“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax, of cabbages and kings. And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings.”
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“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter, “You’ve had a pleasant run! Shall we be trotting home again?” But answer came there none-- and this was scarcely odd, because they’d eaten every one.”
A little over two months after the Walrus nominated the Carpenter to disassemble the EPA, it looks like finally, the time has come. Barring something truly frabjous, the Senate will confirm Scott Pruitt as Administrator of the agency he has sued 14 times. His nom comes despite the fact that he appears to have lied under oath about his (lack of) action as Oklahoma Attorney General to fight pollution.
Suffice to say that the oysters of the EPA, generally happy as clams to fight pollution, are none too pleased about new leadership. Nearly 800 former EPA employees signed a letter to the Senate in opposition to Pruitt and are otherwise protesting and calling their senators.
In addition to rolling back regulations to safeguard the sea becoming boiling hot (okay maybe not literally boiling, but perhaps oxygen-less…), what else are they worried about?
For one, there’s the return of David Schnare, former lawyer and analyst at the EPA. Marianne Lavelle at InsideClimate News’s feature on Schnare provides a window into the staffing decisions being made by whatever Cheshire cat is calling Trump’s shots at this point. Once an EPA oyster but now quite rotten, Schnare’s more recent work has been misleading courts to get climate scientists’ emails on behalf of coal-funded EELI.
Speaking of emails, as the Senate was “debating” Pruitt’s nomination yesterday, a judge ruled that Pruitt’s correspondence with industry and lobby groups have to be turned over either to the Center on Media and Democracy or the court by Tuesday. As of the time of writing, the Senate vote is still today.
Meanwhile, at the mad tea party of a Heritage Foundation Event on climate models, we saw the same performance we’ve seen for years: models are unreliable, social cost of carbon is bad, we won’t see much warming in the future anyway, we should use a 7% discount rate instead of the 3% many experts already consider too high, etc.
Ironically, during one speaker’s presentation of how they know better than real scientists, the laptop shut off. Over the next seven minutes, panelists had to walk away from their chairs so the laptop could be plugged in, computer restarted, password entered, and presentation reloaded. They filled the down time with questions from the audience.
No one asked the obvious question of Heritage’s Tweedle Dees and Dums: “Why should we trust you to run complex computer models to help us plan for the future, when you didn’t even plan far enough ahead to plug in your laptop?”
But you know who is thinking ahead? The EPA. Yesterday, in response to the many FOIAs for its online content, they uploaded a mirror of their pre-Trump website, as it was before we went through the looking glass.
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