It’s a packed week for congressional climate hearings, with at least five different hearings on the docket for today and tomorrow.
First up is the House Climate Crisis committee, which is holding a 10am hearing today on “Cleaning up heavy duty vehicles.” As E&E notes, the transportation sector is the country’s largest source of carbon emissions, so any attempt to get climate change under control is going to require some pretty heavy duty improvements to vehicles. In addition to testimony from leaders in environmental justice and executives from an electric bus company and an engine company, it will be interesting to hear from ranking Republican member Garret Graves (R-La) given his continued support for fossil fuels despite a nominal embrace of climate science.
Then at 2pm today, the House Natural Resource Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources is holding a hearing on “Oil and Gas Development: Impacts of Business-as-Usual on the Climate and Public Health.” Details on this hearing are sparse as of now, but given what we know about how fracking alone will blow the Paris agreement carbon budget, odds are there will be some fireworks.
Also at 2pm today is a House Science Committee subcommittee hearing focused on Scott Pruitt’s legally questionable, polluter-directed, tobacco-lobbyist-inspired changes to the EPA’s science advisory committees, along with President Trump’s directive that a third of all advisory committees be disbanded. According to E&E, witnesses include a couple former advisory board members and J. Alfredo Gomez from the Government Accountability Office.
Gomez will be testifying about a new GAO report looking into Pruitt’s advisory board changes, the contents of which were made public yesterday. PoliticoPRO’s Alex Guillen reported that the GAO found “Pruitt disregarded agency guidelines when he overhauled its major scientific advisory boards and shifted the balance from academics and scientists to industry members and consultants.”
In an attempt to avoid accountability by making sure there was no paper trail, Pruitt chose not to pick board members from a shortlist prepared by career staff, as is required. Instead he held in-person meetings with staff who offered their suggestions, leaving no evidence of who staff thought was most qualified versus who Pruitt actually picked.
On Wednesday at 10am the hits will keep coming, with the House Science Committee’s Investigations and Oversight and Research and Technology subcommittees convening a hearing on “Science Integrity in Federal Agencies.” Given that the Trump administration is repeatedly getting struck down in court because of existing science integrity laws, this otherwise wonky subject area has taken on some real-world public health importance.
Yet again, turning to E&E for more details, it looks like this hearing will deal with the "Scientific Integrity Act,” a piece of legislation introduced back in March by Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.). According to a fact sheet from the Rep’s office, the bill would strengthen, formalize and standardize existing federal standards for science that stave off the sorts of politically-driven distortions we’ve seen from the Trump administration, a point punctuated by the fact sheet’s conclusion that “There is no such thing as an ‘alternative fact’”.
Finally, a hearing about “modernizing and securing” the country’s power grid at the House Science Subcommittee on Energy will be held tomorrow at 2pm. Witnesses are from the DOE, National Renewable Energy Lab, the Energy Storage Association and the Advanced Energy Management Alliance.
Though it’s the last of these five hearings, managing an increasingly distributed and renewable grid is critical for a clean energy economy, so it’s probably worth tuning in to this electrifying discussion…
If, of course, you still have the energy!
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