One of our goals with this roundup is to alert you to upcoming denier threats before they hit the mainstream. Occasionally, great reporting can further illuminate issues we noticed some time ago. With deniers in power, good journalists have been busy digging into these issues even more, so quite a few updates to past roundups are in order.
First up, a new development to something we’ve covered extensively over the past few months: Pruitt’s plans for some red team/blue team nonsense. In a recent interview (from Disney World, for some reason) Pruitt told the Wall Street Journal’s Eli Stokols that he plans to kick off the process in early 2018. Writing this week in Scientific American, climate scientist Ben Santer explains how the peer-review process and scientific norms already function as a red team. Pruitt’s effort, Santer concludes, seeks only to “muddy the waters, to confuse, to delegitimize and devalue decades of well-established science.”
On that same anti-science note, InsideClimate News uses Lamar Smith, he of denying warming even as he watches the Arctic melt, as a case study in a piece published this week on how fossil fuel money shaped the House Science committee. The piece lays out how Smith transformed the committee from a quiet bipartisan group into something that, as Union of Concerned Scientists’ Andrew Rosenberg puts it, has played a role in the“diminishment of science in public policy.” From attacking scientists to politicizing science and championing denial, Smith served his funders well by defending fossil fuels from science.
Buying politicians is one way the industry wields influence. Astroturfing is another. We took a look at some of the fossil fuel industry’s astroturfing operations right before Thanksgiving, and since then more examples have already cropped up.
Kathiann M. Kowalski reports this week for Midwest Energy News on a pro-coal group in Ohio, that clearly serves a fossil fuel agenda, despite keeping its funders secret. Like many astroturfing groups, the organization boasts a typically Orwellian name--the Campaign for American Affordable and Reliable Energy (CAARE)--and has inserted itself into anti-wind farm lawsuits around the state. While the group is far from transparent, Kowalski digs up some clues that lead to fossil fuels. And a quick google of the group’s name shows that back in 2008, industry-friendly “free market” group FreedomWorks launched a campaign with almost the same name.
Slightly more transparent is the pro-pipeline efforts exposed by Huffington Post’s Alexander Kauffman this week. As Kaufman reports, a presentation obtained by HuffPo shows how the American Gas Association has set up a project called “Your Energy” in order to seed arguments, graphics and other propaganda into the public conversation about pipelines. With supposedly local organizations in Connecticut and Virginia, the group’s efforts go to show that the only people who really support pipelines are likely the same ones profiting off of them.
Finally, at this point it’s clear that Trump’s promise to hire “the best people” is just as true as his promise to drain the swamp. But a new analysis from the AP puts a number at how unqualified Trump’s hires have been. Sixty percent of the people Trump has hired for science positions lack an advanced degree in science, according to the AP’s analysis. Sixty percent of Obama’s picks, by contrast, did have advanced degrees. Broken down by agency, the difference is even more stark: while Obama’s Department of Energy had 13 advanced degree appointees, Trump’s has zero.
Reminder: The DoE is responsible for maintaining America’s nuclear fuel for power and weapons, and Rick Perry got a “D” in a class on meats.
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