programs — this is an open and closed case where taxpayer resources are better used elsewhere," the office said in a statement.

It is unclear whether the USDA relocation will ultimately save taxpayers $300 million over 15 years as promised. For now, employees transferred to Kansas City are working out of an existing USDA office until permanent space is ready.

Earlier this month, the boxy building about six miles outside the city's central business district had the feeling of the first day of school. New hires waited to sign in, get security badges and learn where to park.

"We lost a lot of people, and we're trying to rebuild," said Daniel Hellerstein, an economist who researches the economic impact of soil conservation. Hellerstein was one of the retiring employees who was temporarily hired back but remains in Washington. "It's going to be difficult because the slots we need are fairly skilled, and there's a lot of competition out there for qualified people."

Much of the impact of the federal government's shrinking science capacity will not be felt for years, observers said.

"If we're gone, is the world going to be a worse place?" he mused. "I like to think so. But it's not going to be immediate."

---

Mexican Butterfly Conservationist Found Dead

dn 120

---

https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/02/07/dark-moneyed-denialists-fixing-science-symposium-doubt

The “Fixing Science” symposium, which is hosted by the National Association of Scholars and kicks off today in Oakland, California, includes credible speakers who want to improve some areas of science hurt by the use of poor statistical methods or making irreproducible claims.

Unfortunately, they are outnumbered by people who have often cast doubt on mainstream climate, environmental, and health sciences. For starters, who thinks that long-time fossil fuel–funded Patrick Michaels, a senior fellow with the climate science–denying Competitive Enterprise Institute, will “fix science”? UPDATE 02/10/20: NAS Brochure at Symposium.

I was first tipped off to the swarm of climate science deniers at this meeting by Lenny Teytelman on Twitter, who said he found seven climate deniers (an undercount), and by Oxford professor Dorothy Bishop in her January 12 blog post, “Should I stay or should I go?…” about this meeting and whether scientists should engage with those with dissenting views in a situation like this.

Both provided useful insight and information, which I've consolidated with other research here.

Professor Bishop summarized well:

“But, I reiterate, the main point is not whether NatAsSchlols is left- or right-wing. It's the weird structuring of the meeting, which juxtaposes a set of experts in the 'reproducibility crisis' with a set of individuals who promote scientific views that are far from mainstream … You know your arguments would not survive scrutiny by experts familiar with evidence in the area, so you don't invite those (and to be fair, it's unlikely that they'd come anyway, as there are diminishing returns in engaging with those whose minds are fixed). But what you can do is to cast doubt on all scientific evidence by inviting along those who are questioning the solidity and credibility of current scientific practices. That's what is happening here.” [emphasis added]

Many speakers at this meeting have been affiliated with groups known for anti-science efforts, either ideologically or financially, funded mostly by dark money. When their funding sources are accessible, they include the usual companies (fossil fuels, tobacco, and chemical) and private conservative foundations, which lines up with 2013 research by sociologist Robert Brulle, summarized in my post “Study Details Dark Money Flowing to Climate Science Denial.”

A few other speakers have often worked in “product defense,” an area covered well by David Michaels in Triumph of Doubt (2020) (review). I'm compiling here a list of the speakers and organizations who are more often denying science than trying to fix it. People should be very wary of those listed in red, and I've included links to more information for those who want to do their own research.

The Fixing Science symposium sponsors are the National Association of Scholars (NAS, which should not be confused with the reputable U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which also goes by NAS) and The Independent Institute (TII). The former is led by Peter Wood and the latter by David Theroux, both vocal (but non-technical) climate science deniers.

Anti-science Groups

I've scoured IRS Form 990 data (line 8) for the four organizations affiliated with the most symposium speakers, a search that yielded total grants received each year from 2003-2017, shown in Table A. But such 501(c)(3) “public charities” need not report the sources of those grants. Using the candid.org website, I've compiled the information in the spreadsheet, “Grants To Think Tanks, whose two sheets each contain a Table 1 that lists all 1,528 grants, and a Table 2 that summarizes them.

The first sheet sorts by Recipient-Donor-Year, the second by Donor-Recipient-Year. Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) like Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund do report grants they make, but their legal structure makes it impossible to know the original sources of the funding. Perhaps that was not dark enough for some donors. The huge Fidelity Charitable DAF started making grants to the same four organizations in 2015. It is impossible to know who got the idea first, but by 2016, Charles Koch was routing millions of dollars through that DAF.

In Table A, the Miss % is the fraction of total grant money given directly by corporations or others, so not reported on 990PF forms, and therefore, invisible to the public. Adding DAF% and Miss % yields Dark %, which shows the extent of dark money. The Heartland Institute's DAF% is high, as it receives roughly a third of its money (32%) via Donors Trust/Capital Fund.

In the tables below, CD indicates promotion of Climate Denial and TD shows persistent Tobacco Defense, with lower case implying a lesser degree. Appearing in red shows clear, well-documented anti-science behavior, generally to create doubt about science that conflicts with business interests.

DeSmog readers are likely familiar with many of the better known groups, or can click on the profiles, so this section will focus on lesser known groups...much more charts, see bak

omg

https://www.ecowatch.com/pollution-database-trump-toxmap-2641963037.html

TOXMAP, an interactive online map that used various sources to track toxic pollution across the U.S., disappeared from the internet earlier this month, alarming environmental advocates, according to The Hill.

The 15-year-old interactive map was beneficial to researchers and environmentalists. The National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institute of Health, hosted it. Some of the information has moved to other sources, while some has just disappeared completely, as Newsweek reported.

TOXMAP offered detailed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data for clearly labeled toxic release sites and offered extensive health and demographic data, like mortality rates, that users could easily overlay on to the maps. The various capabilities and wealth of data earned TOXMAP a devoted following among researchers, students, activists and other people eager to pinpoint sources of pollution, according to Undark.

With little explanation, it was announced in September that the map would be taken down. Then it was removed last week and the former URL showed a message acknowledging its disappearance and ushered visitors to other potential sources of information, as Undark reported.

"Part of the decision was prompted by the increasing availability of the underlying data from their original sources," said NLM in a statement released to Undark. "Many sources such as the EPA, among others, offer several products that provide similar geographic information system functionality."

The NLM added in its statement that much of the removed information could be found scattered amongst nine other U.S. and Canadian government websites.

People who used the resource see the hiding of data and removal of information as part of the Trump administration's pattern of obfuscation and regulatory rollbacks of environmental policies, as Newsweek reported.

Furthermore, the alternative of combing through nine other websites takes away the consolidation of data and the user-friendly interface of TOXMAP.

"Because this information has gotten so complex, and there's so much of it, it's very difficult for someone who's not really trained in the area to navigate it," said Chris Sellers, an environmental historian at Stony Brook University and a member of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), which monitors federal environmental data sources and advocates for greater public access, to Undark. "This tool actually cut through all the jargon, all the different interfaces that EPA, for instance, puts up before you get to the actual data that you're interested in."

"TOXMAP's end accords with a larger pattern spanning federal environmental agencies whose intentions have been far from quiet, even loudly trumpeted," read a December article from the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), according to Newsweek . "The dismantling of such a usable public platform connecting health and environmental data certainly accords with the EPA's own declared strategies, of seeking to exclude so many environmental health studies from policy-making and to neglect or defund on-going environmental health investigations."

"Whether these parallels are intentional or not, our National Library of Medicine has now joined this administration's ideologically-driven anti-science crusade," the article continued, "effectively shrinking the public's access to environmental as well as disease and mortality data. As with so many other fronts in the Trump Administration's interlocking wars against science and environmental regulation, the prevailing hope seems to be that pushing the facts out of sight will diminish Americans' concerns about the environment."

Claudia Persico, an assistant professor at American University specializing in public administration and environmental policy, told Undark that the site's deprecation was a blow to researchers.

"I think it's really sad that they're getting rid of this," she said.

Sellers added, "It was stunning to me that the National Library of Medicine is actually retiring this pretty essential tool for our environmental right-to-know. I hope people will understand what's happening out there, that the government is gradually cutting off these very valuable tools that are really essential to our democracy." larming' Report Uses NASA Satellite Data to Reveal World's Toxic ... ›

5 Ways Trump Is 'Gaslighting' Us on U.S. Air Pollution Levels ... ›

dereg nat

bad

The Trump administration has terminated two scientific advisory boards at the Environmental Protection Agency, reports Greenwire. Officials say this won’t affect public health, because they’re already getting the same advice in other ways. But one public interest advocate counters, “These two cuts are part of a pattern by this administration to remove science and opportunity for public input from the policymaking process.”

A federal agency “knowingly stalled sending hurricane relief funding to Puerto Rico,” holding up billions of dollars in post-Maria housing funds. Officials at the Department of Housing and Urban Development defended the delay to Congress, The Hill reports, by echoing the words of President Trump, who has called Puerto Rico “one of the most corrupt places on earth.”

Rising levels of tiny particle air pollution across the US killed an additional 9,700 people in 2018 than in 2016, say researchers in a newly published study. Their analysis points to three likely reasons why, reports Vox: expanding economic activity, wildfires, and lax enforcement of clean air regulations going back to 2013.

better

A coalition of environmental groups has sued the Trump administration for repealing the Waters of the United States (or WOTUS) rule, reports Bloomberg Environment. The groups charge that “agencies have simply gone through the motions of giving notice and taking comment without providing any legitimate rationale to support the predetermined result,” which was to wipe the landmark Obama-era rule off the books.

The Department of Agriculture’s in-house watchdog office has started an investigation of efforts by political appointees to suppress climate science at the agency, reports Politico, despite accelerating impacts of global warming on farmers and ranchers.

icn 1019 mick m applauds

BLM Shuffles Staff

Shifting power to the states is also a longtime goal of some conservative groups. The Trump administration has moved in that direction with the Shared Stewardship forest program, for instance, and beefing up the presence of local government on the Bears Ears National Monument management council. Recent proposals in Congress would also put state and local government in charge of energy management and law enforcement on federal lands.

Martin Nie, director of the University of Montana's Bolle Center for People and Forests, said the BLM reorganization is the administration's latest nod to Sagebrush Rebels and states' rights conservatives.

"We have seen an unprecedented transfer of management authority from the federal government to the states," he said, counting the BLM reorganization as the latest example.

Could It Influence Western Voters?

Empowering states, reducing the role of the federal government, expanding public lands energy development—while those ideas resonate in western states, what might be even more important to conservatives is the role the BLM reorganization can play in shoring up the conservative vote in 2020.

Republicans stand to lose Senate seats in Colorado and Arizona if their voters don't turn out. In the U.S. House, the GOP sees winnable Democratic seats in Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada. Montana's sole House seat, held by a Republican now, is considered a tossup. Meanwhile, Nevada and Arizona are both considered swing states in 2020 presidential race.

With the reorganization shifting BLM headquarters and staff to their states, it could appear to conservative voters that the Trump administration is listening to their pleas to give states more influence over federal land.

better

There has been So. Much. Great. climate-change-related coverage across news outlets large and small this week. Congratulations, Covering Climate Now and all the news teams who’ve jumped on board. (Now, keep it up.)

My biggest praise for a groundbreaking political report goes to NBC News, for uncovering how the Trump administration ignored and buried research by its own Customs and Border Protection linking the large number of Central American migrants coming to the US southern border with the impacts of climate change on their farms.

CBP found that climate change-driven crop failures are contributing to such intense poverty and near-starvation on Guatemalans, that fleeing home to embark on a difficult and dangerous overland journey to the Mexico-US line seems like a better choice than staying put.

“But inside the Trump White House, that message was largely ignored in both policy decisions and messaging around what should be done to stem the flow of migrants,” NBC News reports. “With evidence of a correlation between acute food insecurity and migration in hand, the Trump administration instead focused on an agreement with the government of Guatemala to stem the flow of immigrants through law enforcement means.”

NBC sent a reporter to Guatemala to witness and confirm the climate-change-driven human desperation that the Trump administration denies and ignores:[vid]

https://newrepublic.com/article/144056/its-never-harder-climate-scientist

It’s Never Been Harder to Be a Climate Scientist

Legal attacks, internet harassment, and a Trump-fueled "culture of fear" are making their work more difficult than ever.

By EMILY ATKIN

July 27, 2017

One month before President Donald Trump was sworn into office, the climate scientist Michael Mann wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post about the time someone sent a letter filled with fake anthrax to his office. The August 2010 scare, he recalled, was “just one in a long series of threats I’ve received since the late 1990s, when my research illustrated the unprecedented nature of global warming.” Things had gotten better in recent years, he wrote—no more anonymous mail with potential bio-weaponry, no more personal investigations by congressional committees, and far fewer death threats. But with Trump’s inauguration imminent, he wrote, “my colleagues and I are steeling ourselves for a renewed onslaught of intimidation, from inside and outside government.”

Six months into the Trump administration, the onslaught Mann feared has arrived. Scientists and science advocates say climatologists inside and outside the government are facing unprecedented intimidation from the Trump administration, conservative groups, and internet trolls. Jon Foley, a climate scientist and director of the California Academy of Sciences, said he’s more worried about the future of his profession than any time in his 20-year career. “The ebbing and flowing of political currents effects science—it always has—but this is different,” he said. “This is much worse than anything we’ve ever seen before.”

Climate scientists working directly for the Trump administration are the most affected. A report published last week by the Union of Concerned Scientists describes a “culture of fear” as government scientists are gagged, sidelined, or fired, and funding cuts loom. “Some are afraid to utter the words ‘climate change,’” the report reads. The fear has pushed some agency scientists to seek advice from outside sources. Lauren Kurtz, executive director at the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, says several federal climate scientists have asked her about their legal options for speaking out. “One researcher just called to say hey, my boss has made it really hard for me to do my job. What can I do?” she said.

[A timeline of “attacks on science” since Trump came into office, compiled by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Center for Science and Democracy]

Kurtz is also dealing with a problem that has existed for years: lawsuits filed by conservative groups against non-government climate scientists seeking their private communications. And just generally, Kurtz said she’s hearing from more private climatologists worried about the future of their grant funding, or the backlash they might receive from empowered internet trolls if they choose to publicly criticize against cuts that would effect their work. “It’s definitely become a more stressful profession,” Kurtz said. “Long-term, there’s room for optimism. But right now—especially when you factor in things like potential funding cuts and dealing with harassment, yes, it has become more difficult to be a climate scientist.”

As the political, social, and economic ramifications of their findings become more urgent by the day, it only makes sense that attempts to silence and intimidate climate scientists stand to intensify.

Climate scientists have been harassed since long before Trump’s rise, much of it personal and internet-based: Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has said that after a media appearance, she receives up to 200 emails and letters a day filled with threats and accusations. “One email I got said something like, ‘I hope your child sees your head in a basket after you’ve been guillotined for all the fraud you climate scientists have been committing,’” Hayhoe told InsideClimate in 2015. Personal attacks exist off the internet, too. Climate scientist Ben Santer famously found a dead rat left on his doorstep, a story he told most recently to talk show host Seth Meyers.

Climate scientists working inside and outside the government have been subject to more than just internet trolls, though. Conservative organizations, some with ties to fossil fuel interests, have for years filed lawsuits against them seeking e-mail communications and unpublished research under various open records laws. The point, Kurtz says, is “to embarrass them”—indeed, in one ongoing lawsuit against University of Arizona researcher Jonathan Overpeck and climatologist Malcolm Hughes, the coal-funded Energy & Environment Legal Institute admitted it was seeking emails that “embarrass both Professors Hughes and Overpeck and the University.” The conservative group Judicial Watch is suing the U.S. Department of Commerce, seeking the communications of former NOAA scientist Thomas Karl and former director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy John Holdren. Their purpose is to see whether these scientists “mishandled scientific data to advance the political agenda of global warming alarmism.”

Those groups are still at it. The difference, Kurtz said, is not that lawsuits have increased, but that the attorneys who perpetrated them have more political power. E&E Legal Institute General Council David Schnare, for instance, has sued several universities to gain access to climate scientists’ emails. He was named to the Trump transition team for the EPA and then joined the so-called “beachhead” team there, before eventually resigning because of differences with Pruitt. E&E Legal senior fellow Christopher Horner was also a member of Trump’s transition team.

Personal attacks persist as well, though it seems to rise and fall with the news. Hayhoe told me the amount of hate mail she’s received “spiked noticeably for two weeks” after Trump announced he would withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. (Hayhoe had spoken out against the decision.) “I mentioned it to quite a few people, [the spike] was so marked,” she said. Mann says he receives less hate mail too, and thinks the dip has to do with the fact that targeted trolling is less effective than it used to be. “The favorite approach of the climate change denial machine used to be to go after individual scientists, to try and make it seem like the consensus all depends on one person,” he said. “But I think now that the consensus has become as strong as it has, it feels like there’s been less aimed at me personally, because it’s just no longer credible to say that it’s all based on the work of Mike Mann.”

Indeed, most scientists say what’s really increased is a quieter form of intimidation: preventing government climate scientists from doing their jobs. The Union of Concerned Scientists’ report accused the Trump administration of “creating a hostile environment for federal agency scientists who serve the public,” citing the anti-climate rhetoric of agency administrators like Scott Pruitt and Rick Perry, proposed decimation of funding, and general interference in scientists’ work. The DOE’s International Climate Office (which has since been eliminated) asked staff in March to avoid the words “climate change,” “emissions reductions,” or “Paris Agreement” in communications.

Political appointees at the EPA are reviewing scientists’ work, and political appointees at Interior Department are reviewing science-based grants and contracts. “All action at the agency on climate has effectively stopped,” an EPA air quality scientist told The Guardian in June. And they’re being discouraged from interacting with other climate scientists. “There was a climate conference in Atlanta last month and EPA employees were told not to go,” the scientist said, “so even simple interactions are coming to an end.”

There’s probably good reason why that last quote is anonymously sourced: Government scientists can’t even speak about the most uncontroversial aspects of climate change without fearing demotion. Joel Clement, former director of the Office of Policy Analysis at the U.S. Interior Department, and a scientist who worked on climate issues, last week said he was demoted to the accounting office after speaking out about the threat of climate change to Alaska’s Native communities. “Silencing civil servants, stifling science, squandering taxpayer money and spurning communities in the face of imminent danger have never made America great,” he wrote in The Washington Post. “Let’s be honest: The Trump administration didn’t think my years of science and policy experience were better suited to accounts receivable. It sidelined me in the hope that I would be quiet or quit.”

Speaking out has always been the best way to ensure harassment. “There’s a target on your back if you’re a prominent communicator of climate change,” Mann said. “Sometimes it feels like the Boy Scouts fighting the marines. We face a very well-armed, determined opposition, and they don’t have to operate by the rules that we do.” As the scientific facts about climate change become more alarming, and the administration tries to keep silencing it, more scientists will feel the need to speak the truth—or so Mann hopes. “I think a lot of scientists have been cowed into submission by the assaults, the attacks,” Mann said. “The purpose of this fossil-fuel-funded attack machine is to intimidate scientists so they don’t speak out, and make an example of those who do.... The worse thing any of us can do is give in to that.”

Emily Atkin is a staff writer at The New Republic.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trump-administrations-attacks-on-science-already-surpass-two-george-bush-terms/

no lnx

Trump administration’s attacks on science already surpass two George Bush terms

Written by Elliott Negin / Common Dreams August 22, 2019

On July 19, President Trump hosted Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins and their families, along with the family of their deceased colleague Neil Armstrong, at a White House event to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon.

“Tomorrow will represent 50 years from the time we planted a beautiful American flag on the moon,” Trump said. “And that was an achievement, possibly one of the great, considered one of the great achievements ever.”

Trump’s fractured syntax notwithstanding, the Apollo program was indeed a stunning triumph of federal science, involving more than 34,000 National Aeronautics and Space Administration employees and 375,000 industry and university contractors. It was one of many spectacular achievements by federal and federally funded scientists over the last half-century, such as the creation of the internet, fiber optics and magnetic resonance imaging technology, not to mention the role those scientists played in providing the technical underpinning for health and environmental standards that save lives and protect critical ecosystems and wildlife habitats.

Trump’s lauding of the Apollo 11 mission rang a particularly discordant note given the lengths to which his administration has gone to destroy federal science by censoring scientific findings, gagging agency scientists and fostering a hostile working environment. Since taking office, the administration has launched more than 100 attacks on science, according to my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists—more than the George W. Bush administration amassed over its two four-year terms.

Sidelining Science

Just a day before Trump’s Apollo photo op, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced it would rejectscientific evidence and the recommendation of its own staff scientists by not banning chlorpyrifos, the widely used agricultural pesticide shown to hamper childhood brain development. It was the agency’s second scientifically indefensible chemical-related decision of the year. In April, it overruled the advice of its own scientists who urged the agency to follow the example of 55 other countries in completely banning asbestos, a known carcinogen.

Today’s EPA offers a stark example of the Trump administration’s crusade to dismantle science-based agencies. Nearly 1,600 employees left the EPA during the first year and a half of the EPA administration, while only 400 were hired, according to data obtained by The Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request. Of 1,600 employees who left, at least 260 were scientists, 185 were “environmental protection specialists” and 106 were engineers. The total number of employees at the agency today—14,172—is the lowest in 30 years.

Besides chopping staff, the EPA has dramatically reduced the role of outside science advisers. Last fall, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, disbanded a 20-member scientific advisory committee on particulate matter, failed to convene a similar panel on ozone, and packed a seven-member advisory committee on air quality standards with industry-friendly participants. SAB GRAHAM

The EPA is not the only agency pushing scientists out the door. The same day the EPA made its chlorpyrifos announcement, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that nearly two-thirds of 395 Washington, D.C.-based employees in its Economic Research Service, which provides analyses on a range of issues, and National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which oversees $1.7 billion in scientific funding, will quit rather than relocate to Kansas City.

The department’s dubious rationale for moving the Research Service and National Institute is placing researchers closer to farmers and cutting costs, but its ulterior motive is to hollow out their staffs, hindering their ability to carry out their missions. Mick Mulvaney, acting White House chief of staff, acknowledged as much during a speech he gave at an August 2 Republican fundraiser in South Carolina.

“You’ve heard about ‘drain the swamp.’ What you probably haven’t heard is what we are actually doing,” he said. “I don’t know if you saw the news the other day, but the USDA just tried to move, or did move, two offices out of Washington, D.C…. Guess what happened? More than half the people quit…. What a wonderful way to sort of streamline government, and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time.”

Capitol Hill Science Defenders

Some members of Congress are fighting back. Late last month, for example, the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress—a temporary committee with an equal number of Democrats and Republicans—unanimously approved a recommendation to resurrect the Office of Technology Assessment, a congressional watchdog agency that then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich killed in the mid-1990s.

The select committee’s recommendation comes on the heels of a draft House spending bill for the 2020 fiscal year that includes $6 million to jumpstart the agency, which provided Congress with analyses on a range of topics, from acid rain to climate change to renewable energy, from 1972 to 1995.

Meanwhile, House Democrats and Republicans alike voiced their support for protecting federal science during a recent Science, Space and Technology Committee hearing on scientific integrity. Two dozen federal agencies have adopted scientific integrity policies since 2010, but they are inconsistent and difficult to enforce, so some members of Congress want to codify protections in a law.

“Allowing political power or special interests to manipulate or suppress federal science hurts, and hurts all of us,” said New York Rep. Paul Tonko at the July 17 hearing. “It leads to dirtier air, unsafe water, toxic products on our shelves, and chemicals in our homes and environment. And it has driven federal inaction in response to the growing climate crisis.”

Earlier this year, Tonko introduced the Scientific Integrity Act, which would guarantee federal scientists the right to share their findings with the public, ensure the accuracy of government science-related communications, and protect scientific research from political interference.

Federal science has taken an unprecedented beating during the Trump administration and remains a long way from its glory days half a century ago when it landed men on the moon. Tonko recognizes that protecting scientific integrity is a critical first step to rebuilding American scientific enterprise and that it deserves bipartisan support.

“Scientific integrity is a longstanding concern that transcends any one party or political administration,” Tonko said. “The abuses directed by this president and his top officials have brought a new urgency to the issue, but the fact remains whether a Democrat or Republican sits in the [House] speaker’s chair or the Oval Office, we need strong scientific integrity policies.”

This article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/the-trump-administration-has-launched-more-than-100-attacks-on-science-in-unprecedented-assault/

no lnx

The Trump administration has launched more than 100 attacks on science in unprecedented assault

[px President Donald Trump holds up a jacket he was given by a guest, Tuesday, March 21, 2017, after signing the S-422 National Aeronautics and Space Administration Transition Authorization Act in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Paul D. Williams)]

Written by Elliott Negin / Independent Media Institute August 19, 2019

Sidelining Science

Just a day before Trump’s Apollo photo op, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced it would reject scientific evidence and the recommendation of its own staff scientists by not banning chlorpyrifos, the widely used agricultural pesticide shown to hamper childhood brain development. It was the agency’s second scientifically indefensible chemical-related decision of the year. In April, it overruled the advice of its own scientists who urged the agency to follow the example of 55 other countries in completely banning asbestos, a known carcinogen.

Capitol Hill Science Defenders

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

This article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

819 icn

Top CDC Health and Climate Scientist Files Whistleblower Complaint

BY: MARIANNE LAVELLE & GEORGINA GUSTIN

Here's what happened to a top scientist in the nation's premiere health agency. Other scientists, and climate science itself, have been sidelined in agencies across the government. Read More

ew 819

Top Scientist Quits USDA, Says Trump Admin Tried to Bury Study Linking Climate and Nutrition

---

Donations like yours enable us to provide free legal support to scientists like Maria Caffrey, a CSLDF client who filed a whistleblower complaint against the Trump administration on July 22. Caffrey was forced out of her job at the National Park Service after refusing to delete references to human-caused climate change from a report she authored about how sea level rise impacts coastal parks.

Sadly, attempts to muzzle scientists are increasingly common under the Trump administration. As Lauren Kurtz, our director, recently told The Guardian, this kind of censorship is “part of a larger trend of disputing scientific realities for political reasons” and it extends beyond climate to pesticide safety, reproductive health, and other issues.

https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/26/war-on-science-trump-administration-muzzles-climate-experts-critics-say

Maria Caffrey,

no lnx

War on science: Trump administration muzzles climate experts, critics say

Whistleblowers and groups tracking agency decisions say administration is ignoring science and censoring expertise

Emily Holden in Washington

Fri 26 Jul 2019 12.49 BST

The Trump administration is disregarding science and expertise across a wide range of government work, as documented by whistleblowers and groups tracking agency decisions.

