The Climate Science Special Report (CSSR) is scheduled to be released in the next couple of weeks. This is the final version of the draft federal report that the New York Times leaked last August, and part of the larger National Climate Assessment (NCA).
The NCA is a years-long product of 13 federal agencies, making exactly the sort of drawn out inter-agency effort Pruitt has described as an appropriate target for the Red Team. Denier David Wojick pitched the idea in a Town Hall op-ed last week, writing that “an official Red Team critique” should be applied to the CSSR.
Given his long-time association with various fossil fuel groups, there’s a decent chance Wojick was part of that Heartland meeting whose notes were leaked to E&E last week. If he wasn’t there, he certainly seemed to have gotten the memo judging from his op-ed. From challenging the Endangerment finding to declaring the benefits of carbon pollution are “tens or hundreds of times greater” than the costs, Wojick’s points track with the email.
Wojick writes that merely “starting an official Red Team exercise will go a long way toward blunting the rampant CSSR alarmism” and would “turn this looming defeat into a major victory”--echoing the sentiment expressed at the Heartland meeting about the Red Team debate being “political and not scientific.” It’s clear that deniers like Wojick and the rest of the Heartland crew aren’t actually concerned about what the Red Team finds, or if it holds up in the ensuing “debate,” but see any challenge as a win.
He’s so far into denialland, so divorced from reality, that Wojick contradicts even himself. He laments that the NCA, of which this report is part, is mandated by law when initially describing it. By the end of the piece he has apparently forgotten that legal requirement, and goes full conspiracy theorist, suggesting it’s “no accident” the report is coming out now, as it’s “a deliberate attempt” by deep state climatologists “to defy the skepticism of the Trump administration.”
Because Trump and Wojick and Perry and Pruitt are all trying to defy the laws, both literally and the figurative laws of economics, as multiple stories last week showed. On the literal legal side, David Roberts’s new post at Vox explains Pruitt’s “deeply shady — and legally vulnerable” attack on CPP. Roberts also wrote a piece last week explaining the biggest four reasons the administration's attempted coal revival will fall flat.
On the economic side, a big reason for coal’s demise is that renewable prices are, as they have been for years, plummeting. Solar power is now the cheapest energy source anywhere, with prices having fallen so fast that the 2006 estimates of its use were an incredible 4,813% too low. It’s clear renewables will be the driving force behind getting electricity to those who lack it, even as Rick Perry and the Trump administration falsely uses Hurricane Maria as an excuse to prop up coal.
So we see that the Trump administration is at odds with the laws of economics and the free market, and Pruitt likely at odds with the law on the CPP repeal. And even according to Wojick, the legally-required NCA defies the Trump administration’s position. But if two things are at odds, and one is legally mandated, what’s that say about the other?
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