Admittedly a little late, but we have some news to be thankful for! We’ve known for a year now that the red team effort to attack climate science was put on the back burner, much to the chagrin of deniers. But now we appear to have confirmation that the effort is not just sidelined, but dead.
The Guardian’s Emily Holden tweeted on Friday that “Mandy Gunesakara at EPA tells ALEC that red team, blue team debate on #climate science is off the table.”
This, plus the fact that the NCA was just released and that was thought to be a potential target for the red team, is likely as close to a corpse as we’re apt to get. So Hurrah! Huzzah! Hurray! (Wins are pretty few and far between these days, so we’ll take what we can get.)
Now, of course it’d be nice if the EPA were to make that an official public announcement, and explain why exactly it was considering an attack on its own science and scientists in the first place. It’d also be nice if the EPA weren’t sending its political appointees to polluter-funded groups like ALEC, which exists solely to spread legislation that puts polluters over people.
But since we figure the odds are slim that Trump’s EPA would lie to a coalition of the polluters it really serves, we’re going to go ahead and celebrate.
In fact, things seems like they may be looking up. The NCA came out without getting red team’d, the tobacco-industry’s policy to censor science has been put on the back-burner, and come January, the House of Representatives will begin exercising some oversight and, hopefully, begin holding the Trump administration accountable for running the country like Trump ran his businesses: into the ground.
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