Trump officials are censoring warnings about the climate crisis, moving critical agencies out of Washington and enacting far-reaching changes in what facts regulators can consider when they choose between industry and the public good.

[ I'm a scientist. Under Trump I lost my job for refusing to hide climate crisis facts

Maria Caffrey

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Amazon deforestation accelerating towards unrecoverable 'tipping ... ›

---

aha: dereg (damages protection of forest, thus buffer and resilience) and corruption is lack of info on effects so we can avert disaster --> AGW:

ref

https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/amazonian-rainforest-near-unrecoverable-tipping-point

guk no lnx

Amazon deforestation accelerating towards unrecoverable 'tipping point'

Data confirms fears that Jair Bolsonaro’s policy encourages illegal logging in Brazil

Jonathan Watts in Altamira

@jonathanwatts

Thu 25 Jul 2019 17.40 BST Last modified on Thu 25 Jul 2019 21.37 BST

Amazon rainforest turned into farmland. An area the size of Greater London has been lost this month. Photograph: Nacho Doce/Reuters

Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has surged above three football fields a minute, according to the latest government data, pushing the world’s biggest rainforest closer to a tipping point beyond which it cannot recover.

The sharp rise – following year-on-year increases in May and June – confirms fears that president Jair Bolsonaro has given a green light to illegal land invasion, logging and burning.

Clearance so far in July has hit 1,345 sq km, a third higher than the previous monthly record under the current monitoring system by the Deter B satellite system, which started in 2015.

With five days remaining, this is on course to be the first month for several years in which Brazil loses an area of forest bigger than Greater London.

The steady erosion of tree cover weakens the role of the rainforest in stabilising the global climate. Scientists warn that the forest is in growing danger of degrading into a savannah, after which its capacity to absorb carbon will be severely diminished, with consequences for the rest of the planet.

“It’s very important to keep repeating these concerns. There are a number of tipping points which are not far away,” said Philip Fearnside, a professor at Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research. “We can’t see exactly where they are, but we know they are very close. It means we have to do things right away. Unfortunately that is not what is happening. There are people denying we even have a problem.”

It may also complicate ratification of Brazil’s biggest ever trade deal with the European Union if EU legislators decide the South American nation is not keeping its side of the bargain, which includes a commitment to slow deforestation in line with the Paris climate agreement.

The official numbers from the National Institute for Space Research are a growing embarrassment to Bolsonaro, who has tried to fob them off as lies and criticised the head of the institute. Earlier this week, the president insisted the numbers should be screened by the ministry of science and technology and shown to him before being made public so that he did not get “caught with his pants down”.

This has raised fears that the data could be vetted in future rather than automatically updated online each day as is currently the case.

In his first seven months in power, Bolsonaro, who was elected with strong support from agribusiness and mining interests, has moved rapidly to erode government agencies responsible for forest protection.

He has weakened the environment agency and effectively put it under the supervision of the agricultural ministry, which is headed by the leader of the farming lobby. His foreign minister has dismissed climate science as part of a global Marxist plot. The president and other ministers have criticised the forest monitoring agency, Ibama, for imposing fines on illegal land grabbers and loggers. The government has also moved to weaken protections for nature reserves, indigenous territories and zones of sustainable production by forest peoples and invited businesspeople to register land counter-claims within those areas.

This has emboldened those who want to invade the forest, clear it and claim it for commercial purposes, mostly in the speculative expectation it will rise in value, but also partly for cattle pastures, soya fields and mines.

Earlier this month, it was reported that thousands of gold miners illegally invaded Yanomami indigenous territory near the border with Venezuela. Elsewhere, illegal loggers have mounted at least two attacks in response to Ibama enforcement operations, according to the Folha newspaper. On 4 July, they reportedly burned an Ibama truck in Espigão d’Oeste, Rondônia state and last week they were said to have burned bridges in Placas, Pará state.

Rather than defend his officials, the environment minister Ricardo Salles appeared to side with the loggers when he gave a speech to a group of them in Rondônia soon afterwards, in which he reportedly told them: “The timber industry deserves to be respected … What happens today in Brazil, unfortunately, is the result of years and years and years of a public policy of producing laws, rules, regulations that are not always related to the real world. What we are doing now is precisely bringing the legal part of the real world that happens in every country from north to south.”

During a recent G20 meeting, Bolsonaro told the German chancellor Angela Merkel that she had no right to criticise because Brazil’s conservation record was superior to that of Europe’s. This is a dubious claim, according to Climate Observatory, which cites World Bank data that shows Germany has given protected status to a bigger share of its land than Brazil.

Brazil is also going backwards fast. After an 80% reduction in the rate of deforestation between 2006 and 2012, successive governments have relaxed protections. Clearance has been creeping up. Last year, deforestation rose 13% to the highest level in a decade. This year is on course to be far worse and the trend is back towards the dark days of the early 2000s.

“Unfortunately, it is absurd, but it should not catch anyone by surprise. President Jair Bolsonaro and minister Ricardo Salles are dismantling our socio-environmental policies,” said Carlos Rittl, the executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, an NGO formed by a coalition of environmental groups.

He said Salles had eradicated the department responsible for policies to combat deforestation, that no leaders have been appointed in eight of the nine Ibama regional offices, and that operations to combat environmental crimes declined 70% between January and April 2019 compared with the same period last year.

The Deter satellite data is considered preliminary, but it is usually a guide to the longer-term trends. More detailed annual figures are usually released towards the end of the year, after the National Institute for Space Research has calculated data from the more powerful Prodes satellite system.

Trees are considered essential to climate stability. Earlier this month, a study indicated that planting a trillion trees could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities. But scientists say maintaining existing forests, particularly in the tropics, is far more important.

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/01/26/competitive-enterprise-institute-climate-denial-target-nbc-cities-liability-suits

main

ref

https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2018/12/12/ucla-law-professor-ann-carlson-cara-horowitz-cei/

Marco Poggio

A conservative think tank with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry has sued UCLA to obtain email correspondence between two UCLA climate law professors and pro-environment individuals involved in climate change litigation.

The lawsuit was filed last month in California Superior Court by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a libertarian group that lobbies against limits on greenhouse gas emissions and claims that CO2 is good for the environment. CEI argued the university hasn’t complied with two public record requests made in February and May under the California Public Records Act.

According to the lawsuit, Competitive Enterprise Institute v. Regents of the University of California, the emails show environmental law professors Cara Horowitz and Ann E. Carlson discussed future meetings with others, including staffers from several attorney general offices, to discuss new legal actions against major carbon producers.

The lawsuit mimics the ones filed to obtain email correspondence by several climate scientists, including prominent climatologist Michael Mann of Penn State, which was ended by the Virginia Supreme Court in 2012. Another continues to embroil University of Arizona scientists Jonathan Overpeck and Malcolm Hughes, who were recently ordered to release 13 years of emails demanded by another fossil fuel ally.

“This appears to be yet another effort by hired guns funded by polluting interests to badger, intimidate, and silence scientists whose findings prove inconvenient to those who continue to profit from our dependence on fossil fuels,” Mann said of the suit against UCLA.

Among the emails Horowitz and Carlson have been asked to release are those exchanged with litigators in direct contact with offices of pro-environment attorneys general around the country. That includes former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who in 2015 began investigating Exxon for possible climate change-related fraud.

Carlson told Climate Liability News that UCLA is working on complying with CEI’s record request, sorting through hundreds of emails.

“I don’t feel intimidated. I don’t have anything to hide,” Carlson said, “I don’t have a problem, so far, with what I’ve been required to turn over.

“I do worry that these tactics, more broadly, are designed to discourage public discourse about important topics, like climate change and who should pay for climate damages.”

Specifically, CEI has asked for correspondence between the two UCLA scholars and Shaun Goho, a Harvard lecturer and environmental lawyer with a record of environmental litigation in state and federal court.

Goho said the lawsuit is just an harassment tactic meant to divert the energy and resources of people fighting climate change away from their work.

“I don’t see how academics speaking with government officials about matters of public concern is a conspiracy. It doesn’t seem to make sense to me,” Goho said.

“This lawsuit doesn’t stand alone. It’s really part of a broader campaign by fossil fuels companies and their allies to harass people who are taking action trying to try to address climate change in various ways, whether it’s climate scientists, lawyers or others who are researching legal issues related to climate change and the relationship between climate change and the fossil fuel industry.”

CEI has deep ties to the fossil fuel industry. Exxon was its biggest funder until 2006, when public criticism pushed the company to distance itself from CEI’s climate denial campaigns.

CEI has also sought emails containing the names of other pro-environment lawyers and climate scientists, including Peter Frumhoff, the director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Sharon Eubanks, one of the attorneys involved in the federal tobacco litigation against Philip Morris.

Additionally, CEI demanded emails regarding two separate events—one held at Harvard and one at UCLA—attended by Carlson and Horowitz and employees of various state attorney general offices, private lawyers, academics and environmental activists, who were set to discuss causes of action against major carbon producers.

“Public records show that Professors Horowitz and Carlson are using their positions at your public university to coordinate with certain activists groups in organizing and pursuing law enforcement and civil investigations and litigation against private opponents of a particular political agenda. We seek correspondence and other records illuminating this use of a public university faculty position and resources,” the request’s text reads.

Frumhoff declined to comment for this story.

Central to the lawsuit are the UCLA and Harvard meetings, in which Carlson, Horowitz and other parties discussed legal actions against polluters.

The “secret meetings” as they were described in some of the emails, were attended by Frumhoff and Matthew Pawa, a lawyer with Hagens Berman, which is involved in several climate liability suits filed by communities against the fossil fuel industry. Those meetings also included staffers from attorney general offices around the country, including those of New York and California.

A CEI representative declined to comment, citing pending litigation, but referred to the organization’s website for a statement concerning the lawsuit.

“This ‘secret meeting’ agenda shows UCLA faculty briefed the attorneys general and prospective donors on potential legal actions they could pursue. Attorneys general are now pursuing the types of investigations urged by UCLA faculty,” Chris Horner, a senior fellow at CEI who signed the petition, wrote in the statement.

“This donor-funded scheme of using law enforcement to pursue a failed political agenda, raises significant constitutional and other legal issues, as well as ethics concerns. With the revelation that this involves the use of public institutions in this mercenary campaign, the public has a right to know what their employees are doingin their name, and on their dime,” Horner’s statement said the statement continues.

In its lawsuit, CEI claimed the subject matter contained in the emails is of “great public interest” and that the university has violated the California Constitution because delays in handing over the records practically meant a refusal to comply with the request.

The lawsuit presents new challenges to law practitioners in the field of environmental litigation, paving the way for an aggressive use of public record access law that some fear would stymie the process of accountability of carbon producers.

“I don’t know exactly where this is all leading. I do think it’s part of a broader campaign to try to divert attention away from oil industry’s own activities and own efforts to try to dissuade the public about the legitimacy and validity of climate science, and I worry about that,” Carlson said.

The use of public record access laws as a tool to hit back critics in the academic world is a fairly recent practice embraced by trade groups of several industries, not just oil and gas, to target opponents.

“Requests can be burdensome on government agencies,” said David Snyder, an expert in California public record access law who directs the First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit nonpartisan advocacy group that promotes free speech and public access to government information.

The law effectively puts academics in the same position as public officials that might have strong interests in not having their communications disclosed to the public.

“It seems like an odd fit, I acknowledge, for a college professor to sit in the same category as officials at city hall or at the governor’s office,” Snyder said. “Nonetheless, UCLA is a public agency, and employees of that public agency are subject to the public records act.”

A study compiled by the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit providing legal assistance to researchers, ranked each of the 50 states based on the level of protection from open records laws they grant to scientists working at publicly-funded institutions.

Only three states, Delaware, Maine, and Pennsylvania, exclude some forms of scientific and academic research from their open records laws. Laws in four other states, including Arkansas, Montana, New Mexico and North Carolina, contain no protection for researchers whatsoever. The remaining states guarantee different types of statutory exemption, deliberative process exemption and balancing tests that offer different degrees of protection.

“The breadth and strength of state open records laws and the federal equivalent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have made them powerful tools, but have also made them vulnerable to misuse and abuse by groups who try to harass researchers and stifle scientific research they dislike,” the study reads.

The right to exemption from having to turn over documents is often hard to balance with the right to access public records, which is critical to ensure transparency in institutions, Snyder said.

“It’s tricky,” Snyder said. “Under the public records act, by design, government agencies are not allowed to single out the requesters based on the reasons for which they want the records.”

“They can’t say, ‘we’re not gonna give you the records because we know that you espouse these views, because you want to use the records for this purpose,’ that’s expressly forbidden,” Snyder said. “You don’t want the government picking sides.”

not so much suppressed as ignored

trump epa fail

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/a-total-disgrace-outrage-as-trump-epa-says-it-wont-ban-pesticide-linked-to-brain-damage-in-children

no lnx

' A total disgrace’: Outrage as Trump EPA says it won’t ban pesticide linked to brain damage in children

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams July 19, 2019

In a move environmentalists denounced as yet another case of the Trump administration putting industry profits over public health, the Environmental Protection Agency announced on Thursday that it will not ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to brain damage in children.

“By allowing chlorpyrifos to stay in our fruits and vegetables, Trump’s EPA is breaking the law and neglecting the overwhelming scientific evidence that this pesticide harms children’s brains,” Patti Goldman, attorney with Earthjustice said in a statement. “It is a tragedy that this administration sides with corporations instead of children’s health.”

EPA chief Andrew Wheeler’s decision to reject a petition by environmental groups calling for a ban on the neurotoxic chemical ignores the assessments of his agency’s own scientists, said Tiffany Finck-Haynes, pesticides and pollinators program manager for Friends of the Earth.

“The EPA’s refusal to ban chlorpyrifos ignores decades of science showing that this pesticide has irrevocable effects on human health and the environment,” said Finck-Haynes. “The EPA is endangering the lives of children to protect pesticide industry profits.”

Friends of the Earth

@foe_us

Today Trump's @EPA announced that it will not #BanChlorpyrifos — a brain-damaging pesticide that EPA's own scientists have deemed unsafe at any level.

"The EPA is endangering the lives of children to protect pesticide industry profits."https://foe.org/news/trumps-epa-continues-delay-federal-ban-brain-damaging-pesticide-chlorpyrifos-leaving-states-take-action/ …

Trump’s EPA continues to delay federal ban on the brain-damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos, leaving...

Today, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it will not ban the neurotoxic, brain-damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos. Last summer, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals...

foe.org

Chlorpyrifos has been banned for household use since 2000, but the pesticide is still used by farmers on “more than 50 fruit, nut, cereal, and vegetable crops,” according to the New York Times.

“In 2016,” the Times reported, “more than 640,000 acres were treated with chlorpyrifos in California alone.”

The Obama administration in 2015 proposed banning use of the pesticide on food crops, but former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt authorized its continued use in 2017.

“This is a total disgrace,” Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) tweeted in response to the EPA’s decision on Thursday.

Finck-Haynes of Friends of the Earth said that as the federal government continues to work on behalf of chemical interests, states must take immediate action to protect the public and the environment.

“While the federal government refuses to act, we urge states to step in, ban chlorpyrifos, and demonstrate that they will safeguard public health and the environment,” said Finck-Haynes. “We call on [New York] Governor [Andrew] Cuomo to sign the chlorpyrifos ban bill sitting on his desk and protect New Yorkers from this toxic pesticide.”

In a statement on Thursday, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) highlighted the Trump administration’s ties to Dow Chemical, the largest producer of chlorpyrifos in the United States.

“The relationship between President Trump and Dow Chemical… has been called into question,” the group said. “Among other things, the chemical manufacturing giant reportedly donated $1 million for Trump’s inauguration, and its CEO previously played a chief advisory role to the president, heading up his now defunct American Manufacturing Council.”

Erik Olson, senior director of health and food at NRDC, said the effort to achieve a ban on chlorpyrifos will continue.

“Until EPA gets this stuff out of our fields and off our food,” said Olson, “this fight is not over.”

---

dereg nation

better: a new House bill would guarantee reporter access to federal scientists

Restrictions on government scientists talking to reporters are not a new thing.

To change that, some House Democrats have introduced a bill called the Scientific Integrity Act.

It would “allow reporters to directly reach out to agency researchers for insight on agency science and technical information. If scientists are not available, agencies would need to make a knowledgeable public affairs official available,” reports E&E News.

Over 190 House members, all Democrats, have signed on to the legislation at this writing.

"At the local level in western Colorado, I never used to have any issues accessing public land experts at any level locally, or even at the state level” during the George W. Bush era, Bloomberg Environment reporter Bobby Magill tells E&E. "That started to ratchet down during the Obama administration,"

(Full disclosure: Bobby Magill and I are fellow board members of the Society for Environmental Journalism.)

(The Bush administration did try to muzzle James Hansen, then a top NASA climate scientist, after he spoke publicly on the need to drastically reduce climate-heating carbon pollution. Hanson took his story to The New York Times in 2006.)

Under Trump, “the restrictions have taken on added significance…as outside experts have challenged the research and methodology federal regulators have used to justify undoing Obama-era regulations,” E&E notes.

In one example, “last year, the Los Angeles Times reported that researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey would now have to get permission from Interior before speaking with the press under a new protocol.”

Read H.R. 1706, the Scientific Integrity Act, see who’s sponsoring it, and follow its progress at congress.gov.

USDA under fire amid tension over relocation and climate work

E.A. CRUNDEN

Controversial agency relocation slammed as attack on science by lawmakers, employees

E.A. CRUNDEN

https://thinkprogress.org/agriculture-usda-blm-move-dc-climate-trump-protests-science-e8e534ec12fc/

719

Employees and Democratic lawmakers are pushing back on the Trump administration’s plans to relocate hundreds of positions within two agencies outside of Washington, D.C. — a move some see as an effort to clamp down on science.

While the planned moves of both the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and parts of the Department of Agriculture (USDA) differ in their scope and rationale, resistance to both plans has shaped up similarly.

Critics are expressing concern over the motivations behind the efforts, which would lead to a mass-exodus of agency experts unwilling to relocate. This would spur a science brain drain in line with President Donald Trump’s crackdown on reports and research from within his own government.

“These decisions… are meant to displace seasoned scientists and regulators who have honorably served Republican and Democratic Administrations alike,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) in a statement to ThinkProgress responding to both the BLM and USDA relocation plans. Van Hollen sits on the Interior and Environment Appropriations subcommittee.

Responsible for administering public lands, BLM has become a battleground under the Trump administration as the White House has rolled back the boundaries of national monuments and advocated for fossil fuel drilling on U.S. acreage.

Now, the bureau is sparking controversy again. Administration officials confirmed this week that the overwhelming majority of BLM positions in D.C. are set for relocation. Around 84% of BLM staffers will be asked to relocate by the end of next year to areas outside of the nation’s capital, mostly to western states.

That announcement comes a month after Secretary Sonny Perdue mandated that over 500 USDA employees move en masse to Kansas City — located in both Missouri and Kansas — by Sept. 30, and gave them a deadline of July 15 to respond.

[Lack of demand hasn’t stopped Trump from opening tons of land

to oil and gas drilling

In the case of BLM, the Interior Department (DOI) plans to concentrate many of the positions in Grand Junction, Colorado, in addition to a range of western states stretching from Arizona to Alaska. Joe Balash, DOI assistant secretary for land and minerals, called the decision “demonstrably cost-effective” in a July 16 letter to Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM), ranking member of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Interior and Environment.

The Trump administration argues that the move would both cut expenses and shift workers closer to the public lands they focus on, an argument supported by many Republicans including Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), who sits on the Natural Resources Committee.

But Democrats immediately raised objections. Udall said he had “serious reservations” about the move, as did his subcommittee counterpart in the House, Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN). Democrats in both chambers of Congress indicated this week that they feel the plan is largely an effort to push out the D.C.-based senior staff who do not want to relocate.

Many of those employees are experts in their field, including scientists. “It’s a way for them to get rid of a lot of professional staff here in Washington,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) in a statement.

Former Interior scientist calls out ‘culture of fear, censorship, and suppression’ under Trump

Many BLM employees are already located in other parts of the country and support for moving the bureau has been somewhat bipartisan over the years. But the latest push for relocation by the Trump administration coincides with a heated clash between USDA and its employees.

Given until this past Monday to make their decision, scores of USDA workers have opted out of moving. Of the employees with the USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), more than half declined to relocate, according to Politico.

ERS workers in particular argued that the move would disrupt their work and efforts to publish important scientific reports. NIFA, meanwhile, is responsible for grant funding that touches climate, economic, and agricultural work that uses D.C. as a home base.

Many USDA employees have also argued that the move is politically motivated. ERS has recently released reports critical of Trump’s escalating trade war with China and its impact on farmers.

Experts also worry the move is a warning shot with implications for climate science. An investigation by Politico last month found that USDA has repeatedly sought to burystudies showing the danger of climate change. That report noted that some scientists see the ERS move as a foreshadowing of wider repercussions for research that doesn’t align with the administration’s broader “energy dominance” agenda.

USDA workers have fought through their union, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), to dispute the move, but the department has rejected those efforts. Moreover, there is concern that other departments could face similar moves, like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey, both of which are under DOI’s jurisdiction.

But Democrats asserted that they are looking into measures to combat the relocations, emphasizing that the move could be costly to taxpayers in addition to dramatically shifting the wealth of knowledge offered by current government staffers.

Lawmakers indicated they might seek to halt the relocation by blocking its funding in the upcoming appropriations bill that covers both the DOI and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). A group of senators, including Van Hollen, have meanwhile introduced legislation to keep ERS and NIFA in the D.C. metro area, a move that was made before the BLM move was announced.

“This Administration is acting to undermine the subject-matter experts at many of our federal agencies,” said Van Hollen, who added that his office would “continue to use every tool available to push back against these actions.”

This article has been updated to note that only USDA would be impacted by the Senate legislation due to timing.

---

Former Interior scientist calls out ‘culture of fear, censorship, and suppression’ under Trump

KYLA MANDEL

---

Former Interior scientist calls out ‘culture of fear, censorship, and suppression’ under Trump

KYLA MANDEL

There is a “culture of fear, censorship, and suppression” within the Trump administration that is impeding government scientists from doing their best work, former Interior Department policy director and scientist turned whistleblower Joel Clement warned on Wednesday.

Speaking to lawmakers on the House Science Committee, scientific experts spoke about the need for stronger rules to support the integrity of their research and ensure that political agendas don’t dictate or interfere with the data.

“There is not Democratic science, there is not Republican science, there is just science,” said Michael Halpern, deputy director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Halpern pointed to instances under current and previous administrations, including under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, of scientific assessments being either watered down or language softened. He pointed to past research on lead in school lunchboxes and on the impact of fracking on drinking water.

But the scientists said that under President Donald Trump, political interference had reached a new level.

As Clement highlighted, a study into the rules needed to protect the health and safety of offshore oil rig workers was canceled right before a set of measures to protect the workers was rolled-back. Similarly, a study into the health impacts of surface coal mining was canceled right before making moves to support the coal industry.

Other studies have been delayed, such as one on the health impacts of PFAS chemicals in drinking water for fear of a “public relations nightmare,” while agencies have seen some scientists self-censor their work out of fear, such as removing the words “climate change” from reports.

“The American people lose when we end up with manipulated, suppressed, or distorted information,” Halpern said. After all, as multiple experts testified, it’s taxpayer money that funds government scientists — the public paid for that research and deserves to see it.

The result is “dirtier air, dirtier water,” added Clement, who resigned from his post at the Interior in July 2017 after being reassigned to “an unrelated job” by former Secretary Ryan Zinke. Clement saw the move as an attempt to push him out for speaking out about the impacts of climate change on Alaskan native communities.

The hearing on Wednesday follows the release of a bill by committee member Rep. Paul Tonko (D-NY), called the Scientific Integrity Act, earlier this year. The bill, which has the support of nearly 200 House members, is intended to insulate “public scientific research and reports from the distorting influence of political and special interests” according to Tonko.

While Tonko reminded everyone at the hearing that he began working on the bill in 2016 under the Obama administration, he added, “The abuses directed by this President [Trump] and his top officials have brought a new urgency to the issue.”

While more than 20 federal agencies have some type of scientific integrity policy, not all of these policies are successfully or fully implemented. As an April report by the Government Accountability Office found, of the nine agencies reviewed, seven have “specific, documented procedures” for identifying and addressing alleged violations. The report also made 10 recommendations to agencies for addressing the need to better educate staff on the issue, provide greater oversight, and develop procedures to identify and address potential violations.

Scandals mount under David Bernhardt just two weeks after being confirmed to lead Interior

Ethics probes are still in full swing.

Last year, the EPA announced it would begin an investigation to see whether its scientific integrity policy was being properly implemented. This came after a survey was released by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which showed that government scientists across 16 agencies and departments had concerns with the degree of political influence over their work.

Specifically, the annual survey for 2018 showed that a third of the nearly 449 EPA respondents worried about the “influence” of political appointees or White House officials over “science-based” decisions. Less than 30% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “My agency adheres to its scientific integrity policy.”

In addition, roughly a third of EPA respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they had either been asked directly to omit or independently decided to avoid the use of the term “climate change” in their work.

There is technically nothing stopping an agency from dismantling its scientific integrity policy, said Halpern. That’s why a bill such as the one proposed by Tonko would go a long way to buttress, or add “statutory heft,” to agency policies as Clement described.

Clement called the Scientific Integrity Act a good first step, but noted that in order to be truly effective, broader ethics and integrity standards were needed across agencies.

Indeed, many of the individuals overseeing agencies come from the industry they are now responsible for regulating. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Interior (DOI) have faced numerous ethics scandals regarding potential conflicts of interest and alleged industry influence.

EPA internal watchdog will audit the agency’s Scientific Integrity Policy

Less than a third of EPA staff surveyed said they felt the agency adheres to its scientific integrity policy.

In March, for instance, The New York Times revealed documents showing DOI Secretary David Bernhardt intervened to block a study showing pesticides might threaten the existence of 1,200 endangered species; Bernhardt has a history of lobbying against the Endangered Species Act.

