As the Trump administration continues blinding itself to reality (most recently by suspending federal assistance for a report on the impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining) and mashing ctrl+z on everything Obama did, even the oil and gas industry is getting worried that things may be getting undone too quickly. That’s the gist of Ben Lefebvre's PoliticoPRO story, which quotes various industry voices expressing some concern at the perhaps overzealous regulatory repeals.
But before you get too excited about industry caring about the environment, know that their concern isn’t pollution, but public backlash after inevitable spills happens. One anonymous staffer told Lefebvre that “It’s not helpful if regulations are streamlined so as to allow something to happen — say, a methane explosion or a spill — and we’d be painted with it as an entire industry.” So it doesn’t matter if a spill destroys an ecosystem or poisons people, but public perception matters.
This mindfulness of public perception is also likely motivating the much-maligned Red Team effort. While most everyone is opposed to the idea because it is nothing more than a PR project meant to give the impression of a 50/50 split on the issue (as opposed to the actual 97/3 consensus), one person is giving Pruitt the benefit of the doubt.
Unsurprisingly, it’s Richard Muller, the “converted skeptic” behind the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. For those who don’t remember, it was a Mercer/Koch-funded effort to justify Anthony Watts’ pet theory that development around thermometers had skewed the record, and therefore global warming isn’t real. But Muller assembled a pretty decent team, crunched the numbers, and ultimately confirmed the consensus and disproved Watts. (Who, despite originally claiming to endorse the project whatever the results, backtracked once he was rebuffed, illustrating the inability for deniers to be skeptical of their own positions.)
Muller told Scott Waldman at E&E that he thinks that a Red Team could be effective if it’s done in good faith with an objective, apolitical look at the science undertaken by a team devoid of those who have expressed opinions on climate change in the past. This is, of course, impossible given Pruitt’s history (and even more unlikely considering that he announced the project at a meeting of coal lobbyists).
Besides, who is going to agree to put their credibility on the line by enabling Pruitt’s fig leaf of a post-hoc rationalization for pro-fossil fuel policies? By the sounds of his naive approval of the idea, Richard, who seems to be Mullering it over...
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