Although there has yet to be a public update from the Trump administration about its effort to deny climate science through an adversarial red-team review, other recent developments indicate the attacks will continue.
On Friday E&E’s Jean Chemnick reported that a special American portion of the recent G-7 communiqué indicated that the US “reaffirms its commitment to re-examine comprehensive modeling that best reflects the actual state of climate science in order to inform its policy-making decisions, including comparing actual monitored climate data against the modeled climate trajectories on an on-going basis.”
As Chemnick reports, odds are that this passage is an indication that the Trump administration is aiming to attack climate models by invoking the faux pause as an example of how models are failing. Sadly, this isn’t the only way the administration is corrupting science, and like all good propaganda, this undercutting of science is accompanied by claims of protecting it.
The stark difference between words and actions was captured in an op-ed by Rutgers professor Stuart Shapiro on the recent memo from the OMB concerning how the federal government treats science in the process of making regulations. Shapiro provides some of the big-picture context for these changes to the Information Quality Act, which set rules for how the government handles science, and explains that while it ostensibly sounds like it would be used to protect science-based regulations, it can also be used to undo them.
And as expected, that’s exactly what happened. A few weeks ago OMB acting director Russell Vought (a former tobacco and Koch-funded Heritage Foundation official) sent out a memo about the IQA that looked suspiciously similar to the so-called sound science policy created to help the tobacco industry. Earlier this week, the tobacco and Koch-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute submitted a petition to the EPA claiming that the Endangerment Finding violated these science guidelines.
Due to the new guidelines, the EPA now has to waste its time responding point-by-point to CEI’s claims. The crux of their complaints are that the EPA didn’t follow peer-review protocols. But the Endangerment Finding isn’t a piece of original research that would need that sort of review, because it describes the vast body of existing research, which already went through the normal public peer review process in order to be published in the first place. So CEI’s argument is unlikely to hold any more water now than it did in past failed attempts when they leveled similar charges.
But remember, the final outcome doesn’t really matter for CEI and the other denial shops. All that matters is getting the federal government position to officially question climate science, as opposed to regulating based on it. And we know deniers are only picking this fight for public relations purposes not only because it’s obvious they have no chance at building an evidenced-based case, but also because they admitted it.
According to an email from Heartland President Joe Bast obtained by E&E back in 2017, at a meeting about the red team and endangerment finding, Heartland President Huelskamp said the debate is “political and not scientific,” while someone else said that what matters is that “we need to be able to say ‘EPA is reconsidering whether CO2 is a pollutant.’”
To summarize, a tobacco and fossil fuel-funded group is attacking the science underpinning public protections by using a policy originally proposed by the tobacco industry and instituted in the federal government by a former official from another tobacco and fossil-fuel funded group.
All under the guise of improving the quality of government science.
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