June 2, 2018 – Donald Trump and Scott Pruitt are the Tweedledum and dee of the United States, two of the dumbest people to ever lead the American government. They are willfully ignorant about climate change and just plain stupid when it comes to enacting policy. The latest from these two dumbbells comes in the form of Pruitt’s attempted rollbacks on emission standards on vehicles, and Trump’s orders to stop the closure of coal and nuclear power plants.
Besides the fact that both policy decisions ignore the chief contributor to climate change, greenhouse gas emissions produced from human sources, they also run counter to the objectives agreed to at the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. Of course, Trump, can ignore Paris because he has already announced that the United States will not honour the intentions of the previous American administration as a signatory. And Pruitt, represents an entirely different case, a man on a mission to keep his friends and backers from the Heartland Institute, mining coal, and pumping oil and gas for an eternity.
Pruitt is a man with a mission. He is rolling back federal regulations governing pesticide use, lead paint, renewable fuels, water quality, and methane emissions from oil and gas wellheads. He doesn’t give a damn about protecting the ozone layer if it means impeding his backers from putting emissions into the atmosphere that deplete it. One wonders what Trump meant when he campaigned on the promise ‘believe me” to deliver to Americans the cleanest air and water on the planet.
But Pruitt, who filed a 38-page document recently indicating his plans to rollback tailpipe emission standards on vehicles, provided within it no technical, scientific or legal justification for the reversal of the prior administration’s regulations. Instead of science and technological facts Pruitt used quotes from automakers who described how they would have to build more hybrids and electric vehicles (something they all are doing) to meet 2025 regulated fuel standards, described as an onerous undertaking. For those still sane within the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the document Pruitt submitted was described as “unprecedented” and a former senior EPA policy analyst remarked the agency “has just never done anything like this.” With no data and no numbers, it’s pretty clear that both the words “environmental” and “protection” need to be removed from the agency’s name.
Even more interesting is that Pruitt is doing exactly what he did when he was Attorney General in Oklahoma, where he attacked the EPA about its climate change and environmental policies using a letter largely written by friends of his in the oil industry. This was just one of 14 lawsuits this current EPA head launched against the very body he directs today.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that others are following in Pruitt’s footsteps in suing the EPA but this time in an effort to stop him. A coalition of 17 states and the District of Columbia are arguing that without evidence the agency’s revised standards represented an arbitrary and capricious act. It further stated that the emission standards created by the Obama administration were more than feasible with the benefits to the environment outweighing the cost to vehicle makers to achieve them.
With transportation vying for top greenhouse gas polluter along with coal-fired power plants, the emission standard objectives represented if not the most important single policy for cutting atmospheric carbon, certainly one of the top two. So Pruitt, who clearly lives in an upside-down world, is cooking the books at the EPA and thus helping to cook the planet.
Now, as for the dumbbell who is his boss, and his shill, Rick Perry, at the Department of Energy, the two seem to have a hard-on for coal arguing that national security and the defense of the nation preempt all other concerns re the environment. In a draft memo issued by the Trump administration, it argues that “regulatory and economic factors” are causing “fuel-secure plants” to be “retired prematurely.” It further states that the nation is in danger of losing sufficient capacity to meet its needs in the forced transition to renewable and natural-gas-based power generation. And therefore, “to promote the national defense and maximize domestic energy supplies, federal action is necessary to stop the further premature retirements of fuel-secure generation capacity.”
So Trump is using national security as the justification for almost every new and divisive policy he enacts, whether he is attacking trading partners and allies with tariffs, or immigrants and those who want to become Americans, or now energy producers. The President is compelling utilities and grid operators for the next two years to buy power from government-specified coal-fired and nuclear power plants.
In the Financial Times yesterday, Ed Crooks has penned an article in which he quotes Todd Snitchler of the American Petroleum Institute, an organization representing natural gas producers, stating that what the President is proposing is “unprecedented and misguided.” And the operator of the largest power grid in the United States running from New Jersey through Illinois to Tennessee, PJM Interconnection, issued a statement stating there was “no immediate threat to system reliability” that could the use of the national security argument to justify government interference in the marketplace.
So there you have it, Tweedledum, Tweedledee, and their lackeys taking the American people and, unfortunately, the rest of the planet down a rabbit hole to a dystopian future.
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Pruitt “believes” that carbon dioxide doesn’t play a role in our changing climate. He has no evidence to support his position other than hare-brained notions coming from climate science skeptics who shill for the fossil fuel industry. In fact, Pruitt owes the fossil fuel industry for winning the election that made him Attorney General in Oklahoma. They gave him a big fat cheque for $40,000 during his 2010 run for office.
So it should be no surprise that the Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC), which plays an evidence-based advisory role within the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, under Pruitt will have fewer scientists aboard. Five have been dismissed among the 18 that are responsible for reviewing agency research. And who will replace them?
And who will replace them?
You guessed it. “Not scientists.”
Stated an EPA spokesperson, “The administrator believes we should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community.”
That, in and of itself, is valuable. But what scientific contribution can those from industry provide that will be evidence and objective-based?
