As the White House tries to fill the Oval Office schedule so Trump doesn’t get distracted and tweet something dumb, they’ve decided this week should be “Energy Week,” and had underlings repeatedly use the catchphrase “energy dominance.” Although what this phrase means exactly is anyone’s guess. A Reuters interview with Department of Interior Secretary Zinke from last week seems to suggest it means selling out public lands to oil and gas interests. But judging by Trump’s schedule this week, it could also just mean touting increasing exports of natural gas, which would be the continuation of a policy initiated by Obama.
Trump selling the country to the highest fossil fuel bidder should come as a surprise to no one who has been paying attention. This administration is flooded with fossil fuel voices, from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on down. The Center for American Progress (CAP) Action Fund has published yesterday a living database at DirtyDeputies.org, cataloging the many swampy fossil fuel hires now running the American government.
As Mark Hand writes for CAP’s ThinkProgress, nearly a third of the 100 energy and environment hires in the administration thus far have ties to the Koch brothers and the fossil fuel industry. But that doesn’t even include people like Mandy Gunasekara, the aide who handed Senator Inhofe the snowball on that fateful day.
Speaking of dumb ideas by fossil fuel flacks that should be an embarrassment but somehow aren’t, last week CATO’s Pat Michaels wrote a guest post for Judith Curry’s blog taking aim at the National Climate Assessment. Though the Trump administration has yet to make any moves on this report, Michaels suggests that either the administration should just not produce a report (because why would anyone want to know about a serious problem?) or if they do, they should use the Red/Blue team approach.
Though it’s still early in the game, the fact that the Red/Blue team idea for the National Climate Assessment is being floated and that Pruitt and Perry support the team idea in general terms should be a great big red flag. As some real scientists wrote in the Washington Post last week, this is “no way to conduct climate science.”
Again, this is a bad idea. But it’s also impressively hypocritical for deniers. They railed for years that alarmists start with a predetermined conclusion and work backwards to find supporting evidence. Deniers complained that not enough is known about climate science to make decisions, and attacked Obama for supposedly enforcing politically correct dogma on science.
Now Trump is proposing to gut science budgets across the government, hobbling our ability to provide evidence for deniers. In its place they’re suggesting a red team, which by definition starts with the opposite conclusion of mainstream science and works backwards to provide Trump with science he would deem to be politically correct. Literally embodying everything they’ve attacked.
Unfortunately, that hypocrisy is unlikely to keep deniers from lobbying for a red team until they’re blue in the face.
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