But due to the “hostile leadership situation,” there are many scientists who are simply keeping their heads down and staying quiet about issues surrounding scientific integrity under the current administration.

“I’d love if every policymaker thought of science as the North Star,” said Clement, “but I hope it’s part of the constellation.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/trump-official-resigns-in-protest-after-the-white-house-blocked-him-from-revealing-evidence-of-climate-change-report/

no lnx

Trump administration official resigns ‘in protest’ after the White House blocked his testimony on evidence of climate change: report

House Intelligence Committee

written by Cody Fenwick July 10, 2019

Rod Schoonover has resigned as a State Department intelligence official “in protest” over the White House’s decision to block him from presenting evidence and data on the impacts of climate change in Congressional testimony, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

The report cited anonymous State Department officials as sources on the development. Previous reporting had revealed that the White House had blocked the written testimony.

The Washington Post reported:

According to several senior administration officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about internal deliberations, Trump administration officials sought to cut several pages of the document on the grounds that its description of climate science did not mesh with the administration’s official stance. Critics of the testimony included William Happer, a National Security Council senior director who has touted the benefits of carbon dioxide and sought to establish a federal task force to challenge the scientific consensus that human activity is driving the planet’s rising temperatures.

Schoonover still testified before the House Intelligence Committee on June 5, 2019, on the topic of the national security implications of climate change, but he wasn’t allowed to provide evidence and data supporting his conclusions in his written testimony, the Journal reported. His written remarks were reportedly cut in half to exclude this information.

“As an intelligence officer, my job is to provide clear, objective, independent analysis top policymakers to advance U.S. national security,” Schoonover said at the hearing. “The Earth’s climate is unequivocally undergoing a long-term warming trend, as established by decades of scientific measurements from multiple independent lines of evidence.”

He added: “We see few plausible future scenarios where significant harm does not arise from the compounded effects of climate change. People’s choices in the present and future, however, dictate the magnitude of many factors.”

The Journal reported that Schoonover’s last day at the department will be Friday after having worked there for almost a decade.

The event highlights an ongoing struggle in the Trump administration, which arises from the fundamental failures of the Republican Party more broadly. The federal government has developed layers of experts and career officials who work to provide the analysis and information to elected and appointed officials in order for them to best carry out their duties to the public. But these career officials, while they certainly have political opinions, largely do their work with dedication toward pursuing the objective truth to aid decisionmakers. When a party like the GOP becomes so disconnected from reality that it denies the scientific consensus on climate change, it will likely clash with the government’s experts.

Alternatively, as occurred under President George W. Bush, the intelligence community may be co-opted into building the case for even a deeply misguided policy aim such as the Iraq War. Notably, the Journal pointed out that Schoonover’s agency, the Intelligence and Research Bureau, “was nearly alone among spy agencies in questioning whether Iraq had active weapons of mass destruction programs” when Bush pushed for war in 2003.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/7/1/1868871/-Climate-Change-USDA-Scientists-to-be-fired-in-2-weeks-DANGER

also trms 2x

...Why is he wanting to fire Scientists who study climate change? ( According to Rachel and other reports. www.scientificamerican.com/…

Then we have the Food and Drug inspectors who have a problem thanks to the orange dung.

USDA inspects food, and meds.

www.washingtonpost.com/...

The Agriculture Department is offering employees a rare choice: accept a forced transfer to a post 1,000 miles away or be fired.

The Trump administration’s plan to move two agencies from the District to the Kansas City area includes a document with two blank boxes on it, sent to employees on June 13. Check one, it instructs: Accept the transfer by July 15 or “be separated by adverse action procedures.”

William Jolly, a research ecologist with the agency's Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, Mont., was supposed to give a 30-minute presentation titled "Climate-Induced Variations in Global Severe Fire Weather Conditions" at the International Fire Congress in Orlando, Fla., next month. The event is hosted by the Association for Fire Ecology (AFE).

The travel denial follows reports last week that U.S. EPA blocked three scientists from making presentations at a conference in Rhode Island featuring climate change. Critics accused the Trump administration of stifling the dissemination of taxpayer-funded science.

...

maybe he's ok with suppressing sci, just does not want gop to be BUSTED for it?

619 dereg nation

The Wall Street Journal reports that “a small but growing number of Republican lawmakers are urging action on climate change, driven by shifting sentiment among GOP voters and the effects of global warming, from stronger hurricanes to more-destructive wildfires.”

According to the Journal, longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz (author of a now-infamous memo on how to confuse and divide voters about climate change) has warned Republicans that their obstruction and anti-science rhetoric are driving away voters, particularly younger conservatives.

great: flood survivors want answers for unnatural disasters

After her hometown flooded for the fourth time in three years, killing some of her neighbors, Missourian Susan Liley got mad.

Liley and other De Soto residents founded the Citizen’s Committee for Flood Relief in 2015 with two initial goals, as Ensia, the solutions-focused digital magazine, reports: “figure out some kind of early warning system” and “understand the root causes of repeated flooding and address them”...

---

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/06/10/rod-schoonover-trump-attempted-suppress-state-dept-analyst-testimony-climate-crisis

The Trump administration issued one of its most blatant attacks on climate science this past week when it tried to stop a State Department employee from testifying on the climate crisis, reports showed on Saturday.

As the Washington Post reported, intelligence analyst Rod Schoonover's testimony was submitted to the White House for approval ahead of his planned appearance before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. His remarks focused on the national security risks posed by the climate crisis.

The Trump administration refused to approve the testimony for entry into the congressional record, noting that the data Schoonover planned to present—drawing from top government scientists' research and peer-reviewed scientific reports—did not align with the executive branch's views.

[pix]

National Security Council advisers wrote a number of comments on Schoonover's draft, saying the testimony was “not objective.”

The testimony “includes lots of climate alarm propaganda that is not science at all,” wrote William Happer, a senior member of the National Security Council who has sought to create a federal task force to challenge the consensus reached by 97 percent of peer-reviewed climate scientists who say humans are contributing to the climate crisis.

“I am embarrassed to have this go out on behalf of the executive branch of the federal government,” Happer added, noting a particular objection to Schoonover's use of the term “tipping point” in reference to possible devastating, irreversible effects of the climate crisis.

“'Tipping points' is a propaganda slogan for the scientifically illiterate,” Happer wrote.

Related: Get the background from DeSmog on climate science denier William Happer, and read: Physicist William Happer, the 'Unmoored' Climate Science Denier Heading a White House Climate Probe

Schoonover was ultimately permitted to testify before the committee, but his testimony was not submitted into the record because, the Office of Legislative Affairs said, it did not “jibe” with the Trump administration's views on the climate.

President Donald Trump and many of his appointees deny that human activity like the extraction of fossil fuels are contributing to the warming of the globe, which scientists warn is already causing extreme weather events like hurricanes and wildfires, rising sea levels, and melting glaciers. As Schoonover mentioned in his testimony, the last five years have been the warmest on record according to NASA.

Although Schoonover was able to testify, climate action advocates decried the White House's attempt to stifle the information he eventually shared with the committee.

“Any attempt to suppress information on the security risks of climate change threatens to leave the American public vulnerable and unsafe,” Francesco Femia, chief executive of the Council on Strategic Risks and co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security, told the Post.

...

---

see also he warns not to listen to press, yahoo

EPA Science Advisers Push Back on Wheeler, Saying He's Minimizing Their Role

BY: MARIANNE LAVELLE

Under Trump, the EPA administrator — a former coal lobbyist — is also pushing a plan to reduce the use of science in policy making. Read More

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05062019/epa-wheeler-science-advisory-board-meeting-limiting-scientific-studies-trump-methane-rule

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler vowed on Wednesday to make greater use of the agency's official board of science advisers. But soon after he spoke, some of those advisers and other outside experts protested that the agency was instead limiting their role.

Wheeler took the unusual step of addressing the first meeting in a year of the Science Advisory Board (SAB), a group of advisers established by law who should be holding six to eight meetings annually, according to its charter. The reason he was there, Wheeler said, was to show his commitment to a better process.

"I'm glad to be here to lay out a new direction for how EPA interacts with and uses the SAB," he said. "I will be the first to admit we have not utilized you the way that we should. We can and we will do better."

The Science Advisory Board has become a center of controversy as President Donald Trump's administration has sought to remake the federal agencies. Researchers who receive EPA grant money have been barred from serving on the board, while several industry consultants and contrarian scientists have been brought aboard. Although some holdovers remain from previous administrations, Trump-era appointees now make up a large portion of the 44-member body. Some of them are known for their outlying views beyond the prevailing scientific consensus, or for representing the interests of regulated businesses.

Noting the lengthy vetting process for appointees, Wheeler said, "Why should we have talented public servants go through all of that only to use you sparingly? Today we are beginning the transition to a new process. It's no secret that the process was broken, and was not beneficial to the EPA, the board, or the public we all serve."

But some members of the board parried with Wheeler and other EPA officials at the meeting over exactly what part of the process is broken—the advisory process, or how the Trump administration is proceeding with a deregulatory agenda that gives less weight to some of the science that has guided the agency for years.

One SAB member who is a holdover from before Trump, Steven Hamburg, chief scientist of the Environmental Defense Fund, asked Wheeler why the Science Advisory Board had not had an opportunity to weigh in on some of the latest science in the agency's repeal of the Obama administration's regulations on control of methane emissions from oil and gas operations. The SAB raised concerns over that proposal when it met a year ago, and it had an opportunity to confer with another group of outside EPA experts, the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee, but Hamburg said their focus was more on technology than science. EDF, an environmental group, has been involved in a number of large scientific studies on the extent of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, released by the oil and gas industry.

Wheeler said that in the future, he hoped to involve the Science Advisory Board earlier in the process—soon after proposals are made public, but he couldn't change what happened in the past.

"The one you cite—I'm sorry, it's too late in the regulatory process," Wheeler said. "I can't go back and reopen some of the regulations we've already done." The agency finished taking public comment on its methane proposal last December, but has not yet finalized a rule.

One public commenter, John Bachmann, a 33-year veteran of the EPA who is now retired, said that under the 1978 law that governs the EPA's use of its science advisory board, the agency is actually required to provide its regulatory proposals and the underlying science to the Science Advisory Board before a proposal is made public. Bachmann now works with the Environmental Protection Network, a group of former agency scientists and other staffers who have been critical of the EPA's moves under the Trump administration.

Wheeler's Controversial 'Secret Science' Plan

But much of the debate at the first day of a two-day meeting centered on a controversial policy proposal that Wheeler said he was committed to finalizing this year even though it had provoked an outcry that left him "a little shocked."

The proposal, called "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science," would limit the kinds of science the agency can use in its decision-making. The agency received some 600,000 comments on the proposal, including from leading scientific journals, professional organizations and universities. Because many human health studies rely on information gathered under confidentiality agreements, and the raw data has not been made public, the proposal could prevent the agency from using some of the seminal studies underpinning air pollution regulations, for example.

Barbara Morrissey, of Washington State's Department of Health, sitting on the board on an ex officio basis as chair of another advisory group, the Children's Health Protection Advisory Committee, told Wheeler she was concerned about how EPA could meet its legal requirement of using the best available science, if that science can't be replicated in the manner the EPA envisions.

Wheeler said there would be "a safeguard" in the system, giving the EPA Administrator the discretion to include an important study even if it can't be replicated. "I do fundamentally believe that the more information we put out, the more sound our decisions will be and the more easily understood and accepted by the public," Wheeler said.

But one public commenter, Veena Singla, associate director of the reproductive and environmental health program at the University of California, San Francisco, said her concerns about the proposal were not assuaged.

"Having a political appointee deciding what science is in or out of policymaking is not a safeguard, but rather a fundamentally biased process," Singla said.

Before the meeting, the EPA had given the Science Advisory Board a charge to weigh in on two narrow aspects of that rule—how the agency should deal with confidential business information, and how to shield personally identifiable information in the large health studies that in the past have been the basis for much of the agency's decision-making.

SAB 'Should Be Giving an Independent Look'

Allison Cullen, associate dean of the school of public policy and governance at the University of Washington, was one of several board members who objected to the fact that the scope of comments that the EPA sought from the SAB was being limited—in contrast, she said, the public had been asked to comment on the proposed regulation broadly.

"The SAB is an independent body that should be giving an independent look at this, not necessarily responding to what the public comments are," Cullen said.

Hamburg said that the time frame that the SAB had been given to weigh in on the measure was also too compressed for the board to weigh in effectively. "There's a lack of transparency about this 'transparency' proposal," said Hamburg. "It's inconsistent with what the administrator says about wanting to fix a broken system."

New Appointees Side with Wheeler

But several of the board members who were appointed by Wheeler and by his predecessor, former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, praised the agency for its effort.

New SAB member Robert Phalen, an air pollution researcher at the Irvine campus of the University of California, has long been critical of the air pollution studies that the EPA has relied on, which use raw data not available to the public. "A short cut—if a study cannot be replicated for privacy concerns, probably the alternative is to simply drop that from consideration and rely on the vast amount of other studies. That's just a raw suggestion from an SAB member."

Stanley Young, a statistician who did work for the pharmaceutical industry and others before being appointed to the SAB by Pruitt, said that there should be no privacy concerns in epidemiology studies that track mortality. "Once a person is dead, they are not considered a person," he said. He said he hoped that the agency was prepared for "epidemiological foot dragging and stonewalling" about release of its data.

The SAB will be holding a teleconference with the EPA later this summer to further discuss the transparency rule.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

REGULATION

ANDREW WHEELER EPA DONALD TRUMP

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/us/politics/trump-climate-science.html

some lnx below

Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science

May 27, 2019

WASHINGTON — President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term “global warming” into a punch line rather than a prognosis.

Now, after two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.

And, in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.

[Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.]

Mr. Trump is less an ideologue than an armchair naysayer about climate change, according to people who know him. He came into office viewing agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency as bastions of what he calls the “deep state,” and his contempt for their past work on the issue is an animating factor in trying to force them to abandon key aspects of the methodology they use to try to understand the causes and consequences of a dangerously warming planet.

As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.

The attack on science is underway throughout the government. In the most recent example, the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey, James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.

Image

President Trump has pushed to resurrect the idea of holding public debates on the validity of climate science.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times]

Scientists say that would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040. Models show that the planet will most likely warm at about the same rate through about 2050. From that point until the end of the century, however, the rate of warming differs significantly with an increase or decrease in carbon emissions.

The administration’s prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the earth’s atmosphere could warm by as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences.

Work on the next report, which is expected to be released in 2021 or 2022, has already begun. But from now on, officials said, such worst-case scenario projections will not automatically be included in the National Climate Assessment or in some other scientific reports produced by the government.

“What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science — to push the science in a direction that’s consistent with their politics,” said Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment. “It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”

In an email, James Hewitt, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, defended the proposed changes.

“The previous use of inaccurate modeling that focuses on worst-case emissions scenarios, that does not reflect real-world conditions, needs to be thoroughly re-examined and tested if such information is going to serve as the scientific foundation of nationwide decision-making now and in the future,” Mr. Hewitt said.

However, the goal of political appointees in the Trump administration is not just to change the climate assessment’s methodology, which has broad scientific consensus, but also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide — sometimes to an awkward degree.

Image

The Beaufort Sea in the Arctic, a region that is warming rapidly. The United States recently declined to sign a communiqué on protecting the Arctic unless it omitted references to climate change.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times]

“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” the physicist, William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council as the president’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies, said in 2014 in an interview with CNBC.

Mr. Happer’s proposed panel is backed by John R. Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, who brought Mr. Happer into the N.S.C. after an earlier effort to recruit him during the transition.

Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.

Climate scientists are dismissive of Mr. Happer; his former colleagues at Princeton are chagrined. And several White House officials — including Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser — have urged Mr. Trump not to adopt Mr. Happer’s proposal, on the grounds that it would be perceived as a White House attack on science.

Even Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House strategist who views Mr. Happer as “the climate hustler’s worst nightmare — a world-class physicist from the nation’s leading institution of advanced learning, who does not suffer fools gladly,” is apprehensive about what Mr. Happer is trying to do.

“The very idea will start a holy war on cable before 2020,” he said. “Better to win now and introduce the study in the second inaugural address.”

But at a White House meeting on May 1, at which the skeptical advisers made their case, Mr. Trump appeared unpersuaded, people familiar with the meeting said. Mr. Happer, they said, is optimistic that the panel will go forward.

Image

William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council, is pushing to create a climate review panel that would question scientific consensus.CreditPool photo by Albin Lohr-Jones]

The concept is not new. Mr. Trump has pushed to resurrect the idea of a series of military-style exercises, known as “red team, blue team” debates, on the validity of climate science first promoted by Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator who was forced to resign last year amid multiple scandals.

At the time, the idea was shot down by John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff. But since Mr. Kelly’s departure, Mr. Trump has talked about using Mr. Happer’s proposed panel as a forum for it.

For Mr. Trump, climate change is often the subject of mockery. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” he posted on Twitter in January when a snowstorm was freezing much of the country.

His views are influenced mainly by friends and donors like Carl Icahn, the New York investor who owns oil refineries, and the oil-and-gas billionaire Harold Hamm — both of whom pushed Mr. Trump to deregulate the energy industry.

ImageThe Daily Poster

Listen to ‘The Daily’: The White House Plan to Change Climate Science]

After two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, President Trump and his appointees are going after influential government reports.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00/0:00

Listen to ‘The Daily’: The White House Plan to Change Climate Science

Hosted by Michael Barbaro; produced by Rachel Quester and Luke Vander Ploeg, with help from Adizah Eghan; and edited by Paige Cowett and Marc Georges

After two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, President Trump and his appointees are going after influential government reports.

[Music]

Michael Barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today, from the start, the Trump administration has tried to dismantle regulations aimed at curbing climate change. Now, in its latest attack, the administration is trying to dismantle climate science. It’s Wednesday, May 29. Coral, tell me about what happened in November of last year.

Coral Davenport

In November of 2018, the federal government put out what’s known as the National Climate Assessment. This is a huge, sweeping comprehensive assessment of the impact of climate change on the U.S. It’s over 1,000 pages long. It’s prepared by 13 federal agencies. It takes about four years to prepare. It’s a huge deal every time one of these comes out, because it is absolutely considered the most up to date, comprehensive, authoritative understanding of the impact of climate change on the U.S. And it’s a big deal when it comes out in the U.S. It’s a big deal around the world, because it’s also considered one of the most authoritative climate science documents in the world.

Michael Barbaro

So this is kind of like the Bible of U.S. climate science?

Coral Davenport

Yes, exactly.

Michael Barbaro

Coral Davenport covers environmental policy for The Times.

Coral Davenport

And so what the Trump administration decided to do with this is essentially to bury it. They are mandated by law to put it out. There’s a law that says the agencies have to put it out every four years. But they decided to put it online at about 2:00 or 3:00 PM on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.

[Music]

Michael Barbaro

So at a moment when just about everybody is either literally on vacation or on some vacation of the mind?

Coral Davenport

Yes. The people who were not on vacation were climate journalists.

Archived Recording 1

When most Americans are tucking into turkey leftovers and waiting in line for Black Friday sales, the government has released a huge report on the impact of climate change.

Coral Davenport

The strategy of trying to bury it didn’t work at all.

Archived Recording 2

The report wasn’t expected to be made public until next month, leading some to wonder if Friday’s release was an attempt to bury the story.

Coral Davenport

Mainly because it had such kind of stunning and deeply researched conclusions.

Archived Recording 3

A dire new forecast, more frequent and more devastating weather crises on the horizon.

Archived Recording 4

For the southeast, stronger hurricanes and more frequent flooding. The Midwest, agricultural catastrophe, extreme heat destroying crops. And in the west, increased fire danger.

Archived Recording 5

That predicts hotter temperatures will kill more people. Crop yields will decline dramatically. And ocean acidification will cause millions of dollars in losses to the seafood industry. According to those findings, rising sea levels will threaten public infrastructure and real estate along U.S. coasts.

Coral Davenport

And the impacts of that could be devastating specifically to the United States economy.

Archived Recording 6

The report states if greenhouse gases continue to rise, the country will see labor-related losses of $150 billion a year by 2090. Damage to coastal property due to the rise in sea levels and storm surges could reach nearly $120 billion a year.

Coral Davenport

And the report actually found that these impacts could knock as much as 10 percent off the U.S. G.D.P. by the end of the century, which is a huge economic hit. And I think that was the kind of thing that really sort of stunned the administration. Essentially, the conclusions of this report totally undermine the policy agenda, the regulatory agenda of this administration. This administration’s policy agenda, very specifically, is about, literally, emitting more greenhouse gas emissions.

Archived Recording (Donald Trump)

We’re eliminating unnecessary regulations so we can create more jobs and wealth right here in America. I’ve ended the Obama administration’s war on coal. And we’re putting our wonderful coal miners back to work, producing beautiful clean coal.

Coral Davenport

Under President Trump, we have seen the rollback of a couple of key greenhouse gas emissions regulations that were put in place in the Obama administration. One is a major E.P.A. regulation on greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles.

Archived Recording 1

Regulations put in place by the Obama administration call for new vehicles to get 36 miles per gallon by 2025. The Trump administration says that’s too high.

Coral Davenport

There’s another major E.P.A. regulation from the Obama administration that would have drastically reduced greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants, leading to shutdown of power plants, freezing construction of future power plants. The Trump administration is rolling that back.

Archived Recording 2

President’s move ends a moratorium on coal mining on federal land and eases restrictions on coal-fired power plants.

Coral Davenport

And the interior department is rolling back protections on public lands and federal waters in order to not just allow but aggressively promote the exploration and extraction of more fossil fuels, more oil, more gas, more coal, with the specific intent of driving the consumption and the burning of more fossil fuels, producing more greenhouse gases. I mean, this is a very explicit policy agenda. And this report says the results of this policy agenda are going to devastate the U.S. economy. I mean, these two sets of facts are in total conflict.

Michael Barbaro

So not only does this report make the case that these policies will worsen carbon emissions and therefore be bad for the environment, but this report is suggesting that these policies that are meant to strengthen the U.S. economy will, because of the environmental damage that they will inflict, actually hurt it.

Coral Davenport

Precisely.

Michael Barbaro

So what happens after this, for the Trump administration, pretty embarrassing report comes out?

Coral Davenport

Well, at first, the White House and the president slammed it.

Archived Recording (Donald Trump)

I don’t believe it.

Archived Recording 1

You don’t believe it?

Archived Recording (Donald Trump)

No, no. I don’t believe it.

Coral Davenport

And then kind of tried to move on from it. And that was kind of what happened with the public face at the White House. In the background, it’s important to remember that this is kind of a moment where there was a transition happening among top Trump environmental officials. Previously, we had seen top officials like Scott Pruitt, who was the first head of the E.P.A. under Trump who had spent his tenure pretty much constantly fighting off accusations of scandal and corruption. Or Ryan Zinke, the former Secretary of the Interior, same thing, was forced to resign after multiple allegations of scandal as well. These guys had been these big, high-profile, very politically flashy officials. They had left. And their replacements were these two senior officials who were much less flashy, much less scandal-plagued, much less in the headlines, not public figures, but really, really smart at the inside Washington game.

The new head of the E.P.A. is Andrew Wheeler, who is a former coal lobbyist who has also worked as a senior official on the Hill, also worked in the E.P.A. in the George W. Bush administration. David Bernhardt is the new Secretary of the Interior. He used to be an oil lobbyist. Used to work at the Interior Department under the George W. Bush administration. These are guys who aren’t trying to pursue political careers in a big way. They do know how to pull the levers and get policy done. These guys and some of the other top officials look at this report and say, there’s a bigger problem here. This is not just embarrassing. This is not just a couple of bad headlines for us. And this is why.

Lawyers looking to fight these Trump regulatory rollbacks can use this document in court, in the Supreme Court, essentially saying, look, if your own administration says adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere hurts the U.S. economy, how can you make the legal justification to put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The law says you can’t do these regulatory changes if they’re going to substantially hurt the economy. There’s a very clear legal argument to be made. And so these guys are kind of realizing this is a big problem for us, the fact that this thing is out there and exists, and we’re trying to do this policy agenda. This is more than just embarrassing.

Michael Barbaro

So in other words, they’re seeing this report as a potential legal blueprint for their opponents to challenge their policies in court.

Coral Davenport

Opponents of these policies have already said explicitly that once these regulatory rollbacks are done and they go to court, they absolutely intend to use this report to challenge them all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Michael Barbaro

Hmm. So they will take this giant climate report, the one that the Trump administration doesn’t like but know by law it has to put out. And they will introduce this as evidence that these regulatory rollbacks should be invalidated?

Coral Davenport

Exactly.

Michael Barbaro

So what do these officials in the Trump administration do once they realize that this legal exposure exists?

Coral Davenport

Well, they can’t do anything about the current report. That’s out there. That’s done.

[Music]

Coral Davenport

But they start thinking, all right, well, work on the next report, which is coming out in four years, has just started. And they can change the outcome, they think, of the next scientific report.

Michael Barbaro

Well, how exactly does that work? Because you can’t exactly change climate science.

Coral Davenport

Right. And they’re not saying we’re going to fundamentally change the methods by which we do climate science, because, keep in mind, it’s not just the National Climate Assessment. That’s the major report that’s put out by the federal government. But the federal government does climate science reports across the agencies. So they are having a discussion that asks the question, how much information can we leave out. How much does the public really need to know?

Michael Barbaro

We’ll be right back. So Coral, what does the Trump administration decide to do to limit what makes it into these official government reports on climate science?

Coral Davenport

There’s a couple of different ways that this is happening. In one agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, all they do is scientific reports. They’re inside the Interior Department. There is a new policy in place already happening that all of that climate science and all their reports have to include some element of how climate change impacts public lands and waters and the different things that they do. There’s a new policy that climate projections can’t go past the year 2040.

Michael Barbaro

What’s significant about that?

Coral Davenport

If you look at a climate science model, a projection, what’s going to be the impact of the warming planet. If you look at those, the worst impacts, the biggest difference all happen past 2050. After 2050, that’s when you start to see the really dramatic bad impacts of a lot more greenhouse gases. So this policy of saying, our climate science is not going to include any projections after 2040 creates, essentially, scientists say, a falsely optimistic, falsely positive idea. It doesn’t show you the bad stuff that happens if we keep polluting.

