Our anti-environment EPA head, redux

In my last post, which I realize was over a year ago and I have had much on which to catch up and comment, I looked at the track record of newly nominated Environmental Protection Agency Director Scott Pruitt in his home state of Oklahoma. I made the case that, similar to other cabinet picks by Donald Trump at the time, Pruitt was just another in a long series of people who, at best, had limited or no experience or expertise in the areas for which they were nominated to serve, and at worst, were hostile to the objectives of their respective agencies.

For any rational person who actually cared about having qualified and serious cabinet members help guide the ship in Washington, Pruitt would be at or near the bottom of the list for a post at the EPA. But true to form, given the proverbial gaggle of incompetent or unqualified people nominated to Trump’s cabinet and administration — those who have yet to be fired or resign, that is — he simply doesn’t care how well these people know their subjects or how vigorously they stand up for the principles of their offices.

My implication last year that Pruitt was going to be ill-fit for the job and even deleterious to its mission has come to bear. Over the last year, he micromanaged efforts to remove information about climate change work from the EPA’s website (more here), defended Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement signed by 195 nations, including Syria — a striking embarrassment for the United States in its own right — and last October, started a process to repeal the Clean Power Plan, the country’s only major initiative to curb carbon plant emissions.

To anyone who is paying attention, all of this should come as no surprise. As I said previously, Pruitt made his bones railing against the EPA, with more than a dozen lawsuits against the agency to boot, as attorney general in Oklahoma. And he has openly questioned humanity’s role in contributing to climate change, telling CNBC:

I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact.

So no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet, we need to continue to debate, continue the review and analysis.

Of course, that’s in direct opposition to data from NASA and every credible scientific exploration of the topic on the planet. I would wager that, next to nuclear war, climate change and its potential for long-term, seismic impacts to the environment is the most pressing issue that we are facing as a species. In a 2014 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called the environmental trends we are currently seeing “unequivocal”:

Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.

and

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen.

Most recently, a memo leaked from Pruitt’s office continued to throw shade on the idea that humans are causing climate change and all its disastrous effects. Here is point five:

Human activity impacts our changing climate in some manner. The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue.

“In some manner” would be a giant understatement. The memo also said “clear gaps” still existed in our understanding of human’s impact on the climate, even though there was no elaboration. Attempting to argue that there are gaps in our understanding of manmade climate change is a copout, of course, and only serves to delay any significant work in this area with the expressed intent to continue propping up the worst offenders in the carbon and gas industries because Pruitt and his ilk have a financial vested interest in halting or curbing regulations altogether.

Add to that Pruitt’s recent egregious travel expenses and supposedly required security detail in places like Disneyland and the Vatican — I don’t think taking tours to Italy and Disneyland is part of the EPA director’s job description — and you have the top environmental official in the nation clearly not caring about his own carbon footprint, his own excessive use of taxpayer dollars or conflicts of interest related to his job.

But for a president who thinks he can govern from Twitter and insult most everyone on the planet, except for Vladmir Putin, of course, these are the kinds of people we should have expected to lead the charge. And, predictably, they seem to be crashing and burning one by one, much like the administration itself.

Sources:

[Cover image credit: “.:Warming Global:.” by DeviantArt user spotterfire-cat.]

Senator debunks global warming with snow

Here is the venerable Sen. Jim Inhofe from Oklahoma disproving climate change with coldness:

And just like the snowball in his bag, his IQ seems to be inexorably melting and evaporating before our eyes. I wonder if, in his mind, these other historic snow events also provide compelling evidence against climate change, even though many of them took place before all the mass “hysteria” about climate change erupted.

I also wonder about the series of events leading up to this speech. Did he gather the snow in the bag himself, or did he get a staffer to do it? If the latter, did the staffer gathering the snow feel more like a tool than usual? Did Inhofe worry that the snow would melt before he got his chance to deliver the decisive blow to climate change on the floor of the Senate? And if it did melt, did he worry that this fact would have dealt a serious blow to his own argument? Given my hypothesis about the disintegrating IQ, I would guess not.