The mission of BOSC (as described on the website) is as follows:
I see words like “science and scientist,” “laboratories,” “peer review,” and “research” in this mission statement. Nowhere do I see mention of business or the “regulated community.”
When the polluters provide the science we get, for example, an Exxon-Mobil that hides its own scientific research on climate change from the public for three decades because it provides empirical evidence of anthropogenic climate change.
Stated one of the scientists who was dismissed from BOSC on Friday, the move “marginalizes climate change science.”
In addition to the changes at BOSC, Trump’s proposed EPA budget cuts 84% of the funding to the 47-member Science Advisory Board which makes recommendations on the EPA’s research agenda.
How familiar this sounds to what has been happening since the inauguration of Donald Trump and the approval by the Senate of his choice, Scott Pruitt, to head up the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Pruitt considers the EPA, according to an article written in yesterday’s New York Times, to be the equivalent in the public’s mind of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), a predatory and regulatory regime that imposes its will on honest American citizens just trying to make a living. EPA regulations force automobile manufacturers to make cleaner cars that go further on less gasoline and diesel. EPA regulations cause the closure of coal-fired thermal power plants. EPA regulations are based on scientific data that runs counter to everything Pruitt believes. That’s because Pruitt, a former Oklahoma state attorney general is very much a climate change denier, pro fossil fuels, and an enemy of science.
EPA regulations force automobile manufacturers to make cleaner cars that go further on less gasoline and diesel. EPA regulations cause the closure of coal-fired thermal power plants. EPA regulations are based on scientific data that runs counter to everything Pruitt believes. That’s
EPA regulations cause the closure of coal-fired thermal power plants. EPA regulations are based on scientific data that runs counter to everything Pruitt believes. That’s
EPA regulations are based on scientific data that runs counter to everything Pruitt believes. That’s
That’s because Pruitt, a former Oklahoma state attorney general who made a habit of suing the EPA regularly, is very much a climate change denier, pro fossil fuels, an enemy of science, and an appointed fox now in the environmental movement’s henhouse.
Between the President’s requests to dramatically cut the EPA budget and Pruitt’s stocking of administrative positions with like-minded individuals, Americans will no longer have a watchdog monitoring the excesses of mining and utility companies as they pollute the air and water. The watchdog agency’s gloves have been tied up and put back on the shelf for a 4-year interim. There is no more EPA punch to stop polluters. This President, who during his campaign promised clean water and clean air, will deliver neither as he moves on scientists and programs studying climate change. This represents a reprehensible step backward and existential threat to all Americans and the rest of the planet, the only one we know with certainty, that is inhabitable.
How can I say this?
In the headlines the last few days we received an ominous forewarning of future global warming. Scientists, at the Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawaii, reported carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, the greenhouse gas most associated with global warming, will for the first time, surpass 410 parts per million (ppm), a threshold not seen in the geological record since humans first appeared on Earth.
Richard Betts, climate scientist, noted that April or even sooner will see CO2 reach 410 ppm. That follows a record rise last year that put us permanently over 400 ppm. And although 10 ppm seems like a small increment, the greenhouse gas impact of CO2, cumulative over time, will undoubtedly happen, raising global temperatures, and lingering well into future centuries.
Even more frightening is the trending that shows CO2 levels rising at a faster rate than in the 20th century. It wasn’t that long ago that we were at 350 ppm, what many scientists felt was a safe level for atmospheric CO2, creating conditions that were far more benign to human existence. But now at present rates of CO2 contributions made by us, will take us to 450 ppm within 20 years. With levels that high, the forecast for global mean temperature will exceed 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), the upper limit target agreed to by the nations of the world at the Paris COP21 Climate conference.
Pruitt, a fossil fuel man all the way, has appointed climate science deniers (think Senator James Inhofe, for one), to help him try and find alternative facts to the science, ignoring the evidence that abounds. He will declare the news that 2016 was the warmest since human recordkeeping began in the 1870s, to be false. He will argue that everything observed to date is part of the natural cycles of the Earth. He will point to the Sun and blame warming on changes in the solar cycle. He will tell you that axial wobble is the real science responsible for climate change, and not CO2. He has no intention of looking at the real science and data that those in the EPA have compiled for several decades.
So many U.S. scientists have tried to find a safe haven for their research. Recently Canadian universities and companies have volunteered to archive data collected by American environmentalists. Researchers at University of Toronto have been backing up science data from U.S. EPA, NOAA, NASA, the Center for Disease Control, the Department of Agriculture, and other agencies in a race to retain the information before it gets trashed by Trump, Pruitt and their minions.
So what else to do?
In Australia, people and scientific community got together and created a non-government body, the Climate Council, to monitor climate change. The funding came initially from a crowdfunding campaign which in three days raised enough money to allow those laid off or fleeing positions in government to find a place to do their work.
The same can be done in the United States where crowdfunding got its start. To me, an Indiegogo or Kickstarter campaign to create an Environment Climate Council, sounds like the route to go over the next four years or until President Trump is impeached, and his science-denying cadre gets dumped from office.
Although I am not an American, I would be happy to get this started, and invite my readers to give me a shout out to make this a reality.