Michael Barbaro

So the worst this, the worst impacts of the emissions policies that are currently being pursued by the Trump administration would make themselves apparent in projections after 2040. And what this proposal would do is just keep those projections before 2040 and therefore keep the worst, most dire predictions out of these reports?

Coral Davenport

Precisely. And this isn’t a proposal. This is already happening at the U.S. Geological Survey, which is a scientific agency inside the Interior Department.

Michael Barbaro

O.K., so what else is the administration doing to limit the public’s exposure to this information in these reports?

Coral Davenport

So there’s another major proposal, and this is more of a proposal. This hasn’t happened yet. Specifically focused on the National Climate Assessment. In these big climate science reports, there’s usually a range of options based on how much greenhouse pollution goes into the atmosphere. There’s a worst case scenario, things get really hot, things get really bad. And then there’s a best case scenario, we keep the worst of it under control, we just warm up a little bit, things aren’t so bad. And then there’s usually a couple of middle scenarios. So the proposal is essentially: don’t include the worst case scenario.

Michael Barbaro

Just lop it off?

Coral Davenport

Lop it off.

Michael Barbaro

With the goal, once again, of shielding people from the worst case scenarios of what these policies might do?

Coral Davenport

Precisely. And what’s really remarkable about this proposal is that the scenario that they’re proposing to lop off is the most likely scenario, given that this administration is putting in place policies that will specifically lead to the business as usual, higher greenhouse gas emissions outcome.

Michael Barbaro

So the administration is figuring out a way to make the science obscure the long-term realities of climate change?

Coral Davenport

Yes. I’ve been reporting on climate policy for over 10 years. And a story that we’ve written a lot is, despite the fact that President Trump has mocked climate science, withdrew from the Paris Accord, wants to roll back these regulations, we’ve actually written a lot of stories that say, you know what, they haven’t messed with the science. And we wrote that story when they put out the National Climate Assessment last fall. They tried to bury it. They made fun of it. But they didn’t mess with the science. And so this is something really new.

And I talked with a scientist who had worked on the National Climate Assessment who said, what is really concerning here is that the numbers put out by the U.S. government should be absolutely reliable, whether they’re about the economy, whether they’re scientific reports. They should be so reliable as to almost be boring. And what this scientists said to me is, in totalitarian regimes, in the Soviet Union, when governments put out reports and numbers, people kind of laugh at them, because they know they’re just sort of cooked up to support a political agenda. And he said, I see the very, very beginnings of that here in a way that we have not seen before.

Michael Barbaro

So Coral, how openly is the Trump administration pursuing this strategy? Because trying to hide science doesn’t seem like something that any government agency would do very publicly.

Coral Davenport

And yet, Michael, surprisingly, they’re pretty open about it. Trump administration officials have publicly criticized these climate models. They’ve called the worst case scenarios highly unreliable and inaccurate. So they are sort of standing up for what they’re doing and saying, no, this will lead to more accurate, more careful, more thoughtful climate science reports, even though these are statements highly at odds with a vast consensus by the actual climate science community. But interestingly, they’re pretty open about it. They don’t seem to be running away from it.

Michael Barbaro

Coral, what are the implications of the changes that you’ve just laid out, to shift the way we present science and, I suppose, even collect it?

Coral Davenport

So the first is that, if these reports start to come out this way, with big blocks of information that have been cut out, the reports will present a falsely optimistic picture of what the future will look like, despite the increase of planet warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That’s the first step. The second step though, is that they will be so at odds with the rest of climate science being produced in academia and around the world that we will start to see U.S. science discredited.

Michael Barbaro

But what about the whole reason this strategy exists, which is an attempt by the Trump administration to limit the legal exposure that you describe, to make it harder for people to challenge their policies by putting out less climate science data?

Coral Davenport

Michael, that absolutely is the strategy. I’m not sure how well it will work. And the reason is if they put out reports that present a picture that is misleading, that is falsely optimistic, and it is totally at odds with the vast majority of other climate science being produced around the country and the world and that is not considered valid, I’m not sure how good of a legal weapon these new reports will be. It is very much the thinking that this will be their defense. But I don’t know how far you get when you’re messing with science.

Michael Barbaro

I feel like beyond the legal implications, this presents a number of interesting questions. For example, if the U.S. government stops reporting certain pieces of climate science, does that mean that it stops collecting it? Does that mean that it gets harder and harder to create objective comparisons over time, because what was in the report four years ago isn’t in the next one? And does it just create greater skepticism of climate science if the government is no longer considered the great authority on this?

Coral Davenport

I think, yes, it will create greater skepticism of climate science. The U.S. government is one of the greatest research bodies in the world. And so if the U.S. government is not doing this research, it’s not that it won’t get done. It will continue to be done by universities. It will be continued to be done by other governments around the world. But this is some of the best and most authoritative research. Reports like the National Climate Assessment are used and evaluated by scientific agencies and governments all around the world. If the U.S. government is not creating these scenarios, is not collecting climate data, then, yes, there will start to be much bigger holes in our understanding. It will just mean we won’t have this data.

Michael Barbaro

I wonder then, is it possible, Coral, that the point of this is just kind of dead simple, that the Trump administration is trying to make this problem of climate change seem not so bad so that it can push its policy agenda through without much opposition from the public.

Coral Davenport

I think that’s right, Michael. I mean, yes, the idea is these are big reports that get a lot of attention and heighten this intense sense of urgency. And when the last Climate Assessment report came out last fall, it absolutely fueled climate activism. And I think the thinking is, well, when we put out the next one, let’s have it not do that.

[Music]

Coral Davenport

I mean, in some ways, it is very simple. If there’s not as much of a problem, then what we’re doing is fine.

Michael Barbaro

Even if it fundamentally changes our ability to understand the actual science of climate change?

Coral Davenport

I think that this is not an issue that senior officials in the Trump administration are losing any sleep over. And in fact, that’s exactly what the Secretary of the Interior department David Bernhardt said when he was recently asked in congressional testimony about his agency’s role in dealing with climate change. He told members of Congress, I’m not really losing any sleep over it.

Archived Recording 1

I was reading the newspaper this week. And it hit the headlines two days ago that carbon dioxide levels hit 415 parts per million, which is the highest in human history, the highest in 800,000 years. And that was, of course, when there were no humans, the last time it hit that kind of level. And so my question for you is, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most concerned, what’s your number for how concerned you are about us hitting 415 parts per million of carbon dioxide?

Archived Recording (David Bernhardt)

I haven’t lost any sleep over it.

Michael Barbaro

Coral, thank you very much.

Coral Davenport

Michael, thank you so much.

[Music]

Michael Barbaro

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, in a closely watched case, the Supreme Court chose not to rule on the constitutionality of an Indiana law that restricts abortion. The law, which prohibited abortions based on sex, race and disabilities like Down syndrome, was passed when Vice President Mike Pence was Indiana’s governor and was later struck down by lower courts. The case would have given the Supreme Court its first chance since the confirmation of justice Brett Kavanaugh to determine the legality of state laws limiting abortion. That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka made a well-publicized effort to talk him out of leaving the Paris accord in 2017. But after being vanquished by officials including Mr. Bannon, Mr. Pruitt, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II, there is little evidence she has resisted his approach since then.

The president’s advisers amplify his disregard. At the meeting of the eight-nation Arctic Council this month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismayed fellow diplomats by describing the rapidly warming region as a land of “opportunity and abundance” because of its untapped reserves of oil, gas, uranium, gold, fish and rare-earth minerals. The melting sea ice, he said, was opening up new shipping routes.DISASTER CAP'LISM?!

“That is one of the most crude messages one could deliver,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who served as the NATO ambassador under George W. Bush.

Image

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dismayed fellow diplomats by describing the Arctic as a land of “opportunity and abundance” as a consequence of global warming.CreditMandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images]

At the National Security Council, under Mr. Bolton, officials said they had been instructed to strip references to global warming from speeches and other formal statements. But such political edicts pale in significance to the changes in the methodology of scientific reports.

Mr. Reilly, the head of the Geological Survey, who does not have a background in climate change science, characterized the changes as an attempt to prepare more careful, accurate reports. “We’re looking for answers with our partners and to get statistical significance from what we understand,” he said.

Yet scientists said that by eliminating the projected effects of increased carbon dioxide pollution after 2040, the Geological Survey reports would present an incomplete and falsely optimistic picture of the impact of continuing to burn unlimited amounts of coal, oil and gasoline.

“The scenarios in these reports that show different outcomes are like going to the doctor, who tells you, ‘If you don’t change your bad eating habits, and you don’t start to exercise, you’ll need a quadruple bypass, but if you do change your lifestyle, you’ll have a different outcome,’” said Katharine Hayhoe, the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University and an author of the National Climate Assessment.

Not all government science agencies are planning such changes. A spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, asked if its scientists would limit the use of climate models, wrote in an email, “No changes are being considered at this time.”

The push to alter the results of at least some climate science reports, several officials said, came after November’s release of the second volume of the National Climate Assessment.

While the Trump administration did not try to rewrite the scientific conclusions of the report, officials sought to play it down — releasing it the day after Thanksgiving — and discredit it, with a White House statement calling it “largely based on the most extreme scenario.”

Image

This summer, the E.P.A. is expected to finalize the legal rollback of two of President Barack Obama’s most consequential policies: regulations to curb planet-warming pollution from vehicles and power plants.CreditGeorge Etheredge for The New York Times]

Still, the report could create legal problems for Mr. Trump’s agenda of abolishing regulations. This summer, the E.P.A. is expected to finalize the legal rollback of two of President Barack Obama’s most consequential policies: federal regulations to curb planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks.

Opponents say that when they challenge the moves in court, they intend to point to the climate assessment, asking how the government can justify the reversals when its own agencies have concluded that the pollution will be so harmful.

That is why officials are now discussing how to influence the conclusions of the next National Climate Assessment.

“They’ve started talking about how they can produce a report that doesn’t lead to some silly alarmist predictions about the future,” said Myron Ebell, who heads the energy program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-funded research organization, and who led the administration’s transition at the E.P.A.

A key change, he said, would be to emphasize historic temperatures rather than models of future atmospheric temperatures, and to eliminate the “worst-case scenarios” of the effect of increased carbon dioxide pollution — sometimes referred to as “business as usual” scenarios because they imply no efforts to curb emissions.

Scientists said that eliminating the worst-case scenario would give a falsely optimistic picture. “Nobody in the world does climate science like that,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton. “It would be like designing cars without seatbelts or airbags.”

Outside the United States, climate scientists had long given up on the White House being anything but on outlier in policy. But they worry about the loss of the government as a source for reliable climate research.

“It is very unfortunate and potentially even quite damaging that the Trump administration behaves this way,” said Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “There is this arrogance and disrespect for scientific advancement — this very demoralizing lack of respect for your own experts and agencies.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Climate Fight, Trump Will Put Science on Trial

President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term “global warming” into a punch line rather than a prognosis.

Now, after two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.

And, in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.

[Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.]

---

AN no lnx

Inside the Trump administration’s war on science itself

written by Matthew Rozsa / Salon May 28, 2019

President Donald Trump administration has escalated its crusade against policies combatting climate change by attacking the science behind global warming.

One of the cornerstones of the administration’s new climate change policy is ordering parts of the government to stop studying the effects of global warming on the future of the planet, and in particular, the state of the planet by the end of the century if humanity does not control its carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, according to The New York Times.

Trump appointed former astronaut and petroleum geologist James Reilly to lead the U.S. Geological Survey, who in turn instructed his office to only use computer-generated climate models projecting the impact of climate change through 2040, thus abandoning the traditional practice of using models that stretch to the end of the century. And that is not the only major policy change Trump plans to implement regarding climate science.

As the Times reported, “In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.”

The administration’s move was foreshadowed by Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord; his systematic decimation of the federal agencies responsible for protecting the environment, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), through funding cuts and staff reductions; and his administration’s instruction to the EPA to significantly reduce its 2018 estimate that more than 1,400 people would die prematurely every year due to a proposed new rule on coal emissions.

Regarding that last policy Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, told Salon by email last week that “this is a logical next step in the effort by Trump and the polluting interests that dictate his environmental policies to dismantle the environmental protections of the past half century put in place by past both Republican and Democratic presidents.”

He added, “Let me be blunt: Trump is choosing to kill people in order to increase the profits of the polluting interests to which he is beholden. I cannot think of a more craven act than this, and we’re talking about a president who is known for craven acts. There is a reason I warned back in October 2016 that Trump is a threat to the planet.”

Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Department of Global Ecology echoed those thoughts, telling Salon by email that “it is one thing for the Trump administration to decide that more people should be killed from particulate air pollution, because their lives are worth less than the money to be made from loosened regulations. It is another thing entirely to enter an Orwellian world, in which we pretend that the loosening of regulations will not result in more people dying. Trump complains about fake news, but then to justify his policies, his minions create fake science and then use it to create real policy.”

What if reporters covered the climate crisis like Edward R. Murrow covered the start of World War II?" That was the question from Bill Moyers as Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation launched a new program to increase coverage of climate change.

The Trump administration moved to silence the head of the CDC's climate and health program -- but he is fighting back.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse took to the Senate floor and called for better media coverage of the climate crisis: "I have noticed this trend so I’ve begun keeping an eye on the Sunday shows’ coverage this year. Each month I look at how many substantive segments on climate change each show runs. It’s not good. In April, for instance, there were only two substantive segments on climate change across all five shows. They have basically become Sunday morning political gossip columns."

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-administration-tried-to-remove-all-mention-of-climate-change-from-arctic-policy-statement-wapo

Trump administration pushed to remove all references to climate change in an international statement on Arctic policy, despite the fact that the Arctic is warming at about twice the rate of the rest of the world, The Washington Post reports Thursday. Initially, the Post reports, Trump tried to stonewall the negotiations on the non-binding declaration by pledging not to sign a document that mentioned climate change. Three sources from the eight Arctic Council member states said, however, that the administration’s stance has softened in recent days. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will travel to Finland for the official two-day session next week. One official told the Post that he expects the final declaration will take a “substantive” and “robust” stance on climate change in the Arctic—but he’s not yet sure if the actual phrase “climate change” will make it in.

---

(CNN)The Trump administration may have shut down the government advisory committee on climate change started by President Barack Obama, but its members considered the work so important that they did not stop working.

The Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment was created in 2015 by the Obama administration to help local leaders and policymakers figure out how to apply lessons from the National Climate Assessment. The latest version of that report, released in November, determined that climate change is already hurting the United States and that it could cost the economy hundreds of billions of dollars and will kill thousands of Americans.

Trump is making the warming of Alaska even worse

Trump allowed the charter of the advisory committee to expire in August 2017 after his administration showed concern about the political makeup of the 15-member panel.

"It only has one member from industry," wrote George Kelly, then deputy chief of staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in a June 2017 email, the Washington Post uncovered. Kelly said officials needed to decide whether to let the committee "expire as soon as possible," as the "process to gain more balance would take a couple of years to accomplish."

Tackling climate change could save millions of lives, report says

At the invitation of New York's governor, Andrew Cuomo, most of the members of the committee reconvened and became the Science to Climate Action Network, also known as SCAN.

On Thursday, it released its report and recommendations to help policymakers and community leaders better tackle the daunting problems brought by climate change.

With the support of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, the state of New York and the American Meteorological Society, the panel warns that the country continues to be in harm's way because of its failure to act. For instance, local leaders don't have enough data on climate change to make informed decisions, something that the Government Accountability Office has noted in its investigations.

Calling climate change a "global catastrophe," Cuomo said that he supports the committee's efforts to help local leaders because the problem needs urgent attention.

[pix]

Access denied: 2 climate change pages removed from DOT's website

"While the federal government continues to deny climate change and ignore the dire need to strengthen the resilience of our communities, New York and the U.S. Climate Alliance are taking action," he said in a statement published with the report. "This report will provide important recommendations to communities across the country as we work to address climate change."

Committee Chairman Richard Moss, a visiting senior research scientist at the Earth Institute, said he hopes the work will make local action possible.

The committee is working with university groups and regional research networks and will continue to advise local leaders. It will continue to help leaders determine which climate data sets are reliable. It will give technical advice, advising on practical matters like what engineering designs will be more resilient in the face of climate change, and it will help leaders think through the costs and benefits of climate change plans.

In the face of problems like flooding, a problem that has already cost the country billions, it will bring together a collaborative group of experts and leaders to help communities figure out what works and what doesn't and will help them craft local solutions.

"The point is to take what we know, make it usable for the communities and increase their confidence in weighing the tradeoffs and opportunities that come with different strategies for adaptation and mitigation," Moss said. "We're trying to produce something that adds value for those on the front lines of preparing their communities for climate change."

---

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/434157-dem-lawmakers-introduce-bill-to-protect-science-research-from

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation on Thursday to prevent political interference with public science research amid what they called "President Trump's multi-agency assault."

The lawmakers said in a press release that political interference has been a "longstanding concern that has taken on newfound urgency" in the current administration.

Provisions in the "Science Integrity Act" intend to make it so that political considerations do not factor into scientific conclusions, to prohibit the suppression of scientific findings and to allow scientists to answer media inquiries about their work without prior agency approval.

“Independent, rigorous scientific research is one of the most powerful tools we have for advancing the public interest and keeping the American people safe,” Tonko said in the statement.

“President Trump’s multi-agency assault on environmental standards has hinged on efforts to distort, bury and even rewrite credible public scientific findings, including his absurd denial of the growing climate crisis and efforts to cover up evidence that the American people are being exposed to dangerous toxins," he added.

Schatz in the statement said that we are facing "unprecedented times" for science.

"While it’s not the first time it has been under attack, this time feels worse," he said. "That’s why we need to answer the call of our times and stand up for science.”

https://www.ecowatch.com/hurricane-harvey-trump-epa-response-2630918498.html

Andrea Germanos

President Donald Trump's U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Texas state officials rejected an offer from NASA scientists in 2017 to use their state-of-the-art flying laboratory to evaluate air quality in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, new reporting by the Los Angeles Times reveals.

"This is disturbing," said Lina Hidalgo, judge for Texas's Harris County.

Harvey brought historic rainfall, catastrophic flooding and triggered potentially dangerous environmental and public health impacts: Houston's many refineries and petrochemical released pollutants into the air and waters, and area residents began to complain of worrisome smells and toxic sights near the facilities, as well as symptoms including headaches. The EPA asserted that the air quality posed no threat.

NASA, it turned out, was in a good position to gather data on air quality in the area with its DC-8. The jet, whose ability to ability to gather data dwarfs that of the EPA's air pollution plane or the hand-held devices used by Texas state officials, was already set up for testing because of a scheduled six-hour test flight to Lamont, Oklahoma on Sept. 14.

The response to NASA's offer? Thanks but no thanks.

Susanne Rust and Louis Sahagun reported for the Times:

On Sept. 9, David Gray, the EPA's deputy regional administrator in Texas and leader of the agency's emergency response, wrote to NASA and Texas officials that he was "hesitant" to have the jet "collect additional information that overlaps our existing efforts" until he learned more about the mission. He noted that media and nongovernmental organizations were releasing data that was "conflicting" with the state and EPA's.

The NASA scientists offered assurances that their fact-finding would not get in the way, but noted that the data would eventually be seen by the public. Texas and the EPA were unmoved.

The state-level response came from director of toxicology Michael Honeycutt, who now heads EPA's Science Advisory Board and is known for expressing views well out of the reach of mainstream science, such as the idea that lowering ozone would be bad for public health.

On Sept. 11, Honeycutt wrote in an email to NASA and EPA officials that state data showed no sign for concern, and "we don't think your data would be useful for source identification while industry continues to restart their operations."

Gray agreed with Honeycutt: "EPA concurs with your assessment and we will not plan to ask NASA to conduct this mission."

Associated Press reporter Frank Bajak noted that the new investigation adds weight to his own news agency's previous reporting showing that "Texas environmental regulators had little interest in exposing most post-Harvey industrial contamination."

Reacting to the reporting on Twitter, Dr. Chelsea Thompson, a research scientist in atmospheric chemistry, wrote, "It's worth noting that, over a year later now, all of us involved are still stunned by how this played out."

...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/how-house-democrats-can-finally-stymie-trumps-relentless-assault-on-science/

Douglas Costle, who helped create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and then ran it during Jimmy Carter’s administration, died recently at the age of 79. If the Trump administration has its way, the agency as we know it will die along with him.

“Clean air is not an aesthetic luxury,” Costle said when he took the job as EPA administrator. “It is a public health necessity.”

President Trump said pretty much the same thing in an interview just after winning the election. “Clean air is vitally important. Clean water, crystal clean water is vitally important,” he told The New York Times. He stuck to that mantra during a CNN interview last November. “I want clean air,” he said. “I want clean water. Very important.”

The difference is, Costle didn’t just talk the talk. At his very first news conference as EPA administrator, he announced the recall of 135,000 Cadillacs because the cars’ emissions violated the Clean Air Act. Under his watch, the agency banned aerosol spray fluorocarbons to protect the Earth’s ozone layer. In the first two months of his tenure, he hired 600 new scientists and analysts to bolster the agency’s staff.

Trump is Costle’s antithesis. His administration plans to roll back car emissions standards. It killed power plant carbon emission rules. It has also shrunk the EPA workforce to levels not seen in 35 years. That’s just three of too many examples. According to a recent report by my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the number of Trump administration attacks on science-based public health and environmental safeguards in its first two years in office is unprecedented.

There is a glimmer of hope on the horizon, however. With an engaged public and the House of Representatives’ oversight powers now controlled by Democrats, there may be just enough leverage to turn things around—or at least tie the administration’s hands before it can do any more damage.

A Dismal Record

First the bad news: our 60-page report documents 80 Trump administration attacks on science. A sample list includes:

Hollowing out federal science agencies, filling fewer than half of key science appointee positions, and ensuring that political appointees and career staff ignore scientific advice;

Doctoring and killing scientific studies that contradicted industry-friendly policies;

Disbanding key EPA scientific advisory committees, cutting back on how often the remaining committees can meet, and banning scientists who have EPA grants from serving on them; and

Stacking advisory committees with lobbyists from polluting industries.

In fact, the Trump administration has packed the entire executive branch with lobbyists. When Trump promised to “drain the swamp” during his campaign, he wasn’t talking about ridding the government of cronyism and corruption; he was talking about getting rid of civil servants. As of today, the Interior Department is being run by a former oil industry lobbyist, the Defense Department is being run by a former aerospace industry executive, the Department of Health and Human Services is being run by a former pharmaceutical industry lobbyist and the EPA is being run by a former coal industry lobbyist.

The extent of this corporate coup extends well beyond department heads. A March 2018 ProPublica report found that at least 187 political appointees had been lobbyists, and many of them are now overseeing the industries they used to represent. It also found that more than 250 people associated with Trump’s presidential campaign and at least 125 staff members from nonprofit libertarian groups are now deep inside federal agencies, working to repeal decades of consumer, workplace, health and environmental protections.

Thus far, Trump appointees have been all too successful. According to a recent analysis by The New York Times, the administration had weakened or killed 47 environmental rules by the end of last year and were in the process of rolling back another 31. That doesn’t bode well for public health. A May 2018 analysis by a Harvard economist and statistician conservatively estimated that the administration’s environmental rollbacks could lead to 80,000 extra premature deaths per decade and respiratory problems for more than 1 million Americans.

At the same time the administration is weakening and killing environmental safeguards, it has taken the EPA cop off the beat. Civil penalties for polluters have dropped to their lowest average level since 1994, according to an analysis by a former EPA enforcement official. For the 20 years before Trump was elected, EPA civil fines averaged $500 million a year. Last fiscal year’s total was only $72 million—an 85 percent drop.

The Trump administration also has opened up more public land to development at bargain basement rates. The amount of land on the chopping block has jumped 500 percent since 2016, and the Bureau of Land Management has streamlined and shortened the leasing application process.

Then there’s the administration’s scientifically indefensible position on climate change. According to our recent report, the administration “has repeatedly ignored, dismissed, or suppressed the science of climate change, limiting the ability of federal scientists to speak about, report on, or even study it.” Remarkably, the administration refrained from censoring the latest edition of the National Climate Assessment, but it released it on the Friday after Thanksgiving to limit its impact. Trump, meanwhile, rejected the report out of hand. “I’ve seen it. I’ve read some of it. It’s fine,” he told a CNN reporter. But when the reporter then mentioned that the study concluded that “the economic impact [of climate change] will be devastating,” Trump responded, “I don’t believe it.”

No Place Left to Go But Up

So, what is there to be hopeful about?

Our report offers examples in which coalitions of scientists, public interest groups and sometimes even companies have won some hard-fought victories, including blocking Trump nominees with major conflicts of interest and securing federal protection for endangered species.

Likewise, some of Trump’s ethically challenged appointees, notably, disgraced former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, rushed to roll back regulations and produced poorly crafted rulemakings that cannot withstand legal challenges. At least six of Pruitt’s attempts to weaken or delay Obama-era rules, including ones covering pesticides, lead paint and renewable fuels, were struck down by the courts.

But the biggest flicker of hope is due to the results of last November’s election. In the new Congress, a dozen members of the House and Senate have science, technology or medical backgrounds, more than ever before. According to a recent analysis by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the number of climate science deniers in Congress dropped 17 percent, from 180 to 150, because 47 deniers retired, resigned or lost their 2018 re-election bids. Last but certainly not least, the Democrats took back the House, giving them control over the agenda, the power of the purse and the ability to issue subpoenas.

One of the most consequential changes happened at the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, whose chairman for the last six years, Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, retired at the end of the last session. During his tenure, Smith—who has made millions of dollars from oil and gas leases on his Texas property—rejected mainstream climate science, harassed federal climate scientists and tried to sabotage the EPA’s ability to carry out its mission.

The incoming chair of the committee, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, also hails from Texas, but that’s where the similarities between her and Smith end. In a statement she issued after the November election, Johnson promised to “restore the credibility of the Science Committee as a place where science is respected,” “address the challenge of climate change,” and defend “the scientific enterprise from political and ideological attacks.”

