The head of NASA under President Obama was a former astronaut, general, test pilot, and Marine aviator with a solid grounding in science. Donald Trump’s proposed replacement is also an aviator in the reserves, who once ran a museum—and is an right-wing extremist who has no scientific background and who doesn’t believe in climate change.
“Rep. Bridenstine’s failure to accept fundamental scientific truths about Earth’s climate make him an ill-suited and dangerous choice to lead the agency,” Murray says in a Thursday letter to members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which is holding a confirmation hearing Nov. 1 on the nomination.
Bridenstine’s issues go well beyond being a passive denier. He sponsored a bill to eliminate climate change research and joined Jim Inhofe in the pretense that, because it snowed in the winter time, that obviously meant climate change was a hoax. In fact, Bridenstine was so convinced that scientists around the world are inventing climate change, that he was behind a move to force the “conspiracy” into the open.
Bridenstine was one of the sponsors of the Honest and Open New EPA Science Treatment Act of 2017, also known as the HONEST Act, which is purportedly aimed at making government-funded scientific research more transparent.
Except that the HONEST Act has one of the most dishonest names in legislative history. While Bridenstine fed his fellow climate skeptics a line about outing those dastardly scientists, in truth the legislation was designed to cripple the ability of the EPA or other agencies to deal with pollution.
… the proposed legislation, which was passed by the House of Representatives earlier this year but failed to gain traction in the Senate, would make it more difficult to put together environmental regulations, since the raw data needed to handle issues like air pollution is drawn from medical records of regular people, the sort of information that simply cannot be made public. If this proposed legislation were to become law, it would mean the EPA would likely have to abandon conducting much of the health research the agency oversees, since there would be no way to obtain and use personal health information without violating a patient's right to confidentiality.
So the real purpose of the dishonest HONEST Act was to make it impossible to regulate, under the guise of expanding transparency. Another version of the bill was titled the Secret Science Reform Act, again helping to sell the idea that scientists were part of a secretive global cabal that was hiding information from the public.
That’s the guy Trump wants with the keys to the space program.
Murray isn’t the only one concerned about putting a science-denier in charge of a scientific agency.
Bridenstine’s nomination is already running into trouble with a couple of important senators. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), the ranking member of the committee that will oversee his confirmation hearing, has said the head of NASA “ought to be a space professional, not a politician.”
And it’s not just Democrats who are skeptical about the skeptical Bridenstine.
Florida’s other senator, Marco Rubio (R), has said he would prefer a NASA administrator who has the “respect of the people who work there from a leadership and even a scientific perspective.”
Bridenstine’s not a “climate skeptic.” He’s an anti-science warrior who has worked to make much of science difficult and appropriate regulations impossible.