William Happer is the retired Princeton physicist who was rumored to be in contention to become Donald Trump’s White House science adviser. The idea of Harper becoming the “science” anything was depressing and predictable coming from a Republican administration that not only ignores scientific data, but aggressively undermines and attacks it. According to National Security Council officials, Happer has gotten himself a new gig as the “senior director for emerging technologies.” Way back in February of 2017, Happer was interviewed in The Scientist and had this to say about his conversations with the newly-inaugurated Trump:
I said, ‘I’m sure you know my position that I think climate change has been tremendously exaggerated—its significance. Climate is important, always has been, but I think it’s become sort of a cult movement in the last five or 10 years.’ So in just a sentence or two, I said, ‘That’s my view of it.’ And he said, Well, I agree with you. But that’s all we discussed.
Happer worked in the Department of Energy during the first George Bush administration, so you know the kind of fossil fuel hack pedigree he comes from. Happer’s big thing is that we don’t know whether or not the increasing CO2 in our atmosphere is really a bad thing. He says that researching how climate change could be super fantastic for everybody doesn’t get the “funding” that people with his stupid ideas need. If the government funded less climate change science, Happer—who is decidedly NOT a climate scientist—and his buddies could use those resources to to tell us what virtually all climate scientists already know: the build up of manmade CO2 is not good for our changing climate when it comes to humanity.
Instead, Happer has told the public that CO2 buildup isn’t a real problem facing the planet.
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"The public, in general, doesn't realize that from the point of view of geological history, we are in a CO2 famine," he told E&E News during the interview in January.
That is why Happer continued his public Trump virtue signaling by applauding the U.S. pull-out from the Paris climate accord.
"There is no problem from CO2," Happer said. "The world has lots and lots of problems, but increasing CO2 is not one of the problems. So [the accord] dignifies it by getting all these yahoos who don't know a damn thing about climate saying, 'This is a problem, and we're going to solve it.' All this virtue signaling. You can read about it in the Bible: Pharisees and hypocrites and phonies."
He hits all the spots: climate science denial, we have to sit on our hands, even evangelical Bible-quoting nonsense. This acrobatic conservative-virtue signaling is coming from a man who has been dishing out bullshit to the public, for a fee, for many years.
Happer was previously listed as the director of a group called the “CO2 Coalition,” which has a website that claims that CO2 released from fossil fuels is just good news for global plant growth while having no real effect on Earth’s climate. (These claims are false.) He has also taken to referring to the field of climate science as a “cult movement.”
However, CNN points out, Happer has a classic conservative response to being called a climate change “denier.”
Happer has said he is not a "climate denier." He told Foreign Policy magazine in May 2017 that "climate has been with us forever" and it's ridiculous to "deny" it.
Get it? He isn’t saying the climate doesn’t exist. Got you scientists there! Luckily, Happer’s new job, while incredibly ambiguous, puts the retired 79-year-old climate change denier at the forefront of “emerging technologies.”