Our report recommends a number of steps members of Congress on both sides of the aisle can take to blunt the Trump administration’s assault on science, including strengthening science-based rules and passing legislation that defends federal scientists, and lead author Jacob Carter says Johnson’s agenda is “promising.”

“For the first time in two years, we can see some meaningful checks and balances in Washington,” said Carter, who worked at the EPA during the Obama administration. “That is how it is supposed to work. Congress should press the administration to stop undermining science and do its job of protecting the public. And the science community can play a meaningful role if scientists step up and get engaged as constituents. There’s a lot of damage to undo, but we have a roadmap to get there.”

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and originally published by Truthout.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

---

no lnx vid

---

ref 11/18 shamed to do rt thing?

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a25304542/meet-the-press-climate-change-chuck-todd-danielle-pletka/

Rarely do you get news of an ongoing catastrophe and, within a couple of days, a perfect example of why we've done nothing about that exact problem. But Chuck Todd and Meet The Press were happy to oblige this Thanksgiving weekend. On Friday, the Trump administration attempted to bury a harrowing U.S. government climate-change report by releasing it on Black Friday, a notorious dumping ground for bad news. Normally, though, the bad news is just for the current administration—not the whole world.

On Sunday, Todd hosted Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute on his teevee show. Her performance—and it was a performance—was a shining example of how the ruling class has successfully hemmed and hawed for decades, with the full support of the feckless Beltway media, slowing any kind of action and safeguarding big-business profits while experts in the field have known full well that human civilization as we know it is in clear and escalating peril

[vid]

...Right-wing panelist on Meet the Press on climate change: "I'm not a scientist ... We need to also recognize we had two of the coldest years, biggest drop in global temperatures that we have had since the 1980s, the biggest in the last 100 years. We don't talk about that."

As Pletka so happily volunteered, she is not a scientist. So why was she invited on one of the nation's Premier Political Talk Shows to spread disinformation about a scientific issue? That two years since 1980 have been cold does not have any bearing on the scientific consensus that climate change is real and man-made. This member of the conservative intelligentsia—the American Enterprise Institute, for which Pletka works, is a right-wing "think tank"—is actually just making the more polite version of President Good Brain's argument on Wednesday:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened to Global Warming?

114K

4:23 PM - Nov 21, 2018

This is not the first time Trump has disproved global warming on the basis he is cold today. (Elsewhere, he has simply called it a Chinese hoax.) Nobody put this crap to bed better than Stephen Colbert did all those years ago. Weather is not climate. The weather is affected by changing climate patterns, but warming global temperatures over the decades—an indisputable trend, even among denialist hacks like Pletka—does not mean every day of every year will be warmer than the previous. What it does very likely mean is more powerful storms that drop trillions of gallons of water on American cities, and bigger, more ferocious wildfires that turn the American West to ash.

Of course, Pletka probably knows this. She gave Our Beautiful Boy Chuck Todd that tried-and-true conservative line that's rapidly going stale: that surely something is happening with the climate, but who can say whether humans are causing it? Well, after years of exhaustive study, scientists have found it is "extremely likely" (terms the scientific community does not choose lightly) that humans are significantly contributing to warming global temperatures. We also know that the Beautiful, Clean Coal that Pletka suggested the U.S. has switched to does not exist. "Clean coal" is a misleading term for the same coal that continues to be the dirtiest fossil fuel in existence.

Did Todd challenge her with the facts? No. But this is what the evidence says. It's just Pletka isn't concerned with gathering the evidence and coming to a conclusion—also known as the essence of the scientific method. Here is an (albeit anonymous) account from an Atlantic reader who claims to have worked for Pletka at the American Enterprise Institute:

A number of years ago I worked for Danielle Pletka for a summer as a researcher, and her piece today matches the "scholarship" she and AEI were producing in the early part of this decade. I was rarely if ever asked to perform background research on a subject but was more often asked to provide specific evidence to support ready made assertations. At the time AEI was mobilizing in support of military action against Iraq, and it was quite clear to me that the academic process was reversed - positions designed, research dug up to support the positions.

This seems like an opportune moment to mention that Pletka is widely known as a varsity-level cheerleader for the Iraq War. More recently, she demonstrated her intricate knowledge of the conflict by suggesting to the French ambassador on Twitter that France had joined the U.S. in the conflict. OK, so that was completely and laughably wrong (Remember the idiotic Freedom Fries charade?), but at least by 2013 she was...still defending the invasion. Yes, after it embroiled the region in sectarian conflict, and after all the reasons people like Pletka peddled for going in were proven to be baseless. Eventually, this genius foreign-policy move led to the rise of ISIS. This is just another example of how, if you work in the Beltway, there are absolutely zero consequences for being completely wrong about everything.

In fact, if you work at a think tank like AEI, it might just get you a raise—if you stick to the party line. All think tanks are, to some extent, mouthpieces for their donors, but that particularly goes for a right-wing gun-for-hire shop like the Institute. The Guardian uncovered how AEI works to undermine the science on climate change in 2007:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

And what did that ExxonMobil funding look like?

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

You may remember that Exxon was also exposed as having discovered, through the work of its own scientists, that climate change was real as early as 1977. Instead of accepting this reality and beginning the work of responding to the burgeoning climate crisis, Exxon chose to fund disinformation on the topic for decades, protecting their profits in the shorter term. They're not alone among oil-and-gas outfits, many of which simultaneously started building their rigs to accommodate sea-level rise that would result from the climate change that, in public, they steadfastly disputed was happening.

One way to fund disinformation is to pay a think tank like AEI to spread it for you. And that's what Pletka was still doing, on Sunday, after just the latest report dropped detailing the catastrophic consequences of our inaction on the climate crisis. The U.S. report focused on the fact that the crisis will melt 10 percent of the American economy and send it crashing into the ocean by 2100. Farmers in the midwest will lose 75 percent of the crop yield on their corn. Rising sea levels will put trillions of dollars in coastal real estate in jeopardy. But last month's report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—compiled by 91 leading scientists from 40 different countries based on more than 6,000 scientific studies conducted by still more scientists—was even more apocalyptic. It found that human civilization as we know it will be in severe peril by 2040, and that we have 12 years to dramatically change course to avoid that scenario.

Amid all that, news programs like Chuck Todd's Meet The Press—offerings that putatively exist to inform the public about the world around them—are still playing host to people who are paid to spread false information about the world. Todd is not alone: CNN hosted Rick Santorum on Sunday. Like NBC News, which employs Pletka as a contributor, they pay Rick directly to spread nonsense.

...this Week talked about the climate report for two minutes with Sen. Amy Klobuchar and noted that the administration tried to bury it.

The report did not, from what I can tell, come up on the rest of the hour-long show...[vid]

whitehouse sen

Here's paid CNN commentator Rick Santorum praising the Trump administration for trying to bury the climate report, arguing that climate change is made up by scientists trying to make some money pic.twitter.com/lBpLMexgt9...

This festering boil on the body politic highlights another in-vogue conservative argument: that the scientists who've devoted their lives to studying the climate are really just in it for those juicy government grants to continue studying it. It's all about the money! As usual in this era, this is a case of accusing the opposition of something you're already up to.

Santorum is applying the incentive structure that exists for massive multinational oil and gas corporations and those they employ—seeking out certain findings because you have a vested financial interest in a certain outcome—to climate scientists. In reality, the kind of conspiracy that right-wingers like Santorum are alleging here would be perhaps unprecedented in scale. If this is all a big con, thousands of climate scientists spread across dozens of countries would need to all be getting their kickbacks, and have a way to secretly stay on-message. It's absurdly unlikely, and it belies the aforementioned way that the scientific community vets a scientific report's findings.

Oh, and the money in government grants ain't actually that good. That's why some "scientists" might take, say, $10,000 from AEI to dispute the scientific consensus. It's all bullshit, folks, and it's bad for ya.

...ay that the nation's major television news stations routinely play host to propagandists who are paid, directly or indirectly, to spread disinformation and muddy the waters to protect the interests of massive energy corporations, all at the expense of the future of human civilization.When Pletka said emissions are down since President Trump withdrew from the Paris climate accords—making the U.S. the only nation in the world that refuses to participate—that was just true enough: they are down in 2018, though the rate of emissions reductions slowed from the previous two years and will likely continue to slow as the Trump administration attempts to roll back our efforts to combat the crisis. The crown jewel in that regard is the Clean Power Plan, our main vehicle for meeting our obligations under the Paris agreement, which Trump has sought to repeal. At the very least, Todd is obligated to challenge this crap if he's going to host a dishonest broker—or host someone who can.

According to John Whitehouse of MediaMatters, none of the Sunday Shows hosted a single scientist while covering the climate in 2016 and 2017.

[RELATED STORIES

It's the Golden Age of Climate Denial

There Are Very Fine Scientists on Both Sides]

The Meet The Press chief will certainly defend his decision to host a climate-change "skeptic" on the basis of "intellectual diversity" and Hearing From Both Sides, as if what his viewers need is to hear both the truth and utter nonsense. Both Sides are not operating in good faith here. One side accepts the scientific consensus. On the other, the Republican Party is the only major political party in the industrialized world that disputes it. Both Sides Journalism, which falsely equates the truth about the world we've determined through the scientific method with self-serving crap dished out by the instruments of oil interests, has made it politically palatable to do nothing, for decades, about an existential threat to humanity. Friday's report further underlined the crisis facing humankind. Two days later, Meet The Press showcased part of how we've allowed things to get to this point.

But since we're on the topic of intellectual diversity, here's a suggestion: If Chuck Todd wants to talk about a scientific topic, how about having a fucking scientist on?

---

rider on old bill keeps CDC from research (on guns, lifted in big tax cut?)

---

icn blk friday scam BS nat assess

Fact-Checking the Attacks

The administration and its allies appear to be repeating one main talking point in their effort to discredit the National Climate Assessment: They claim, inaccurately, that the report represents only a worst-case scenario. It actually reflects a broad range of possible future outcomes—along with an enormity of direct, present-day observations of the impacts of global warming.

The naysayers are trying to build that falsehood on a number of misleading assertions:

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said "even Obama's undersecretary for science didn't believe the radical conclusions of the report that was released." This appears to be a reference to Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist for BP, who spent 18 months as an undersecretary in the Obama administration's energy department. Koonin has long maintained climate science is not "settled," and has argued the government should have a red-team/blue-team debate—an idea championed unsuccessfully by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.

Sanders also said that the National Climate Assessment "is based on the most extreme modeled scenario, which contradicts long-established trends." But in fact the report considered the full range of climate scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, looking at what will happen if carbon emissions decline, if they stabilize, and if they continue to grow unabated. As Hayhoe noted in her Twitter thread, "the observed increase in global carbon emissions over the past 15–20 years has been consistent with higher scenarios."

The Trump EPA put out a news release it called a "fact check" on Wednesday, citing an article on the conservative website The Daily Caller to try to bolster an assertion by Wheeler that Obama administration's science adviser John Holdren instructed the report's authors in 2015 to look at worst-case scenarios. "Mr. Wheeler's insinuation is absolutely false," Holdren, now at Harvard, responded in a statement. "Assertions by high officials of the Trump administration that these are 'worst case' reports are nothing more than a flimsy attempt to discredit the careful and comprehensive work of some of the best climate scientists in the country, inside and outside of government," Holdren said.

Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, said the administration might intervene in future climate reports. "Going forward, I think we need to take a look at the modeling that's used for the next assessment," Wheeler said. But the report underwent several rounds of technical and policy review by the 13 federal agencies involved. There was a series of regional engagement workshops that reached more than 1,000 people in over 40 cities, with listening sessions, webinars and public comment. An expert external peer review of the whole report was performed by a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado, took issue with the report for including a figure that was widely quoted in the media: that U.S. GDP could take a 10 percent hit by 2100 due to climate change. The estimate was derived from an innovative, cutting-edge modeling of climate impacts on the U.S. economy published in the journal Science. Pielke, who often says he agrees with the core science on global warming but disputes how it is applied, argued this headline-grabbing data point should not have been included, since it reflected a scenario of more global warming than is commonly reckoned in modeling. Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University and co-author of the Science paper, said the team purposefully took into account the unlikely—though not impossible—scenario at the end of the charted curve because of its potentially large consequences. "We were deliberately trying to include tail risks, not just 'most likely' outcomes, because consideration of tail risks is crucial to sound risk management," Kopp said in an email.

The arguments of the Trump administration have been amplified in media coverage in the aftermath of the report's release.

Danielle Pletka of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute prefacing her remarks with the caveat, "I'm not a scientist," before delivering a blizzard of inaccuracies on Sunday's "Meet the Press" on NBC aimed at undermining the report's credibility. Pletka said the last two years have been the coldest on record, when in fact they have been among the warmest. She said the U.S. "is not using dirty coal anymore," when in fact about 30 percent of U.S. power is still generated by coal and only one U.S. coal plant has technology in place to capture some of its carbon emissions.

Hayhoe pre-taped an appearance on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 show to talk about the National Climate Assessment on Tuesday, but her appearance—though posted online—was bumped from the TV broadcast. CNN instead aired a segment with paid contributor Rick Santorum, a former Republican U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, who accused climate scientists of stoking alarm to make money.

epa res ctr shut down, child res put on admin leave... see kid killers eg

---

ref

https://thinkprogress.org/koch-epa-industry-david-dunlap-chemical-water-1f08cfa2fb01/

The Environmental Protection Agency has hired a former Koch Industries staffer who worked on water and chemical policy to fill a key role within the agency, continuing a Trump administration trend of appointing company insiders to oversee the industries they are meant to regulate.

David Dunlap, a former Koch chemical engineer who has served as director of policy and regulatory affairs with the right-wing corporation since 2010, is joining the EPA as deputy assistant administrator for research and development. Prior to his eight years with Koch, Dunlap worked for the Chlorine Institute overseeing health and environmental safety, in addition to roles with both the Uniform and Textile Service Association and Ogden Environmental.

“As a chemical engineer, Mr. Dunlap has worked on environmental issues for nearly 30 years with a focus on assessing risk,” read a statement from EPA chief of staff Ryan Jackson. “His extensive experience on regulatory issues will be pivotal in our mission to protect human health and the environment.”

Koch Industries is a massive conglomerate overseen by the Koch brothers, major conservative donors who have spent decades undercutting U.S. climate and environmental policies — the brothers’ fortune was made largely from fossil fuels but has since expanded to chemicals and manufacturing.

In April, Senate Democrats indicated that they would probe the influence of the brothers on Trump administration policies, specifically with reference to the EPA and the Department of the Interior. The Kochs have appeared to take credit for the rollback of the Clean Power Plan, among other Obama-era initiatives targeted by the Trump administration.

[Scope of Koch influence on Trump climate policy under scrutiny]

A spokesperson for Koch Industries told Courthouse News on Monday that Dunlap is “not working for Koch Industries in any capacity” at this time, indicating that he has officially left his prior position with the company.

Dunlap’s predecessor, Richard Yamada, left the EPA in September after only 15 months in the position. Yamada was largely seen as one of the chief drivers behind a deeply controversial “secret science” policy proposal attempting to limit the use of private data in scientific studies. Such efforts have been a pet cause of retiring Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX); Yamada previously had a role working with Smith to draft similar legislation prior to interest from the Trump administration.

And during former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s tenure, the Heritage Foundation — which has received numerous donations from the Koch brothers over the years — hosted a closed-door meeting with Pruitt and others to discuss the policy.

In his new role, Dunlap will help to oversee a number of crucial programs. The risk assessment program that produced a health study linking formaldehyde to cancer, for instance, falls under the EPA’s research and development arm. Trump administration officials have blocked that report, seemingly due to pressure from the chemical industry. Formaldehyde is a prevalent chemical throughout the United States and is often found in items like particle boards and crease-resistant fabrics.

Georgia-Pacific Chemicals LLC, a Koch Industries subsidiary, is one of the largest formaldehyde producers in the country, and has lobbied against the study’s release according to Politico. As a former Koch employee, Dunlap will now be in a position to direct the study’s future, amid a heavy industry lobbying effort.

The EPA is in the midst of a controversial streamlining effort; last week, the agency announced that the Office of the Science Advisor will be closing. Meanwhile, Dunlap’s appointment will provide a measure of political leadership within the EPA while allowing the Trump administration to avoid a Senate confirmation hearing.

[Politics-driven ‘secret science’ initiative isn’t going over well with EPA staff]

Recent battles over agency nominees with industry backgrounds have proven bruising for the White House, although the administration has largely succeeded in its efforts to appoint officials with strong ties to the companies and sectors they now oversee. That includes acting EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler, who previously served as a coal lobbyist.

Green groups and advocates argue that revolving door between industry and the federal government has taken a toll on environmental regulations. The Trump administration has overseen an onslaught of environmental regulation rollbacks, many directly benefiting fossil fuel industries, chemical companies, and corporate interests more broadly. Most recently, the EPA has indicated that it will propose easing limitations on the toxic chemical mercury, in a victory for the coal industry.

desmog 918

Morgan Currie, Stanford Universityand Britt S. Paris, University of California, Los Angeles

After Donald Trump won the presidential election, hundreds of volunteers around the U.S. came together to “rescue” federal data on climate change, thought to be at risk under the new administration. “Guerilla archivists,” including ourselves, gathered to archive federal websites and preserve scientific data.

But what has happened since? Did the data vanish?READ MORE

def fund:

The federal government has now tried to restrict science 155 times — about once every four days — since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to the Silencing Science Tracker we maintain with the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “It’s a pretty constant drumbeat,” Lauren Kurtz, our executive director, told Earther.

More than three-quarters of the Tracker entries involve attempts to silence climate science, with the highest number of attacks occurring at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

One of the most troubling is the "science transparency" rule proposed by the EPA, which would prohibit the agency from taking many scientific studies into consideration when making policy decisions. The EPA received nearly half a million comments on this proposal; among them are comments we submitted explaining our opposition to the rule.

While climate scientists often face harassment, for women in climate science there is frequently another layer of hostility. Lauren Kurtz recently spoke with E&E News about how women in this field are attacked based on their gender.

IG halts climate censorship investigation

Adam Aton, E&E News reporter

Published: Thursday, August 16, 2018

The Interior Department's Office of Inspector General has dropped its investigation into allegations that the National Park Service censored a climate change report.

ref

---

http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/silencing-science-tracker/epas-use-of-scientific-studies-restricted/

EPA’s Use of Scientific Studies Restricted

Date: March 19th, 2018

Agency: US EPA

Explanation: Bias and Misrepresentation

Scientist: Other

On March 19, 2018, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt announced a new “science transparency policy” that restricts the scientific studies used in agency rulemakings. Under the policy, EPA will no longer use studies incorporating non-public scientific data in rulemakings, as has been its longstanding practice.

Administrator Pruitt has argued that the new policy is needed to prevent the use of so-called “secret science” that cannot be tested by third parties. In an interview published in The Daily Caller, Administrator Pruitt said:

“If we use a third party to engage in scientific review or inquiry, and that’s the basis of rulemaking, you and every American citizen across the country deserve to know what’s the data, what’s the methodology that was used to reach that conclusion that was the underpinning of what — rules that were adopted by this agency.”

According to Pruitt, if a study’s data and methodology are not published, “it’s not transparent. It’s not [able to be] objectively measured, and that’s important.” Others, however, point out that the studies undergo peer review. In an op-ed published in The New York Times, former top EPA officials Gina McCarthy and Janet McCabe wrote:

“Peer review ensures that the analytic methodologies underlying studies funded by the agency are sound . . .

[Administrator Pruitt] and some conservative members of Congress are setting up a nonexistent problem in order to prevent the E.P.A. from using the best available science. These studies adhere to all professional standards and meet every expectation of the scientific community in terms of peer review and scientific integrity.”

McCarthy and McCabe also emphasized that the new policy would restrict the studies able to be used in EPA rulemakings. They wrote:

“Some of [the] studies [at issue], particularly those that determine the effects of exposure to chemicals and pollution on health, rely on medical records that by law are confidential because of patient privacy policies. These studies summarize the analysis of raw data and draw conclusions based on that analysis. Other government agencies also use studies like these to develop policy and regulations, and to buttress and defend rules against legal challenges. They are, in fact, essential to making sound public policy . . .

For instance, foundational epidemiological research into the effects of air pollution on health by scientists at Harvard and the American Cancer Society established a clear connection between exposure to fine particles and increased mortality. This research led to further studies that supported the development of air quality standards and rules requiring industry to reduce pollution, improving health and reducing costs for millions of Americans.

Yet, because the personal health data associated with individuals participating in the studies were obtained with guarantees of confidentiality, Mr. Pruitt apparently would have argued for those studies to be tossed out had he been at the helm then.”

Update: On April 24, 2018, Administrator Pruitt signed a proposed rule intended to implement the “science transparency policy.” The rule provides that, “when EPA develops regulations, including regulations for which the public is likely to bear the cost of compliance, with regard to those scientific studies that are pivotal to the action being taken, EPA should ensure that the data underlying those are publicly available in a manner sufficient for independent validation.”

On May 17, 2018, E&E News reported that the science transparency policy “closely resemble[s]” proposals put forward by industry groups, including the National Association of Manufactures and American Petroleum Institute.

---

ICN 7/18

...Researchers also have been studying the impact of mountaintop removal operations on the health of people living nearby.

Last August, the Trump administration, halted a health study on the impacts of mountaintop mining that was already underway by the National Academy of Sciences. A Department of Interior Inspector General's review found in June that the study had been canceled for no clear reason.

The study has not resumed, though, and the committee was disbanded earlier this year, Jennifer Walsh, spokeswoman for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, told InsideClimate News on Tuesday.

"The National Academies still believe this is an important study of the potential health risks for people living near surface coal mine sites in Central Appalachia," she said.

---

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/06/epa-formaldehyde-warnings-blocked-696628

many lnx

Trump administration is suppressing an Environmental Protection Agency report that warns that most Americans inhale enough formaldehyde vapor in the course of daily life to put them at risk of developing leukemia and other ailments, a current and a former agency official told POLITICO.

The warnings are contained in a draft health assessment EPA scientists completed just before Donald Trump became president, according to the officials. They said top advisers to departing Administrator Scott Pruitt are delaying its release as part of a campaign to undermine the agency’s independent research into the health risks of toxic chemicals.

Andrew Wheeler, the No. 2 official at EPA who will be the agency's new acting chief as of Monday, also has a history with the chemical. He was staff director for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2004, when his boss, then-Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), sought to delay an earlier iteration of the formaldehyde assessment.

Formaldehyde is one of the most commonly used chemicals in the country. Americans are exposed to it through wood composites in cabinets and furniture, as well as air pollution from major refineries. The new assessment would give greater weight to warnings about the chemical's risks and could lead to stricter regulations from the EPA or class-action lawsuits targeting its manufacturers, as frequently occurs after these types of studies are released.

“They’re stonewalling every step of the way,” the current official said, accusing political appointees of interfering with the formaldehyde assessment and other reports on toxic chemicals produced by EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System. Industry has long faulted the IRIS program, the agency’s only independent scientific division evaluating the health risks of toxic chemicals, whose assessments often form the basis for federal and state regulations.

The current official and former official requested anonymity out of fear for their jobs and the impact that speaking out could have on the IRIS program.

Interfering with the formaldehyde study is one of several steps Trump's EPA has taken to side with the businesses the agency is supposed to regulate and undermine the agency's approach to science, critics say. Public health advocates also expressed alarm after Pruitt replaced academic scientists with industry advocates on the agency’s influential science advisory boards and sought to limit the types of human health research the EPA can rely on in rulemakings.

The officials said Trump appointees have required that career officials receive their permission before beginning the required internal review of the formaldehyde study and have canceled key briefings that would have advanced it. That interference came after EPA career scientists revised the study once already last year to insulate it from political controversy, they said.

In a statement, EPA denied that the assessment was being held back.

“EPA continues to discuss this assessment with our agency program partners and have no further updates to provide at this time," EPA spokeswoman Kelsi Daniell said. “Assessments of this type are often the result of needs for particular rulemakings and undergo an extensive intra-agency and interagency process.”

But as long ago as January, Pruitt told a Senate panel that he believed the draft assessment was complete.

Five months later, it has yet to see the light of day. Meanwhile, internal documents show, a trade group representing businesses that could face new regulations and lawsuits if the study were released had frequent access to top EPA officials and pressed them to either keep it under wraps or change its findings.

“As stated in our meeting, a premature release of a draft assessment … will cause irreparable harm to the companies represented by the Panel and to the many companies and jobs that depend on the broad use of the chemical,” Kimberly Wise White, who leads the American Chemistry Council’s Formaldehyde Panel, wrote in a Jan. 26 letter to top officials at the EPA. The panel represents companies including the Koch Industries subsidiary Georgia-Pacific Chemicals LLC that could face higher costs from stricter regulations or lawsuits.

Environmentalists: Pruitt's replacement 'should scare anyone who breathes'

By ERIC WOLFF

Nearly a million jobs “depend on the use of formaldehyde,” White’s letter argued.

The holdup is attracting attention on Capitol Hill, where Democrats have already expressed alarm, arguing that the Trump administration has allowed politics to interfere in EPA’s scientific assessments of threats such as toxic pollution and climate change.

The agency must “move past politics and focus on its job of protecting human health” by releasing the formaldehyde study, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said in a statement to POLITICO.

"Because formaldehyde can be found in everything from wood products to women’s hair straighteners, the public health risks are substantial,” Markey said. “Delaying the EPA’s latest assessment of the health risks of formaldehyde only further endangers the health of Americans."

Public health advocates have similarly expressed fears that the Trump administration has allowed EPA to be captured by the industries it regulates. The revelations about the formaldehyde study come after Pruitt removed academic scientists from the agency’s influential science advisory boards and in many cases replaced them with industry advocates, and after he proposed a policy to limit the agency's use of human health data while offering a carve-out for confidential industry studies.

“At every corner, you see the agency trying to either minimize the role of science or manipulate the role of science or just ignore the work of scientists in doing the critical work to ensure that human health and the environment is protected,” said Jennifer McPartland, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund’s health program.

POLITICO also reported in May that Trump administration officials, including EPA chief of staff Ryan Jackson, sought to delay an HHS study finding that nonstick chemicals pose health dangers at a lower level than EPA has said is safe.

Insiders anticipate few major policy changes under Wheeler, who is widely expected to continue Pruitt's deregulatory agenda and is well-versed in chemicals issues. He began his career in EPA's chemical safety office, and after leaving Inhofe's staff lobbied for several chemicals companies, including Celanese Corp., a major formaldehyde manufacturer and ICOR International, a refrigerants manufacturer that was recently acquired by Chemours Co., a DuPont spin-off. A Celanese spokesman said Wheeler worked only on the Renewable Fuels Standard for the company, although Wheeler’s disclosure forms describe his lobbying as being on the broad topic of “chemicals issues.” Wheeler is not barred from working on chemicals issues under the recusal statement he signed in May.

Decades’ of research has linked formaldehyde to nose and throat cancer and respiratory problems, and newer research has suggested the connection to leukemia — controversial conclusions that would gain significant credence if EPA formally adopts them. The new assessment affirms those links to leukemia, nose and throat cancer and other ailments, according to the current and former officials familiar with its findings.

The new assessment could lead the EPA to impose stricter regulations of chemicals refineries or wood products and could spur class-action lawsuits from cancer patients attempting to hold companies responsible for their illnesses.

The agency officials said the political aides blocking the assessment include Jackson and Richard Yamada, a former staffer for House Science Chairman Lamar Smith(R-Texas) who is now a top official in EPA’s Office of Research and Development. And they said Nancy Beck, who criticized the IRIS program in her previous job as a top chemical industry expert, is now helping to stymie the program’s assessments in her new post as head of EPA’s chemical safety office. Jackson, Yamada and Beck did not respond to requests for comment.

The EPA spokeswoman disputed the accusations and said Yamada and Jackson have, in fact, requested briefings on the assessment.

The current EPA official told POLITICO that political appointees have managed to avoid creating written evidence of their interference with the formaldehyde assessment by refusing to send emails or create other records that eventually could become public, instead using what the official described as “a children’s game of telephone."

By blocking the report at the first step of the IRIS review process, political appointees are keeping it from being reviewed by the National Academies of Sciences, an independent panel of the country's top scientists that must weigh in on all such risk assessments. EPA has already paid the academies $500,000 for that review, the highest level of scrutiny a scientific study can receive, but the work cannot start until Pruitt's aides send the study.

“If the administration was really keen on protecting public health, why wouldn’t they send this to the National Academy and give it a really good review?” the former EPA official asked. “If it survives that review, then there’s a public health problem that needs to be dealt with, and if it doesn’t survive the review, then they can point the finger at IRIS and say, ‘You’re dead.’”

How Scott Pruitt blew it

By ALEX GUILLÉN and ANDREW RESTUCCIA

The former official said there would be only one reason not to ask the country’s top experts whether they agree with the analysis: “You don’t want the answer.”

Public health advocates say the administration’s attacks on science have had especially significant implications for the IRIS program. The small office of about 35 experts pores over the huge body of existing research on chemicals, including industry-backed studies aimed at proving the substances safe, to independently assess their risks. While purely scientific, the program’s reviews are looked to by regulators not just at EPA, but also in the states and around the world, often paving the way for new or more stringent regulations.

But industry has long targeted the program, arguing it uses an opaque process to decide which studies to rely on and which research to give credence to when findings conflict.

The American Chemistry Council, Beck’s former employer, spent more than $7 million last year lobbying EPA and Congress on issues including IRIS, formaldehyde and the policy to limit EPA’s use of human health research. Chemicals manufacturers, including Hexion, one of the country’s largest manufacturers of formaldehyde, have also spent tens of thousands of dollars on lobbying related to the program this year.

A National Academies panel agreed with some of industry’s criticisms of the IRIS program in a blistering review of an earlier iteration of the formaldehyde assessment that recommended major changes to how IRIS decides how much weight to give conflicting studies, although it did not attack the substance of its findings about the health effects of formaldehyde. Critics of the IRIS program have pointed to that review frequently as they have sought to kill it, including in an appropriations battle this spring. The EPA spokeswoman also pointed to that assessment in her statement. "The National Academy of Science and Congress in legislative reports have for years been highly critical of EPA’s previous assessments involving formaldehyde," she said.

But te EPA has overhauled the program since then, hiring a new director for IRIS and a new head of the National Center for Environmental Assessment, in which it is housed. The changes have received high marks from the National Academies in two more recent reviews, one in 2014 and one this past April. The latest formaldehyde assessment is expected to demonstrate further progress implementing the academies’ recommendations, potentially undermining industry critiques of the overall IRIS program if it were to be released.

Although efforts to kill EPA’s independent scientific arbiter have so far failed, EPA officials and public health advocates say the program has been significantly hobbled under an administration with close ties to the chemicals industry.

White, the top staffer for the American Chemistry Council’s Formaldehyde Panel, wrote the EPA three times between September 2017 and January 2018, urging the agency to incorporate industry-funded research that found no link between formaldehyde and leukemia, and arguing that the studies shifted the scientific consensus away from the conclusion that it does. In November, Pruitt appointed her to the agency’s influential Science Advisory Board.

Less than a week after the council's Jan. 24 meeting with EPA, Pruitt himself confirmed that the report had been complete for months. During a Senate hearing at the end of January, Markey asked Pruitt for an update on the formaldehyde assessment, saying it was his understanding “that the EPA has finalized its conclusion that formaldehyde causes leukemia and other cancers and that [the] completed new assessment is ready to be released for public review, but is being held up."

“You know, my understanding is similar to yours,” Pruitt replied, promising to follow up.

Markey reminded Pruitt of the exchange in a May 17 letter. In a response Thursday, the agency’s principal deputy assistant administrator for science, Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, said EPA “continues to discuss the formaldehyde assessment internally and has no further updates to provide at this time."

https://www.alternet.org/animal-rights/trump-administration-erodes-protections-endangered-animals-developers-new-attack

kitty bock HSUSA

...Now, a new action by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency puts at further peril endangered and threatened animals in the United States.

The FWS has issued a memorandum prohibiting agency staff from even telling developers when they are required to file for a permit before they begin development projects on properties that could degrade the habitats of endangered and threatened species. According to the Huffington Post, the memo, issued last month by the agency's principal deputy director Greg Sheehan, says it's "not appropriate" for staff to tell developers when they need to obtain such a permit—even though it may be required by law in many circumstances.

The situation is pretty simple to understand: the survival of wildlife depends on biologically healthy and intact ecosystems and habitats, and our government should be giving the benefit of the doubt to imperiled species, not to commercial interests. Notification of the requirement to secure a permit is not onerous red tape; it’s a sign of a functional and effective government.

I have written before about Sheehan, who is closely associated with Safari Club International, a membership club for American trophy hunters. In March, Sheehan greenlighted the lifting of existing bans on the import of elephant and lion trophies from certain African countries and signaled that FWS will approve such imports on a case-by-case basis—a decision that the Humane Society of the United States is challenging in federal court.

Last year the FWS prematurely and unlawfully removed ESA protections for grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, leading states in the region to move to open up a trophy hunting season for these great bears.

Pandering to commercial interests and reducing transparency has become an alarming tendency for this administration, especially at the Department of the Interior. These furtive and reckless actions put at risk the beautiful wildlife that we all, as Americans, enjoy, cherish and wish to protect. We’ve got to stand up for wildlife, by standing strong against misguided moves by federal agencies charged with the protection of wild animal species.The FWS has also established an "advisory board" stocked with trophy hunters, giving them a platform to destroy any and all barriers to international trophy hunting and the import of trophy heads and parts by U.S. citizens.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/interior-warns-staffers-to-keep-mum-about-mandatory-endangered-species-protections_us_5aecee82e4b0ab5c3d65b4f7

New guidelines issued by the U.S. Department of the Interior now prohibit staff members from informing private interests when they must obtain a permit before they can develop properties where activities may affect habitats of endangered species.

A memorandum issued last month by the Fish and Wildlife Service principal deputy director, Greg Sheehan, declared that it’s “not appropriate” for staff to tell developers when they need to obtain such a permit — even though it may be required by law in many circumstances.

Under a section of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, businesses and individuals must request what’s called an “incidental take permit” if they believe their developments could interfere with the habitats of endangered species.

Sheehan insists in his memo that it’s the “decision of the applicant” whether or not to apply for such a permit. Staff members should not use “mandatory language (e.g., a permit is ‘required’),” the memo warns.

“The biological, legal, and economic risk assessment regarding whether to seek a permit belongs with the private party determining how to proceed,” Sheehan said.

Staffers will still be able to provide “critical technical assistance” when it’s requested, according to the memo.

The memo also appears to sharply limit situations where such permits may be required. That includes only cases “where a non-federal project is likely to result in a ‘take’ of a listed species of fish or wildlife ... habitat modification, in and of itself, does not necessarily constitute take,” according to the memo. That would seem to imply such a decision would rely on the judgment of a private interest with a commercial business at stake.

Sheehan was the official who announced to trophy hunting lobby group Safari Club International in Tanzania last year that the Trump administration was lifting an Obama-era ban on elephant trophies from two African nations, Zimbabwe and Zambia. Donald Trump later held off on the action, but the ban was officially lifted again on a “case-by-case basis” in March.

He’s considered among the Interior officials “behind the curtain who are really, really changing our public lands and setting a future direction that may or may not be consistent with what the law requires,” Jim Lyons, a research scholar at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, told The Revelator.

Environmental advocates have criticized Sheehan’s newest edict as a way to weaken regulations with the kind of single-handed action that has been a hallmark of the Trump administration. Noah Greenwald of the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity told The Hill that he believes it will be harder to enforce requirements protecting habitats of endangered species because there will no longer be a record of permit recommendations.

The memo is the latest erosion of wildlife protections by the Trump administration.

The administration is also battling blanket safeguards when a species is declared threatened. Under the Endangered Species Act, once a species is listed as threatened, a series of protections automatically go into effect. Under a proposed new rule, specific protections would be decided on a case by case basis.

An endangered species is at risk of extinction, while a threatened species is likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future. Threatened species include such animals as manatees, sea otters, the Guadalupe fur seal, wood bison, the gray wolf, the grizzly, the polar bear and the northern spotted owl. There are more than 300 threatened animal and plant species in the U.S. More than 500 animal species are endangered in the U.S.

Last month, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke tapped Susan Combs — a rancher and fierce opponent of the Endangered Species Act with strong ties to the oil industry — to serve as acting secretary for fish, wildlife and parks.

---

dingdong

https://www.alternet.org/here-are-8-ways-outgoing-epa-chief-scott-pruitt-suppressed-science

no lnx

Here Are 8 Ways Outgoing EPA Chief Scott Pruitt Suppressed Science

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt leaves a legacy of suppressing the role of science at the agency

By Elizabeth Shogren / Center for Investigative Reporting July 7, 2018,

Report: Trump Admin. Suppressing Media Access of Government Scientists

A new Trump administration protocol requires U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists to run interview requests with the Department of the Interior, its parent agency, before speaking to journalists, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The move is a departure from past media practices that allowed government scientists to quickly respond to journalists' inquiries, according to unnamed USGS employees interviewed by the Times.

The scientists fear the new rule would give taxpayers less exposure to USGS expertise, as journalists would seek scientific comments elsewhere.

"In the 44 years I was with the agency, I was never required to go through anyone for authorization to speak with a reporter," William Ellsworth, a former USGS scientist who is now at Stanford University told the Times. "The USGS is a nonpolitical science agency ... These new roadblocks will not help them fulfill their mission."

Scientists with USGS study the country's landscape, its natural resources and its natural hazards. The department also measures and analyzes natural and man-made factors that contribute to climate change—an issue that has become increasingly partisan since Donald Trump became president.

The LA Times cited a April 25 email from Interior press secretary Heather Swift stating that it is standard procedure for scientists to first obtain approval for interviews with media outlets when the topics are considered "very controversial or ... likely to become a national story."

The new policy also allows Interior's communications office to turn down interview requests on certain topics, the Times reported.

Faith Vander Voort told the newspaper in an email that "the characterization that there is any new policy or that it for some reason targets scientists is completely false," and that Interior had only asked the USGS public affairs office to follow guidelines established in 2012 under President Obama.

However, the guidelines do not say that scientists must get approval before speaking with reporters.

In fact, a 2015 USGS manual on news release and media relations policy states: "The USGS supports and encourages employees to speak on behalf of the USGS to news media representatives about their official work and freely and openly discuss scientific, scholarly, technical information, findings and conclusions based on their official, published work or area of expertise."

A number of senior employees have left the Interior department headed by former Montana congressman Ryan Zinke. Earlier this year, nearly all members of the National Park Service advisory panel abruptly quit in protest of the Trump administration's policies, which they say have neglected science, climate change and environmental protections.

"We resigned because we were deeply disappointed with the department and we were concerned," the former head of the panel, Tony Knowles, told the New York Times. "[Zinke] appears to have no interest in continuing the agenda of science, the effect of climate change, pursuing the protection of the ecosystem.

Scientists Under Scrutiny in Newly Revealed Interior Department ... ›

https://www.ecowatch.com/epa-scientists-conference-2500143723.html

2018 Federal Scientists Survey FAQ | Union of Concerned Scientists ›

Government Scientists at U.S. Climate Conference Terrified to ... ›

Defying Trump, Twitter feeds for U.S. government scientists go rogue ... ›

---

https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-change-trump-science-2571740964.html

White House Considered Ignoring Climate Science, Internal Memo Reveals

The Trump administration debated whether it should attack or simply ignore federal research on climate change, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.

A memo obtained by the Post written last September by former top White House energy and environmental aide Michael Catanzaro presented three pathways for the administration to approach climate science. The menu of options: conducting a red team/blue team exercise to "highlight uncertainties"; using the Administrative Procedure Act to formally attack scientific findings; or "ignor[ing], and not seek[ing] to characterize or question, the science being conducted by federal agencies and outside entities." The memo did not present an option for endorsing federal climate science.

As reported by the Post, the document "highlights the dilemma the administration has faced over climate change since Trump took office. Even as Trump's deputies have worked methodically to uproot policies aimed at curbing the nation's carbon output, the administration's agencies continue to produce reports showing that climate change is happening, is human-driven and is a threat to the United States."

"The scientific evidence about accelerating effects of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is so strong, and so prevalent, that it would be impossible to hush it up even if you wanted to," said Rush Holt, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in a phone interview with the Post. "Coraldeaths and glacier melting and sea-level rise, and all of these things are just so well documented and there's just new evidence every day, whether it's from USGS, or [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], or NASA, or Department of Energy, or various academic institutions. It just can't be swept under the rug."

...

---

no many lnx

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/climate/epa-kelly-perrotta-resignations.html

Two top aides to Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency chief who is facing an array of investigations related to his spending and management practices, have resigned amid widening scrutiny of their roles at the agency.

The departures include Pasquale Perrotta, who served as Mr. Pruitt’s chief of security and helped facilitate the costly and unusual team of bodyguards and other protective measures provided to Mr. Pruitt — measures that critics have called unnecessary.

Also departing was Albert Kelly, a longtime friend of Mr. Pruitt’s and a former banker who received a lifetime ban from the finance industry last year following a banking violation. Mr. Kelly ran the agency’s Superfund program, which oversees the cleanup of hazardous waste sites.

The resignations of Mr. Kelly and Mr. Perrotta follow a string of reports of Mr. Pruitt’s lavish spending and alleged conflicts of interest, including his office’s illegal purchase of a secure telephone booth, his condominium-rental agreement with the wife of an energy lobbyist, and accusations that he demoted or sidelined E.P.A. employees who questioned his actions.

Mr. Pruitt, who is the subject of 11 federal investigations, is now seeking to establish a legal defense fund, according to four people familiar with his plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not directly involved with setting up the fund. These people said they expect Mr. Pruitt to operate the fund privately, with no E.P.A. affiliation.

When asked about the fund, Jahan Wilcox, an E.P.A. spokesman, said, “E.P.A. does not set up a legal expense fund for any employee.”

The people familiar with Mr. Pruitt’s legal defense fund said they did not know what legal or financial form the fund would take.

The practice among administration officials of setting up some form of outside fund or account to help defray the cost of legal expenses dates back to at least the Nixon administration, said Robert Rizzi, a tax attorney who specializes in government ethics with the firm Steptoe. Mr. Rizzi noted that Mr. Pruitt would hardly be the first member of the Trump administration to set up such a fund. “This has come up more often in this administration than in previous administrations,” he said.

Mr. Rizzi also said the creation of such a fund could cause further headaches for Mr. Pruitt should energy companies or other industries regulated by the E.P.A. contribute to it. “These funds raise a lot of uncertainties in the tax area and the ethical area,” he said.

Also on Tuesday, new details emerged about the lobbying of the E.P.A. by J. Steven Hart, the lobbyist whose wife had last year rented a $50-a-night condo to Mr. Pruitt. Congressional investigators on Tuesday provided The New York Times with an email in which Mr. Hart asked Mr. Pruitt for help in getting three people appointed to the E.P.A.’s prestigious Science Advisory Board. They had been recommended by Smithfield Foods, a company that was a client of Mr. Hart’s lobbying firm?, and its Smithfield Foundation, a charitable subsidiary.

The email was sent in August 2017, a few weeks after Mr. Pruitt had moved out of the apartment, but at a time when he still owed money to Mr. Hart’s wife.

Representative Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey, ?the leading Democrat on the House committee that helps oversee E.P.A. operations, ?called the email “further proof that Administrator Pruitt has consistently misled Congress and the public about the extent to which the special interests providing him with gifts have sought specific favors from E.P.A. in return.”

The E.P.A. press office did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Williams & Jensen, the lobbying firm that Mr. Hart left last month, did not respond to a request for comment.

---

cancer tobacco playbook the nation hertsgaard, regulatory capture, sci supp 3

A closer look reveals the industry’s sleight of hand. When Henry Lai, the professor whom Carlo tried to get fired, analyzed 326 safety-related studies completed between 1990 and 2005, he learned that 56 percent found a biological effect from cell-phone radiation and 44 percent did not; the scientific community apparently was split. But when Lai recategorized the studies according to their funding sources, a different picture emerged: 67 percent of the independently funded studies found a biological effect, while a mere 28 percent of the industry-funded studies did. Lai’s findings were replicated by a 2007 analysis in Environmental Health Perspectives that concluded industry-funded studies were two and a half times less likely than independent studies to find a health effect.

One key player has not been swayed by all this wireless-friendly research: the insurance industry. The Nation has not been able to find a single insurance company willing to sell a product-liability policy that covered cell-phone radiation. “Why would we want to do that?” one executive chuckled before pointing to more than two dozen lawsuits outstanding against wireless companies, demanding a total of $1.9 billion in damages. Some judges have affirmed such lawsuits, including a judge in Italy who refused to allow industry-funded research as evidence.

Even so, the industry’s neutralizing of the safety issue has opened the door to the biggest, most hazardous prize of all: the proposed revolutionary transformation of society dubbed the “Internet of Things.” Lauded as a gigantic engine of economic growth, the Internet of Things will not only connect people through their smartphones and computers but will connect those devices to a customer’s vehicles and home appliances, even their baby’s diapers—all at speeds faster than can currently be achieved.

Billions of cell-phone users have been subjected to a public-health experiment without informed consent.

There is a catch, though: The Internet of Things will require augmenting today’s 4G technology with 5G, thus “massively increasing” the general population’s exposure to radiation, according to a petition signed by 236 scientists worldwide who have published more than 2,000 peer-reviewed studies and represent “a significant portion of the credentialed scientists in the radiation research field,” according to Joel Moskowitz, the director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped circulate the petition. Nevertheless, like cell phones, 5G technology is on the verge of being introduced without pre-market safety testing.

Lack of definitive proof that a technology is harmful does not mean the technology is safe, yet the wireless industry has succeeded in selling this logical fallacy to the world. In truth, the safety of wireless technology has been an unsettled question since the industry’s earliest days. The upshot is that, over the past 30 years, billions of people around the world have been subjected to a massive public-health experiment: Use a cell phone today, find out later if it causes cancer or genetic damage. Meanwhile, the wireless industry has obstructed a full and fair understanding of the current science, aided by government agencies that have prioritized commercial interests over human health and news organizations that have failed to inform the public about what the scientific community really thinks. In other words, this public-health experiment has been conducted without the informed consent of its subjects, even as the industry keeps its thumb on the scale.

“The absence of absolute proof does not mean the absence of risk,” Annie Sasco, the former director of epidemiology for cancer prevention at France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research, told the attendees of the 2012 Childhood Cancer conference. “The younger one starts using cell phones, the higher the risk,” Sasco continued, urging a public-education effort to inform parents, politicians, and the press about children’s exceptional susceptibility.

For adults and children alike, the process by which wireless radiation may cause cancer remains uncertain, but it is thought to be indirect. Wireless radiation has been shown to damage the blood-brain barrier, a vital defense mechanism that shields the brain from carcinogenic chemicals elsewhere in the body (resulting, for example, from secondhand cigarette smoke). Wireless radiation has also been shown to interfere with DNA replication, a proven progenitor of cancer. In each of these cases, the risks are higher for children: Their skulls, being smaller, absorb more radiation than adults’ skulls do, while children’s longer life span increases their cumulative exposure.

The wireless industry has sought to downplay concerns about cell phones’ safety, and the Federal Communications Commission has followed its example. In 1996, the FCC established cell-phone safety levels based on “specific absorption rate,” or SAR. Phones were required to have a SAR of 1.6 watts or less per kilogram of body weight. In 2013, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised the FCC that its guidelines “do not account for the unique vulnerability and use patterns specific to pregnant women and children.” Nevertheless, the FCC has declined to update its standards.

The FCC has granted the industry’s wishes so often that it qualifies as a “captured agency,” argued journalist Norm Alster in a report that Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics published in 2015. The FCC allows cell-phone manufacturers to self-report SAR levels, and does not independently test industry claims or require manufacturers to display the SAR level on a phone’s packaging. “Industry controls the FCC through a soup-to-nuts stranglehold that extends from its well-placed campaign spending in Congress through its control of the FCC’s congressional oversight committees to its persistent agency lobbying,” Alster wrote. He also quoted the CTIA website praising the FCC for “its light regulatory touch.”

The revolving-door syndrome that characterizes so many industries and federal agencies reinforces the close relationship between the wireless industry and the FCC. Just as Tom Wheeler went from running the CTIA (1992– 2004) to chairing the FCC (2013–2017), Meredith Atwell Baker went from FCC commissioner (2009–2011) to the presidency of the CTIA (2014 through today). To ensure its access on Capitol Hill, the wireless industry made $26 million in campaign contributions in 2016, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and spent $87 million on lobbying in 2017.

Neutralizing the safety issue has been an ongoing imperative because the research keeps coming, much of it from outside the United States. But the industry’s European and Asian branches have, like their US counterpart, zealously war-gamed the science, spun the news coverage, and thereby warped the public perception of their products’ safety.

The WHO began to study the health effects of electric- and magnetic-field radiation (EMF) in 1996 under the direction of Michael Repacholi, an Australian biophysicist. Although Repacholi claimed on disclosure forms that he was “independent” of corporate influence, in fact Motorola had funded his research: While Repacholi was director of the WHO’s EMF program, Motorola paid $50,000 a year to his former employer, the Royal Adelaide Hospital, which then transferred the money to the WHO program. When journalists exposed the payments, Repacholi denied that there was anything untoward about them because Motorola had not paid him personally. Eventually, Motorola’s payments were bundled with other industry contributions and funneled through the Mobile and Wireless Forum, a trade association that gave the WHO’s program $150,000 annually. In 1999, Repacholi helped engineer a WHO statement that “EMF exposures below the limits recommended in international guidelines do not appear to have any known consequence on health.”

Two wireless trade associations contributed $4.7 million to the Interphone study launched by the WHO’s International Agency for Cancer Research in 2000. That $4.7 million represented 20 percent of the $24 million budget for the Interphone study, which convened 21 scientists from 13 countries to explore possible links between cell phones and two common types of brain tumor: glioma and meningioma. The money was channeled through a “firewall” mechanism intended to prevent corporate influence on the IACR’s findings, but whether such firewalls work is debatable. “Industry sponsors know [which scientists] receive funding; sponsored scientists know who provides funding,” Dariusz Leszczynski, an adjunct professor of biochemistry at the University of Helsinki, has explained.

The FCC grants the wireless industry’s wishes so often that it qualifies as a “captured agency.”

To be sure, the industry could not have been pleased with some of the Interphone study’s conclusions. The study found that the heaviest cell-phone users were 80 percent more likely to develop glioma. (The initial finding of 40 percent was increased to 80 to correct for selection bias.) The Interphone study also concluded that individuals who had owned a cell phone for 10 years or longer saw their risk of glioma increase by nearly 120 percent. However, the study did not find any increased risk for individuals who used their cell phones less frequently; nor was there evidence of any connection with meningioma.

When the Interphone conclusions were released in 2010, industry spokespeople blunted their impact by deploying what experts on lying call “creative truth-telling.” “Interphone’s conclusion of no overall increased risk of brain cancer is consistent with conclusions reached in an already large body of scientific research on this subject,” John Walls, the vice president for public affairs at the CTIA, told reporters. The wiggle word here is “overall”: Since some of the Interphone studies did not find increased brain-cancer rates, stipulating “overall” allowed Walls to ignore those that did. The misleading spin confused enough news organizations that their coverage of the Interphone study was essentially reassuring to the industry’s customers. The Wall Street Journal announced “Cell Phone Study Sends Fuzzy Signal on Cancer Risk,” while the BBC’s headline declared: “No Proof of Mobile Cancer Risk.”

The industry’s $4.7 million contribution to the WHO appears to have had its most telling effect in May 2011, when the WHO convened scientists in Lyon, France, to discuss how to classify the cancer risk posed by cell phones. The industry not only secured “observer” status at Lyon for three of its trade associations; it placed two industry-funded experts on the working group that would debate the classification, as well as additional experts among the “invited specialists” who advised the group.

Niels Kuster, a Swiss engineer, initially filed a conflict-of-interest statement affirming only that his research group had taken money from “various governments, scientific institutions and corporations.” But after Kuster co-authored a summary of the WHO’s findings in The Lancet Oncology, the medical journal issued a correction expanding on Kuster’s conflict-of-interest statement, noting payments from the Mobile Manufacturers Forum, Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Sony, GSMA, and Deutsche Telekom. Nevertheless, Kuster participated in the entire 10 days of deliberations.

The industry also mounted a campaign to discredit Lennart Hardell, a Swedish professor of oncology serving on the working group. Hardell’s studies, which found an increase in gliomas and acoustic neuromas in long-term cell-phone users, were some of the strongest evidence that the group was considering.

Hardell had already attracted the industry’s displeasure back in 2002, when he began arguing that children shouldn’t use cell phones. Two scientists with industry ties quickly published a report with the Swedish Radiation Authority dismissing Hardell’s research. His detractors were John D. Boice and Joseph K. McLaughlin of the International Epidemiology Institute, a company that provided “Litigation Support” and “Corporate Counseling” to various industries, according to its website. Indeed, at the very time Boice and McLaughlin were denigrating Hardell’s work, the institute was providing expert-witness services to Motorola in a brain-tumor lawsuit against the company.

The wireless industry didn’t get the outcome that it wanted at Lyon, but it did limit the damage. A number of the working group’s scientists had favored increasing the classification of cell phones to Category 2A, a “probable” carcinogen; but in the end, the group could only agree on an increase to 2B, a “possible” carcinogen.

That result enabled the industry to continue proclaiming that there was no scientifically established proof that cell phones are dangerous. Jack Rowley of the GSMA trade association said that “interpretation should be based on the overall balance of the evidence.” Once again, the slippery word “overall” downplayed the significance of scientific research that the industry didn’t like.

Industry-funded scientists had been pressuring their colleagues for a decade by then, according to Leszczynski, another member of the Lyon working group. Leszczynski was an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School when he first experienced such pressure, in 1999. He had wanted to investigate the effects of radiation levels higher than the SAR levels permitted by government, hypothesizing that this might better conform to real-world practices. But when he proposed the idea at scientific meetings, Leszczynski said, it was shouted down by Mays Swicord, Joe Elder, and C.K. Chou—scientists who worked for Motorola. As Leszczynski recalled, “It was a normal occurrence at scientific meetings—and I attended really a lot of them—that whenever [a] scientist reported biological effects at SAR over [government-approved levels], the above-mentioned industry scientists, singularly or as a group, jumped up to the microphone to condemn and to discredit the results.”

Years later, a study that Leszczynski described as a “game changer” discovered that even phones meeting government standards, which in Europe were a SAR of 2.0 watts per kilogram, could deliver exponentially higher peak radiation levels to certain skin and blood cells. (SAR levels reached a staggering 40 watts per kilogram—20 times higher than officially permitted.) In other words, the official safety levels masked dramatically higher exposures in hot spots, but industry-funded scientists obstructed research on the health impacts.

“Everyone knows that if your research results show that radiation has effects, the funding flow dries up.” —Dariusz Leszczynski, adjunct professor of biochemistry at the University of Helsinki

“Everyone knows that if your research results show that radiation has effects, the funding flow dries up,” Leszczynski said in an interview in 2011. Sure enough, the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority of Finland, where Leszczynski had a long career, discontinued research on the biological effects of cell phones and discharged him a year later.

According to scientists involved in the process, the WHO may decide later this year to reconsider its categorization of the cancer risk posed by cell phones; the WHO itself told The Nation that before making any such decision, it will review the final report of the National Toxicology Program, a US government initiative. The results reported by the NTP in 2016 seem to strengthen the case for increasing the assessment of cell-phone radiation to a “probable” or even a “known” carcinogen. Whereas the WHO’s Interphone study compared the cell-phone usage of people who had contracted cancer with that of people who hadn’t, the NTP study exposed rats and mice to cell-phone radiation and observed whether the animals got sick.

“There is a carcinogenic effect,” announced Ron Melnick, the designer of the study. Male rats exposed to cell-phone radiation developed cancer at a substantially higher rate, though the same effect was not seen in female rats. Rats exposed to radiation also had lower birth rates, higher infant mortality, and more heart problems than those in the control group. The cancer effect occurred in only a small percentage of the rats, but that small percentage could translate into a massive amount of human cancers. “Given the extremely large number of people who use wireless communications devices, even a very small increase in the incidence of disease…could have broad implications for public health,” the NTP’s draft report explained.

But this was not the message that media coverage of the NTP study conveyed, as the industry blanketed reporters with its usual “more research is needed” spin. “Seriously, stop with the irresponsible reporting on cell phones and cancer,” demanded a Vox headline. “Don’t Believe the Hype,” urged The Washington Post. Newsweek, for its part, stated the NTP’s findings in a single paragraph, then devoted the rest of the article to an argument for why they should be ignored.

The NTP study was to be peer-reviewed at a meeting on March 26–28, amid signs that the program’s leadership is pivoting to downplay its findings. The NTP had issued a public-health warning when the study’s early results were released in 2016. But when the NTP released essentially the same data in February 2018, John Bucher, the senior scientist who directed the study, announced in a telephone press conference that “I don’t think this is a high-risk situation at all,” partly because the study had exposed the rats and mice to higher levels of radiation than a typical cell-phone user experienced.

Microwave News’s Slesin speculated on potential explanations for the NTP’s apparent backtracking: new leadership within the program, where a former drug-company executive, Brian Berridge, now runs the day-to-day operations; pressure from business-friendly Republicans on Capitol Hill and from the US military, whose weapons systems rely on wireless radiation; and the anti-science ideology of the Trump White House. The question now: Will the scientists doing the peer review endorse the NTP’s newly ambivalent perspective, or challenge it?

...

---

4/18 sum update

Restricting Information

Across many federal agencies, information about climate change and policies to address it has been removed from the internet or archived in hard-to-access locations. Terms like "climate change" have been removed from agency websites, and others have been renamed. For example, the Department of Energy's Clean Energy Investment Center is now simply the Energy Investor Center.

Morgan Currie, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Digital Civil Society Lab, and Britt S. Paris, a Ph.D. student in information studies at UCLA, acknowledge that public information on government activities changes to reflect the policy directives of different administrations. But as they note, climate change is still occurring, whether it is reported or not:

"In our view, burying climate science diminishes our democracy. It denies the average citizen the information necessary to make informed decisions, and fuels the flames of rhetoric that denies consensus-based science."

Stacking Advisory Panels

Many scientists provide advice without pay to federal agencies on issues within their areas of expertise. But the Trump administration has downgraded or eliminated independent scientific input on a number of key issues.

For example, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt has barred scientists receiving agency grants from serving on EPA advisory committees, and has replaced a number of academic board members with representative of industries and state governments.

Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke has created a new advisory board on recreation that is heavily weighted toward industry and another on international wildlife protection made up mainly of trophy hunters.

Past administrations that tried to stack advisory boards ultimately failed to achieve their goals, according to Donald Boesch, a professor of marine science at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who has served on many federal advisory committees. Other scientists, not affiliated with the administration, will call out biased conclusions and unsupported recommendations from these slanted panels, Boesch predicts:

"Consequently, policies and regulations based on the panels' recommendations will be less likely to withstand public or political scrutiny and be more open to legal challenges than if they were based on more balanced input."

Manufacturing Controversy

Although his proposal was ultimately rejected by the White House, EPA administrator Pruitt campaigned energetically in 2017 for a "red team-blue team" review of current climate science. Such an exercise, Pruitt asserted, would provide fresh perspective.

Critics viewed this idea as an attempt to undercut a widely supported consensus that human actions are changing Earth's climate, by putting climate deniers on an equal footing with mainstream experts.

Red team-blue team exercises center on "the spirit of challenge by an antagonist," explains University of Michigan climate scientist Richard Rood, who has participated in these types of reviews. Rather than shedding light on serious scientific questions, Rood describes Pruitt's proposal as a performance designed to advance a political agenda:

"Such spectacle will be based on emotional appeal and will rely on manipulating the message about the role that uncertainty plays in scientific investigation. The goal will be the amplification and persistence of public doubt—a goal that would be undoubtedly achieved."

Distorting Scientific Findings

Many statements about climate change by Trump administration officials have questioned whether climate change is occurring or have downplayed the need to take action. Most recently, in late March 2018, EPA staffers received a list of "talking points" about climate change that instructed them to emphasize uncertainty when discussing the issue with local communities and Native American tribes.

For example, one point stated:

"Human activity impacts our changing climate in some manner. The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue."

Joe Arvai, a professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan who served on EPA's Chartered Science Advisory Board from 2011 to 2017, calls this framing an exaggeration of uncertainties around the human causes of climate change. "In effect, Pruitt is asking EPA staffers to lie," Arvai contends.

In another area—the health impacts of exposure to pollutants and toxics—Pruitt has proposed to change EPA policy so that the agency would only consider scientific research if underlying raw data can be made public for external scientists and organizations to review. Pruitt says this approach will increase transparency, but Arvai argues otherwise:

"[I]n reality, this rule would mean that critical public health studies could no longer be used to inform EPA policy because some of the data are protected by doctor-patient or researcher-participant confidentiality."

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Researchers See Public Engagement as Crucial Part of Their Job ›

March for Science: Scientists are back and ready to march ›

March for Science 2.0 seeks movement status - Axios ›

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/02/14/climate-denier-tim-ball-trump-approved-not-credible-enough-stand-accountable-libel-0

It was gratifying, today, to see a senior justice of the Supreme Court of British Columbia denounce the professional “climate change sceptic” Dr. Tim Ball as incompetent, inattentive and, perhaps, indifferent to the truth.

But it was an outrage to see the same judge let Ball so casually off the hook, by dismissing a libel action that had been brought by University of Victoria climate scientist and B.C. Green Party leader Dr. Andrew Weaver.

Related: Judge Dismisses Libel Claim, Tim Ball Not Credible Enough To Be Taken Seriously

Weaver sued Ball in 2011 for one in a series of rabid diatribes that Ball had written for the website Canada Free Press (“Corruption of Climate Science Has Created 30 Lost Years,” Jan 10, 2011 — no longer available since CFP took it down and apologized for its defamatory content).

Ball, a long-retired geographer who is more famous for overstating his own credentials than for anything accomplished during his academic career, had accused Weaver (then a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) of bias and scientific incompetence — casting him as part of a politicized campaign to fleece Canadian taxpayers of grant money while overselling the dangers of climate change.

The resulting libel action ground through the courts until it finally went to trial last fall, with 7.5 days of evidence heard over a period of more than three weeks — a brutal and expensive waste of time that would be a significant deterrent for almost anyone hoping to defend a reputation against the climate denial assault.

But Weaver had become a target and stepped up to the task. And with this judgment, he was vindicated, entirely.

Justice Skolrood found that “… despite Dr. Ball’s history as an academic and a scientist, the Article is rife with errors and inaccuracies, which suggests a lack of attention to detail on Dr. Ball’s part, if not an indifference to the truth.” The judge further accepted that Ball was committed to damaging Weaver’s reputation. Justice Skolrood wrote: “These allegations are directed at Dr. Weaver’s professional competence and are clearly derogatory of him. Indeed, it is quite apparent that this was Dr. Ball’s intent.”

But with the strangest get-out-of-jail-free card ever delivered in a Canadian libel trial, the judge concluded that Ball’s writing was too apparently idiotic to be taken seriously.

Again, from Justice Skolrood’s Reasons for Judgment: “The Article is poorly written and does not advance credible arguments in favour of Dr. Ball’s theory about the corruption of climate science. Simply put, a reasonably thoughtful and informed person who reads the Article is unlikely to place any stock in Dr. Ball’s views, including his views of Dr. Weaver as a supporter of conventional climate science.”

But where in the Canadian or American climate conversation (or in either country’s governments) does Justice Skolrood think we might find the kind of “reasonably thoughtful and informed person” who would be immune to Ball’s low standard of science or accuracy?

Clearly, in a time of Donald Trump’s presidency, scientific, administrative and personal incompetence — not to mention indifference to truth — are no longer barriers to being taken seriously.

Tim Ball, himself, was invited to Washington to participate in a briefing with the Trump transition team.

In the Canadian libel tradition, if a plaintiff demonstrates that he or she has been defamed, the case is won. And you would expect, if the plaintiff was famous and credible and the defendant quite obviously a dunce, that damages would be minimal. But there would still BE damages.

That is, unless the defamer can argue one of a narrow range of defences. “Fair comment,” for example, would require an affirmative answer to the question: “could anyone honestly express that opinion on the proved facts?” In this case, Justice Skolrood said, no.

“While Dr. Ball presents his central thesis that climate science has been corrupted by politics, the Article offers little in the way of support for that thesis, apart from vague references to missing or falsified data and political manipulation, unsubstantiated and erroneous references ….”

So, unable to claim conventional defences, Ball’s lawyer, Michael Scherr, went for something novel. Having admitted that his client was guilty of defamation, Scherr demanded that Weaver should have to prove that the defamatory comments actually caused damage. In the judge’s words, Scherr was seeking “a threshold of seriousness,” and arguing, in effect, that his client’s work didn’t meet that threshold.

The notion arose from a case in another Canadian province (Vellacott v. Saskatoon Star Phoenix Group Inc. et al, Saskatchewan, 2012). In that case, the court found that certain published comments were not defamatory because they were so ludicrous and outrageous as to be unbelievable and therefore incapable of lowering the reputation of the plaintiff in the minds of right-thinking persons. Against that standard, Justice Skolrood wrote, “the impugned words here are not as hyperbolic as the words in Vellacott, (but) they similarly lack a sufficient air of credibility to make them believable and therefore potentially defamatory.”

The woeful truth, now, is that climate change denial has suffered from a similar “lack (of) a sufficient air of credibility” for decades, and Tim Ball has spent that period on the lecture circuit saying blithely incredible things, dissembling about climate science and defaming climate scientists — without ever facing an impartial judge or being censured for the damage that he’s done.

Now, finally, he is brought before — and broadly derided by — the court, but nevertheless allowed to walk away without so much as a requirement that he cease and desist.

Ball’s supporters (who obviously have no illusions about the quality of his work) are cheering this decision as, “A great victory for free speech.” But, one hopes, the celebrations will end with an ultimate comeuppance. Weaver’s lawyer, Roger McConchie, is already preparing the appeal. Beyond being castigated as inept and lacking integrity, Ball may yet be called to account.

“The only real finding in the judgment is that it didn’t defame Dr. Weaver and it’s a little puzzling because the defendants themselves admitted in their defence that they did defame him,” McConchie told the Times Colonist.

TAGS: tim ballandrew weaverclimate lawsuitlibel suit

---

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11042018/zinke-interior-department-staff-reassignments-inspector-general-report-whistleblower-joel-clement-doi-scientist

Interior Department's Office of Inspector General concluded an investigation into the reassignment of 27 top career employees last year without being able to determine the reasons behind the moves or their legality, because, it said, the agency failed to document its decision-making process, despite federal guidance.

In a report issued Monday, the agency's watchdog examined the reassignment of the employees between June 15, 2017, and October 29, 2017.

Among those moved was Joel Clement, formerly the director of the Office of Policy Analysis. In a July 2017 op-ed, Clement accused the department under Secretary Ryan Zinke of transferring him to an obscure accounting post as retaliation for speaking out about the threats manmade climate change poses to Alaskan villages. Zinke has expanded greater fossil fuel development on federal lands and played down or erased consideration of climate impacts across the agency.

Clement said last year that his reassignment was part of a pattern within Interior under the new administration. After he filed a federal whistleblower complaint against the agency, eight senators asked the Inspector General's Office to undertake an inquiry.

The investigators found that Interior's Executive Resources Board (ERB)—made up of six voting members who were all political appointees at the time and who made the personnel decisions—"did not document its plan for selecting senior executives for reassignment, nor did it consistently apply the reasons it stated it used to select senior executives for reassignment. We also found that the ERB did not gather the information needed to make informed decisions about the reassignments, nor did it effectively communicate" with those re-assigned.

The report continued: "As a result, many of the affected senior executives questioned whether these reassignments were political or punitive, based on a prior conflict with DOI leadership, or on the senior executive's nearness to retirement. Many executives speculated that multiple reasons applied or believed their reassignment may have been related to their prior work assignments, including climate change, energy, or conservation."

The Interior Department had 227 top career staff, designated as Senior Executive Service, at the time. The department has broad authority to reassign them, provided it follows certain rules. One is that the employee is reassigned to a position "for which the appointee is qualified," something Clement, a scientist and policy expert, took issue with when he was reassigned to an office that specializes in auditing and dispersing fossil fuel royalty income.

The report noted that all but two of the reassignment notices were sent on June 15, and that the first reassignment started on July 2. It also noted that reassignments aren't allowed until 120 days after an agency head is appointed; July 2 would have been 123 days after Zinke's confirmation.

"Because the ERB had no documents related to its decisions, we relied on interviews with ERB members for the rationale behind the ERB's decisions," the investigators wrote. ERB members "told us that instead of consulting with the senior executives or with the senior executives' supervisors about performance and qualifications, the ERB used short biographies submitted by the senior executives in February 2017." Those biographies had been requested as "a way for the new political leadership to get to know the career" staff, they wrote. They also reported that, in most cases, the staff members' supervisors were not informed until hours before the notices were sent.

Interior Deputy Secretary David L. Bernhard said in a written response to the report that the decisions the agency made were "lawful."

Clement, who resigned in October 2017, four months after he invoked the federal whistleblower protections, said in an emailed statement that he was "stunned by the level of incompetence that this report describes."

"There were so few records kept that the Inspector General can't even make a determination of the legality of the reassignment actions," he wrote. "It's remarkable that the political staff at Interior would be so blithe, thoughtless, and careless during a time of intense scrutiny. It begs the question, what did they have to hide?"

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/03/leaked-memo-epa-gives-its-employees-talking-points-on-how-to-downplay-climate-science/

The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday evening sent employees a list of eight approved talking points on climate change from its Office of Public Affairs?guidelines that promote a message of uncertainty about climate science and gloss over proposed cuts to key adaptation programs.

An internal email obtained by HuffPost?forwarded to employees by Joel Scheraga, a career staffer who served under President Barack Obama?directs communications directors and regional office public affairs directors to note that the EPA “promotes science that helps inform states, municipalities and tribes on how to plan for and respond to extreme events and environmental emergencies” and “works with state, local, and tribal government to improve infrastructure to protect against the consequences of climate change and natural disasters.”

But beyond those benign statements acknowledging the threats climate change poses are talking points boiled down from the sort of climate misinformation EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has long trumpeted.

“Human activity impacts our changing climate in some manner,” one point reads. “The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue.”

The other states: “While there has been extensive research and a host of published reports on climate change, clear gaps remain including our understanding of the role of human activity and what we can do about it.”

The email was sent under the subject line: “Consistent Messages on Climate Adaptation.”

In a statement to HuffPost, the EPA confirmed the memo and said the agency’s “work on climate adaptation continues under the leadership of Dr. Scheraga.”

The delivery of the talking points comes a week after Pruitt announced plans to restrict the agency’s use of science in writing environmental rules, barring the use of research unless the raw data can be made public for other scientists and industry to scrutinize. That directive would disqualify huge amounts of public health research conducted on the condition that subjects’ personal information will remain private. Two former top EPA officials called the move an “attack on science” in a New York Times op-ed published Monday.

Last year, the EPA reassigned the four staffers in the policy office who worked on climate adaptation, shuttered its program on climate adaptation and proposed eliminating funding for programs that deal with rising seas and warming temperatures.

Pruitt personally oversaw efforts to scrub climate change from EPA websites, and staunchly defended President Donald Trump’s decision last June to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord. In October, Pruitt proposed repealing the Clean Power Plan, the only major federal policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The agency had also suggested zero

...

https://www.ecowatch.com/nasa-climate-science-trump-2553691889.html

Critics say NASA's Earth Science Division is a waste of taxpayer dollars and a distraction from the agency's core mission of space exploration. But NASA has a critical role to play in understanding human-caused climate change, by operating satellites that monitor the earth's forests, deserts, oceans and atmosphere.

NASA scientists are working to improve our understanding of natural disasters like wildfires, hurricanes and drought, while tracking long-term changes to the earth's climate. Researchers are also mapping out those changes so Americans can understand how heat-trapping carbon pollution is reshaping the world. Below is a collection of NASA maps, graphs and photos cataloging this profound transformation.

...

https://www.alternet.org/drugs/drug-companies-are-funding-investigational-studies-influence-their-results

Remember how appalled we felt as a society when we discovered that, for so long, we had been mistakenly taking Big Tobacco’s word that cigarettes are harmless? Rinse and repeat with lobbyists for Big Alcohol fear-mongering about legal weed. And again and again with a panoply of consumer-level commodities and goods.

Nowadays we have all these familiar worries, but about our drugs and medications instead. It’s become so bad that there's now reason to believe Big Pharma is also colluding to poison the well of scientific inquiry.

The truth is, there are many examples of private industry paying for positive press from the scientific community. When you look closer at our spending priorities as a nation, it’s not entirely difficult to see why. As public funding for the sciences has fallen away, many scientists have had to pivot toward more consistent—and ethically fraught—sources of funding and stability as surely as politicians who, for want of public election funding, get buoyed by billionaires at $100,000-per-plate fundraising dinners.

We’ll take a look at case studies in a moment, but for right now, think about how important it is for us to be able to trust, at a minimum level, the products we invite into our bodies and our homes.

It’s become common knowledge that the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most corrupt out there. This is a serious affront to justice that has gone on for far too long. The fight for consumer protections of all kinds can and must begin with health care, medicines, prescription drugs and medical devices. Here are the stakes.

The Erosion of Trust

In 2006, GlaxoSmithKline—the esoteric name for a ubiquitous diabetes treatment brand—took a victory lap after a lengthy report in the New England Journal of Medicine declared its Avandia medication to be the most effective of the three diabetes drugs tested.

Unfortunately for readers and patients, the extent of the report’s bias was not as attention-grabbing as the headline and ensuing celebratory press releases. In fact, with the help of the FDA and renowned heart specialist Steven Nissen, the Washington Post found that GlaxoSmithKline directly funded the research itself. All 11 of the paper's authors had received consultation fees, grants or another form of monetary compensation.

There may be no clearer example of conflicts of interest in the halls of science. Given the degree to which private money may have influenced the result of this scientific endeavor, we have little choice but to assume it did.

Even worse? The drug didn’t merely fail to help patients cope with their illnesses, it actually raised their risk of heart attack. Avandia effectively doesn’t exist anymore in the U.S., in part because GlaxoSmithKline was so busy trying to force two logical dots to connect that it didn’t even pick up on all the collateral damage.

This is outrageous. Consumers shouldn’t have to second-guess the medical professionals who are supposed to help us take care of ourselves.

The Fall of Accountable Science

Between 2011 and 2012, the New England Journal of Medicine published more than 70 “original studies” of newly FDA-approved and experimental drugs. Of these 70-plus reports:

Up until about the 1980s, the federal government was the primary financier of scientific research in the world of medicine. In the '60s and '70s, the federal government had a 70 percent share of scientific research. In 2013, that number finally dropped below the 50 percent mark.Sixty received direct pharmaceutical company funding.

Fifty were written or co-written by a current employee of a pharmaceutical company.

Thirty-seven had lead writers who had, at some point, received speaking fees or other compensation from the subject of the study.

As you may have guessed, there is at least token legal oversight available for clinical investigations of new drugs in the form of FDA regulation. In addition to protecting the personal information of trial participants (patients), the FDA also maintains that no drug may reach the investigation phase until its effects—and its lack of harm—have both been documented in a lab setting. As you can likely tell, these protections no longer appear adequate.

It has become an open secret that most of the drugs the FDA concerns itself with cannot be relied upon to greatly outperform placebos, or existing treatments, in a vast majority of cases. Moreover, the wholesale regulatory capture of the FDA has resulted in a situation where this vital public office serves as a glorified rubber patent stamp for protecting medicines as privately owned, profit-generating pieces of intellectual property.

The American People Are No Longer in Control of Their Scientific Destiny

A generation or so ago, the skill with which a nation pursued and made use of scientific knowledge was one of the chief metrics of its greatness. However, starting in the 1980s, the United States took a decided turn away from public sector expansion. Reagan-era policies aimed to privatize government services in the name of balancing local and state budgets. Since then, the world has watched as Americans have continued to vote accountable government and transparent scientific study nearly out of existence by proponents of “small government” and the shifting of fiscal, bureaucratic and legislative power from the public to the private sector.

When corporatists boast of the rate of innovation in the private sector, they generally fail to mention where the money came from that makes all that innovation possible—or what America used to do with it instead. In truth, privatization does not necessarily lead to less government, as its proponents would like to believe. In many cases of privatized innovation, the government still plays a significant role along the value chain of innovation.

The difference, though, is that instead of the government being involved for the sake of oversight and accountability, profit-seeking privatized enterprises can lobby for the expansion of public funding just the same as those in the public sector would. Those private companies can then skim off only the most successful ventures. It’s simply another example of how the government continues to turn a blind eye to unethical, profit-mongering business practices in the name of “trickle down economics,” which we know have not worked in the past.

However, the winds of change seem to be shifting. For all our present social and political turmoil, we’re more aware of the problem than ever before. But before we can fix it, we must remember science is, like any other endeavor, a human institution.

Like a passionate grade-school teacher who can’t do her best work due to a lack of school funding, scientists of all stripes are, after all, human beings with their own biases, internal monologues, ideas, agendas and needs. Science is one of the most vitally important institutions we have right now. Most Americans say it’s very nearly the only thing that matters in the face of global, anthropocentric climate change, but it’s currently perishing from neglect.

Here is the silver lining: Though junk science seems to have a stubborn place in the spotlight and in our shared vocabulary, scientists are actively trying to turn the tables. Inspired in part by the fallout from the 2016 election, American scientists are seeking political office at a brisk clip—and being vocal about it, too.

Additionally, it seems that we are finally collectively beginning to wake up to the enormous disservices that Big Pharma has done our society. Throwing our support behind scientist-politicians could be one aid to the problem, but we also need to address the bigger issues at hand with how our medical knowledge is funded and who we can trust to provide us with real answers to medical questions.

Government oversight and funding are important aspects of that, and improved transparency regarding where we’re getting our “science” is something people are finally starting to advocate for, and should continue to. With this two-part awakening in both the scientific and general community, we can only hope that we are, at last, reaching the end of the road for scientific illiteracy in the States.

Kate Harveston

---

https://www.ecowatch.com/pruitt-clean-power-plan-2529918305.htm

Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has obtained emails indicating U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt's personal involvement in efforts to remove information about climate changefrom EPA's website.

EDF obtained the emails from EPA in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. We have posted the files for easy public access.

The emails center on a website purge at EPA in April 2017. Along with webpages about climate change and climate science, the purge removed the webpage about the Clean Power Plan—the most significant action that the U.S. has ever taken to address climate change, and one that Pruitt is now attempting to repeal

The website purge undermined access to information about the Clean Power Plan's immense benefits for climate and public health, as well as supporting materials about the rule's legal and technical underpinnings. The public comment period for Pruitt's proposal to repeal the Clean Power Plan is ongoing....

---

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18012018/science-climate-change-advisory-board-epa-interior-trump-administration

1/18 update

https://www.alternet.org/environment/national-parks-epa-trump-administration-stiff-arms-science-advisers

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/majority-national-park-service-advisory-panel-resigns-trump-administration

NEWS & POLITICS

Majority of National Park Service Advisory Panel Resigns from Trump Administration

The move came after Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke consistently refused to meet with them.

By Elizabeth Preza / Raw Story January 16, 2018, 11:23 PM GMT

Nine out of 12 members of the National Park System Advisory Board on Tuesday quit out of “frustration” after Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke refused to meet with them, the Washington Post reports.

In a letter to Zinke, former Alaska governor Tony Knowles said the board members “have stood by waiting for the chance to meet and continue the partnership,” slamming the interior secretary for ignoring their “requests to engage.”

“We understand the complexity of transition but our requests to engage have been ignored and the matters on which we wanted to brief the new Department team are clearly not part of its agenda,” Knowles wrote. “I wish the National Park System and Service well and will always be dedicated to their success.”

Knowles told the Washington Post the board members “were frozen out” of recent Interior Department decisions to raise entrance fees and reverse a decision to ban plastic water bottles from the national park system.

---

One Year Into the Trump Administration, Where Do We Stand?

By John R. Platt

What a long, strange year it's been.

Saturday, Jan. 20 marks the one-year anniversary of the Trump administration officially taking office after a long and arduous election. It's a year that has seen seemingly unending attacks on science and the environment, along with a rise in hateful rhetoric and racially motivated policies. But it's almost been met by the continuing growth of the efforts to resist what the Trump administration has to offer.

So where do we stand, one year in?

Well, for one thing, we can say that the year has given the administration's actions a visible shape. "These are not isolated incidents at this point," said Jacob Carter, research scientist for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who has been tracking the administration's attacks against science—at least 65 since the president took office. "They're happening so often now that there is definitely a pattern starting to emerge. The administration really wants to undermine the role of science and science-based decision making. They're getting the expertise out of the way to further a political agenda."

Carter said these attempts to remove science from government decision-making—ranging from ending a study of the health effects of mountaintop-removal mining to eliminating the words "climate change" from all EPA grants—"have real consequences on peoples' lives. It's about our health and safety. If we don't listen to the best available science, then our lives are at risk."

But pushing science and scientists aside doesn't mean they go away forever. "Under this administration we know the scientific evidence isn't going to be able to speak for itself, so scientists really have to step up and speak for it," Carter said. And scientists have been doing that in record numbers, starting with last year's March for Science and continuing on multiple fronts ever since. "They're stepping up in an unprecedented number and saying science has got to be used in policy-making decisions." That's not slowing down; Carter recalls how he attended two big scientific conferences last year and "I had tons of scientists coming up and asking me how they can advocate, what they could do to make sure that science is being used and remains in a proper place."

That increased level of activism is not unique to scientists, as people from many walks of live have definitely become more politically engaged in the past year. "Trump's election was a wakeup call in a way," said Gayle Alberda, an assistant professor of politics at Connecticut's Fairfield University, who studies elections, political participation and civic engagement. "Nation-wide, we've seen this huge influx of people wanting to know not only how to run for office, but how to get politically engaged."...

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I also wanted to ask you, Professor Banerjee, about the threats faced by environmental scientists under the Trump administration. In August, Democracy Now! interviewed Interior Department whistleblower Joel Clement, a senior official at the Interior Department who had focused on the dangers that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities in the Arctic. We spoke with Clement after he was transferred to an unrelated job within the Interior Department where he was tasked with collecting royalty checks from oil and gas companies.

*JOEL CLEMENT: There’s been a long pattern, since the administration took over, of suppressing science, muzzling scientists, sidelining subject matter experts. The biggest concern is that doing so has huge consequences for Americans—and, particularly in my case, those Alaska Natives. I mean, that permafrost is melting. They’re fully exposed to storms now that the sea ice has receded. And that concern is not going to be limited to Alaska Natives for long.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So that’s Interior Department whistleblower Joel Clement speaking in August. He has since, of course, resigned. So, Professor Banerjee, can you talk about the threats faced by environmental scientists under the Trump administration?

SUBHANKAR BANERJEE: This is—thank you for bringing this up. This is not only the Trump administration, but previous administrations have done this, is there is—any scientist working on pathbreaking work on Arctic offshore, or offshore at large, that somehow gets entangled with oil and gas issues, are being silenced and punished. So, Joel Clement is the latest of this. I’ll give you two more examples. And Joel Clement’s work is, again, pathbreaking, because the coastal erosion is an extremely significant issue for indigenous communities all across Arctic Alaska, both—all across Arctic Alaska. And he was trying to highlight that. And so, as we are speaking right now, the Department of Interior is actually hosting what they call some sort of a symposium to do a massive overhaul or reorganization of their senior staff members. And Joel Clement got caught up in that, but he’s extremely courageous, so he went and blew the whistle. Democracy Now! covered it.

Now let me give you a couple of more examples. Charles Monnett was a leading federal Arctic biologist who studied the polar bear biology and the first scientist to bring attention to the plight of polar bears from climate change. His research was published, and that research he did in the Beaufort Sea, where Trump administration will try to open up to oil drilling. He did the research in 2004, when polar bears were drowning in the Beaufort Sea because of melting sea ice. The research was published in the peer-reviewed journal Polar Biology in 2006, which actually inspired the animation in Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, and brought worldwide attention to the plight of polar bears from climate change. Fast-forward, the Bush administration then went after Charles Monnett and his studies. Again, they demoted him, and they did all sorts of things to cover his funding and so on and so forth. But Obama administration went one step further, because Obama administration was also really pushing for oil and gas development in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. The Obama administration Department of Interior actually put Charles Monnett under house arrest in 2012 for six weeks, after which he was released without any charges being leveled against him.

Then there’s a third example of Professor Richard Steiner of University of Alaska Fairbanks, who spoke out against oil and gas issues in the Bering Sea. The University of Alaska took away all his federal funding, from agencies like National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He protested. Democracy Now! did the coverage. Amy, you spoke with Rick Steiner also. And he protested and filed a lawsuit, and then he resigned.

So, to draw attention to all of these issues, I am convening a major conference called “The Last Oil” at the University of New Mexico, that will take place from February 21 to 23rd, to bring attention to this form of silencing, punishing, as well as marginalization of indigenous people all across the Arctic.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally—

SUBHANKAR BANERJEE: So, we are in a time they are doing everything to undermine the public process. They’re silencing scientists. They’re marginalizing and silencing indigenous communities. We need a all-out antiwar movement, antiwar-style movement now.

see particulate holocaust:

intercept

...The top-billed witness scheduled to provide testimony at the House hearing on Tuesday is a lawyer named Jeffrey Holmstead, who has has worked to block the EPA’s efforts to limit mercury pollution while representing coal companies including Duke Energy, Progress Energy, and Southern Company. Meanwhile, Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican chair of the House Science Committee who has been zealously promoting the“secret science” bill, is also in the pocket of the energy companies. Though he’s also received funding from Koch Industries and iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel Communications), Smith’s biggest contributors are oil and gas companies, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Also testifying on Tuesday will be Kimberly White of the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry trade group.

This bald industry bid to subvert public health-based regulations that can cut into profit isn’t new. What’s new is that this upside-down environmental attack, in which those who benefit directly from polluting industries are policing the independent scientists who can show the harms of their products, could now succeed. Although the House passed the secret science bill in 2014 and 2015, it never made it to the Senate floor. After it passed the House in 2015, Barbara Boxer called the bill “insane,” Bernie Sanders called it “laughable,” and President Obama promised to veto it. This time, it’s not a joke. With a Republican majority in both houses and Trump in the White House, the secret science act could easily become law

The small group of lawyers and PR strategists orchestrating the secret science effort are closely tied to those attacking the EPA from within. All have connections to either big tobacco, oil, or both — and almost all have been affiliated with a small, right-wing group called the Energy & Environment Legal Institute. It’s interesting that E&E should fixate on transparency since the group has gone to great lengths to conceal its donors. Nevertheless, public records document some of the group’s ties to big coal companies, including the now bankrupt Alpha Natural Resources, Peabody Coal, and Arch Coal.

E&E senior policy fellow Steve Milloy, a former tobacco industry attorney, has perhaps written the most — at least publicly — about the secret science strategy, both in an ebook and for Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News. Milloy calls Myron Ebell, who oversaw Trump’s EPA transition team, his “friend and hero.” In the late 1990s, Milloy and Ebell were both members of the American Petroleum Institute’s Global Climate Science Communications Team, which laid out the oil industry’s strategy to undermine the science of global warming. Meanwhile, three of Milloy’s colleagues from E&E are also members of the EPA landing team. Among them are David Schnare, E&E’s general counsel, who is perhaps best known for harassing Michael Mann and other environmental scientists with FOIA requests, and Amy Oliver Cooke, an energy industry think tanker who created MILF, Mothers In Love with Fracking.

[vid]:amy Oliver Cooke describes her love for fracking.

Two other E&E associates have been wrapped up in the secret science strategy for years. The first is Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at both E&E and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who is also a member of Trump’s EPA landing team. Back in the 1990s, Horner worked for Bracewell LLP, the law firm (formerly known as Bracewell & Giuliani)supplying the top witness at Tuesday’s hearing. The dawning awareness of the dangers of second-hand smoke was putting tobacco companies on the defensive, including Horner’s client, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. In a 1996 memo, which seems to be the earliest known reference to the secret science strategy, Horner laid out a plan to fight back.

...

https://theintercept.com/2017/02/05/republicans-want-to-make-the-epa-great-again-by-gutting-health-regulations/

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a57128/trump-coal/

---

weirdly iconic role that coal mining played in the last election, and the weirdly iconic role it has played in the administration's rhetoric since then, continues to amaze and astound. In a time in which the reliance on fossil fuels and the subsequent emissions of CO2 have endangered the future of the planet, a successful presidential candidate ran on bringing back a dying industry that, even in its salad days, killed and maimed people with distressing regularities, an industry in which the labor strife was the most serious armed conflict between Americans since Appomattox, and an industry that crippled the economy of several states. This president* ran on the most pro-coal platform of any presidential candidate since Theodore Roosevelt stepped in to mediate the coal strikes in 1905. It was as though we were living through some sort of presidential re-enactors convention.

Of course, in the real world, the coal industry continues to be dangerously unhealthy and environmentally ruinous. So, naturally, having handed environmental policy over to people like EPA director Scott Pruitt, an extraction industry sublet, the way to solve these perennial problems with coal is not to study them any more. The Charleston Gazette-Mail seems somewhat stunned by this development.

In an August 18 letter, the U.S. Department of the Interior's Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement informed the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that it should cease all work on a study of the potential health risks for people living near surface coal mine sites in Central Appalachia. The letter states that the Department has begun an agency-wide review of its grants and cooperative agreements in excess of $100,000, largely as a result of the Department's changing budget situation.

Mountaintop removal is probably the worst possible form of coal mining. It is a tantrum of a process that has been known to unleash untold poisons into the water tables in surrounding areas. A month ago, a researcher talked to the National Academy of Sciences and told that panel that enough studies have been conducted to conclude that mountaintop removal mining threatens the health and safety of citizens living in and around the coalfields.

"We know enough," researcher Michael Hendryx told the panel during a meeting in Washington. "If all we do is call for more research, we're asking people to be research subjects without their consent." While at WVU, Hendryx became a target for coal industry criticism when he published dozens of peer-reviewed papers that found coalfield residents living near mountaintop removal operations faced increased risks of cancer, birth defects and premature death, among other health problems. The National Academy of Sciences, with funding from the U.S. Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, is conducting a two-year study of the issue, an exercise that in many ways amounts to a review of scientific papers that Hendryx either authored or inspired with his work at WVU. Hendryx, who is not on the academy panel, now is an assistant professor of public health at the University of Indiana Bloomington.

The project was announced in August 2016 and funding was in place before the Donald Trump administration — which has promised to roll back regulations on the coal industry — took office. State Public Health Commissioner Dr. Rahul Gupta and former state Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Randy Huffman had asked the U.S. Interior Department for help on the issue, and Interior's OSM provided $1 million in funding for the academy review. West Virginia political and governmental leaders have mostly either ignored the growing body of science on mountaintop removal's health effects or tried to belittle the work. Coal industry officials have, likewise, attacked the studies, funding a large effort to discredit the work.

But, if you don't study something, it doesn't really exist. The damage already done to this country and its institutions is going to take decades to fix.

---

The Trump Administration Word Ban Extends to Other Federal Agencies. Its Ongoing Assault on Science Is Much Worse.

By Michael Halpern

A word ban extends beyond the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Washington Post reported last night, including at another, unnamed U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agency that was told how to talk about the Affordable Care Act, presumably to discourage people from signing up for health care. The directive came from the White House Office of Management and Budget, which coordinates the president's budget proposal and rule-making agenda.

On Friday, the Washington Post broke the news, and other outlets confirmed, that CDC officials were prevented from referring to seven words when putting together the agency's budget: vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, transgender, fetus, evidence-based and science-based.

If only the banning of "science-based" and "diversity" was the worst thing the Trump administration has done to science.

Additional terminology guidance given to the State Department suggests that the administration intends to pull funding from science-based HIV/AIDS prevention initiatives that work to promote abstinence-only programs instead, even though peer-reviewed research consistently finds that abstinence-only programs do not delay sexual activity or change other sexual risk behaviors.

The CDC word ban was widely repudiated by scientists, senators and public health advocates. The issue has attracted enormous attention—even from Cher—as emblematic of a morally, scientifically and ethically corrupt style of governing.

In an email to staff last night, CDC Director Brenda Fitzgerald said that the CDC "remains committed to our public health mission as a science and evidence based institution…science is and will remain the foundation of our work."

Yet recently, CDC scientists were banned from responding to basic data requests from reporters without political approval—a clear violation of the agency's scientific integrity policy.

Sidelining Science Since Day One

This starts with words and communication, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. Just last week, Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke summoned the head of Joshua Tree National Park to his office for a tongue lashing over tweets the park had sent out referencing climate change. That's right: the park director flew across the country to be reprimanded for a couple of tweets, in order to send a message to all park directors: talking about climate change is verboten.

And oh, if only word choice was the worst action this administration has taken to undermine the use of science in policy-making. They're not just trying to downplay the phrase "evidence-based." They're trying to ditch the whole idea of basing policy on evidence.

In July, we chronicled how the Trump administration has sidelined science since day one. And since then the abuses of evidence have continued to flow.

The Treasury Secretary claimed that economists were working "around the clock" to come up with analysis justifying the tax bill. They were not. The EPA banned scientists who receive EPA grants—the ones the agency has decided do the most promising environmental and public health research—from providing science advice to the agency. The Department of Interior is trying to defund and prevent public access to the U.S. Geological Survey library system.

The White House has no science advisor, and the president's Office of Science and Technology Policy is a ghost town. Numerous political appointees—including the CDC director and the nominee for NOAA administrator—have financial conflicts of interest that lead many to question their ability to do the jobs. The administration has shut down studies where it expects it won't like the outcome: on climate change in the tropics, on teen pregnancy prevention and on the health risks of surface coal mining in West Virginia. Science agencies are targeted across the board for severe budget cuts.

An exhaustive list is, quite frankly, impossible. President Trump's attacks on science harm our environment and make all of us sicker and less safe. If the Trump administration won't allow federal agencies to do their job, it's time to ask Congress to step up its game, engage in meaningful oversight and do its job.

Michael Halpern is an expert on political interference in science and solutions to reduce suppression, manipulation and distortion of government science.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Uproar Over Purported Ban at C.D.C. of Words Like 'Fetus' - The ... ›

Trump Administration's Solution to Climate Change: Ban the Term ›

ref

Aug. 21, 2017

Statement Regarding National Academies Study on Potential Health Risks of Living in Proximity to Surface Coal Mining Sites in Central Appalachia

WASHINGTON -- In an August 18 letter, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement informed the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that it should cease all work on a study of the potential health risks for people living near surface coal mine sites in Central Appalachia. The letter states that the Department has begun an agency-wide review of its grants and cooperative agreements in excess of $100,000, largely as a result of the Department’s changing budget situation.

The National Academies will go forward with previously scheduled meetings for this project in Kentucky on August 21-23 -- which are allowed to proceed according to the letter -- and encourages the public to attend open meetings in Hazard and Lexington on August 21 and 22. The National Academies believes this is an important study and we stand ready to resume it as soon as the Department of the Interior review is completed. We are grateful to our committee members for their dedication to carrying forward with this study.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide independent, objective analysis and advice to the nation to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, technology, and medicine. They operate under an 1863 congressional charter to the National Academy of Sciences, signed by President Lincoln.

Contacts:

William Kearney, Executive Director

Riya V. Anandwala, Media Relations Officer

Office of News and Public Information

202-334-2138; e-mail news@nas.edu

national-academies.org/newsroom

---

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/08/trump-kills-coal-health-study/

Trump administration has told the National Academy of Sciences to stop working on a study about the potential health risks for people living near mountaintop coal-removing sites in Central Appalachia.

“Everyone knows there are major health risks living near mountaintop removal coal mining sites,” Bill Price, the senior Appalachia organizer at the Sierra Club said in a statement. “It’s infuriating that Trump would halt this study on the health effects of mountaintop removal coal mining, research that people in Appalachia have been demanding for years.”

In 2014, a West Virginia University study found that dust from mountaintop removal coal-mining sites was linked to increased incidences of lung cancer. The following year, the state formally asked the Obama administration for help in studying these health effects, and in 2016, the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE) gave the NAS $1 million to determine the human health effects for people living near coal mine operations.

But last week, in an August 18 letter to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the OSMRE said that the Department of the Interior has begun an agency-wide review of all its grants and cooperative agreements that exceed $100,000, as part of a the Department’s “changing budget situation” and that the agency should halt all work on the study. The NAS says that it is ready to resume work on the study when the review is complete.

“Communities living with daily health threats were counting on finally getting the full story from the professionals at the National Academies of Science,” Price said. “To take that away without warning or adequate reason is beyond heartless.”

Not only can coal have an impact on public health, burning it releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Nonetheless, the Trump administration has been aligned with climate skeptics, and throughout his campaign and presidencyTrump expressed support for the coal industry.

When he announced a new agenda for the Environmental Protection Agency, Administrator Scott Pruitt told a group of coal miners that “the coal industry was nearly devastated by years of regulatory overreach, but with new direction from President Trump, we are helping to turn things around for these miners.” At an Iowa rally in June, Trump promised to put coal miners back to work. “We’ve ended the war on clean, beautiful coal,” he said. “And we’re putting our miners back to work.”

Bill Price, from the Sierra Club, says that revoking this study demonstrates the administration’s real priorities when it comes to coal. “It appears that the only people Trump cares about in Appalachia are coal executives,” he wrote, “not the people who’ve lived and worked here for generations.”

---

Printer Friendly Version

Project Title:

Potential Human Health Effects of Surface Coal Mining Operations in Central Appalachia

PIN: DELS-BESR-16-03

Major Unit:

Division on Earth and Life Studies

Health and Medicine Division

Sub Unit: Board on Earth Sciences & Resources

Board on Environmental Studies & Toxicology

Board on Health Sciences Policy

RSO: Glickson, Deborah

Subject/Focus Area: Earth Sciences; Engineering and Technology; Environment and Environmental Studies; Health and Medicine

Project Scope

An ad hoc committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will conduct a study to examine the potential relationship between increased health risks and living in proximity to sites that have been or are being mined or reclaimed for surface coal deposits. The study will focus on four states in Central Appalachia. In particular, the study will

1. Identify and briefly describe the main types of coal deposits in Central Appalachia that are extracted using surface mining techniques. Descriptions will include geologic and geochemical characteristics, mining and reclamation operations, and waste management approaches.

2. Summarize the state and federal regulatory frameworks for surface coal mining operations, including coal preparation plants and the associated coarse coal refuse facilities and slurry impoundments.

3. Systematically search and screen literature to identify relevant scientific publications on the potential human health effects related to surface coal mining operations. The committee will use the selected literature to accomplish the following:

a. Identify effects from surface coal mining operations on air, surface water, ground-water, and drinking water quality and on ecologic communities and soil that could potentially lead to human health concerns.

b. Evaluate the potential for short-term and long-term human health effects, which will include consideration of potential exposure pathways and relevant environmental contaminants and other stressors.

c. Assess the scientific and methodologic quality, rigor, and sufficiency of the scientific research.

4. Identify baseline data and approaches necessary to monitor environmental and human health indicators that may be affected by surface coal mining operations.

5. Identify gaps in research and needs for additional research that may assist in the development of new approaches to safeguard the health of residents living near these types of coal mining operations.

As this study is focused on human health effects for those living in close proximity to surface coal mine operations, the committee will not consider the occupational health aspects of workers at these mines.

Project Duration: 24 months

---

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-gets-list-of-forbidden-words-fetus-transgender-diversity/2017/12/15/

We’re fully into Orwellian territory now. The Washington Post’s Lena H. Sun and Juliet Eilperin reportedFriday evening that a group of CDC employees were told not to use seven words in official budget documents: “vulnerable,” “fetus,” “transgender,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “evidence-based,” and “science-based.”

Twenty-four hours later, Sun and Eilperin followed up by reporting that another HHS agency received similar guidance about avoiding “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” and “diversity,” as well as instructions to use “Obamacare” instead of “Affordable Care Act.” Another linguistic substitution is visible at the State Department, where some documents now refer to “sexual risk avoidance” rather than “sex education.”

In a post at the Union of Concerned Scientists blog on Saturday morning, Michael Halpern wrote:

...

---

Much to Grouse About: Interior Department Calls for Changes That Could Threaten Sage Grouse Protection

By Charise Johnson

That the current administration places very little value on the merit of robust scientific evidence when considering its actions (or inactions) is no longer shocking, but it remains an intolerable practice.

In this week's episode of "How is the Trump Administration Dismantling Science-Based Protections?" we visit the Interior Department's decision to formally reconsider a widely heralded Obama-era agreement for protections of the greater sage grouse in the West.

On Thursday, the Interior Department published a formal notice of intent to rework 98 sage grouse management plans across the quirky bird's 11 state range. This change comes after a mere 60 days deliberation by the Interior Department's internal Sage-Grouse Review Team (appointed by Sec. Ryan Zinke) and Sage-Grouse Task Force (representatives of governors of the eleven western states)—and much to the chagrin of the many stakeholders who worked for several years to craft a cooperative land use agreement in an effort to protect the sage grouse and its habitat.

What's the deal with the sage grouse?

The sage grouse is the chicken of the "Sagebrush Sea"—an ecosystem which is "suffering death by a thousand cuts," as former Sec. of Interior Sally Jewell put it. Habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and wildfires in the sagebrush have all contributed to the decline of this magnificent bird.

Importantly, Sec. Jewell worked to put in place federal-state partnerships in order to protect the sage grouse. In 2010, the FWS proposed listing the sage grouse under Endangered Species because of the threats its survival faced. After much input from stakeholders and the public, the agency in 2015 chose not to list the species and instead put efforts into state management plans, assuring us all that states could put programs in place to ensure the bird's protection. With Sec. Zinke's moves, we're now paving over (perhaps literally) those state protection plans, leaving the sage grouse at least as vulnerable as it was when the FWS proposed listing it under the Endangered Species Act.

The sage grouse has long been caught in the crosshairs of political controversy, especially when it comes to undermining the science behind conservation efforts. For example, in 2004, Julie MacDonald, a political appointee at the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), altered scientific content in a report examining the vulnerability of the greater sage grouse, which was subsequently presented to a panel of experts that recommended against listing the bird under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) (read my colleagues' thoughts on political interference in sage grouse conservation efforts here and here).

Ignoring the science

The Sage-Grouse Review Team (SGRT) recommendations include potentially removing or modifying the boundaries of critical habitat called sagebrush focal areas (SFAs), as well as setting population targets and captive breeding, and modifying or issuing new policy on fluid mineral leasing and development. Also worth noting is that an Obama-era moratorium on mining claims in six Western states recently expired, with no indication of renewal from Sec. Zinke.

The problem with the Interior changing the conservation plans is twofold: 1) the motivation for reviewing the sage grouse management plans was to "ease the burden on local economies" by opening protected lands to development, which could have negative impacts on already rapidly-dwindling sage grouse populations, and 2) reopening the plans could spell more trouble for recovery efforts and potentially force FWS to list the sage grouse under the ESA in the future, which is precisely what states wanted to avoid. The conservation plan is critical, but it only works with the agreed upon protections in place.

The decision to undo years of collaboration and compromise between federal, state, local, and tribal governments, NGO's, scientists, industry, landowners, ranchers and hunters in a matter of two months sends a loud message to the public that economic considerations prevail over scientific evidence, even at the cost of an entire ecosystem and the species dependent upon it.

The SGRT recommendations ignore the science and put the entire sagebrush landscape at risk, much to the detriment of the sage grouse. Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead is critical of the new plan, concerned that it ignores scientific consensus. "We've got to have good science lead the way, and that trumps politics," Mead said. "Let's look at what the states have done, and what biologists, folks who know this, are telling us."

Sage advice

We cannot allow our government to irresponsibly cater to oil and gas industry at the expense of our wildlife and public lands. Instead, we must urge the Department of Interior to focus their efforts on collaborative, science-informed management of the sage grouse and its habitat.

Charise Johnson is a research associate in the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

---