Obama speaks candidly on climate change

Although he should have been talking about climate change five years ago, it’s good to see Obama siding with science and advocating for a price on carbon. Better late than never. Here’s a preview from Tom Friedman’s interview on Showtime:

I particularly liked Friedman’s example about climate change deniers in Congress consulting the 97 percent of doctors who may diagnose their children, but on climate change, they want to consult the other 3 percent minority. This, I have found also, applies to religion, but instead, the percentages are more like 99-to-1, as Christians and other believers, despite 99 percent of scientists being in agreement about evolution and the inadequacy of creationism to explain our world, they still trust the dissenting 1 percent, and without any evidence all the while.

Boehner and climate change

Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., along with 21 members of Congress sent a letter this week to Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, requesting a debate on climate change. The letter is available in PDF form here. The lawmakers who signed the letter are Reps. Henry A. Waxman, Bobby L. Rush, Chris Van Hollen, Doris O. Matsui, Jared Huffman, Earl Blumenauer, Rush Holt, Raul M. Grijalva, Peter DeFazio, Jim Moran, Barbara Lee, Steve Cohen, John Garamendi, Donna F. Edwards, Ben Ray Lujan, Peter Welch, Paul D. Tonko, Lois Capps, Hank Johnson, Carolyn B. Maloney, Keith Ellison and Adam Schiff.

Of course, given Boehner campaign contribution interests, don’t expect the speaker to be baited into holding a debate. Based on data from Open Secrets, I calculated that Boehner received at least $1.2 million from oil and gas and other related energies from 2011 to 2012, and according to MapLight, a nonpartisan research organization, that figure could be higher. Conversely, the lawmakers who sent the letter to Boehner received 77 percent less money from carbon polluting industries than representatives who did not sign the letter.

As this chart shows, the non-green energy sector is Boehner’s fourth largest contributor, just behind “miscellaneous,” which could just as well include other cardon-related industries:

Picture 1

Credit: Open Secrets

The Obama Administration has been working on a plan to address climate change that is largely geared toward energy efficiency and renewable resources, which Boehner, to no one’s surprise, has called “absolutely crazy:”

Why would you want to increase the cost of energy and kill more American jobs at a time when the American people are still asking where are the jobs? Clear enough?

Notwithstanding what he sees as the economics of energy reform, Boehner has long ridiculed the notion that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is harmful to the environment, ridiculously citing cow farts as an example, and well, our own respiration:

Here he is in 2009:

The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know when they do what they do you’ve got more carbon dioxide.

It’s clear we’ve had change in our climate. The question is how much does man have to do with it and what is the proper way to deal with this? We can’t do it alone as one nation.

At least he admits that some type of climate change is happening, although he has been refuted many times over (Here and here, to name a couple examples) for his stance on the damage carbon dioxide is causing to the environment. As the letter to Boehner suggests, the Republican strategy on climate change seems to be, like most other issues of import, to do nothing and hope the problem goes away, meanwhile collecting their big checks from energy interests.

Here is a portion of the letter sent to Boehner:

The Safe Climate Caucus is comprised of 25 members of the House who have made a commitment to talk every single day on the House floor that we are in session about the urgent need to address climate change. Every day, we have given speeches on topics relating to climate change, including the importance of preparing communities to mitigate the impacts of extreme weather events, the potential for clean energy technologies, and the threats of rising temperatures across the country.

But despite our continued and ongoing efforts to speak out on this issue on the House floor, no Republican member of the House has shown up to explain why House Republicans refuse to accept the views of every scientific institution or to justify their inaction to future generations.

Like evolution, the best approach the GOP seems to be able to come up with is to put their fingers in their ears and hope the scientific community and people who care about the long-term effects of climate change will simply go away, which is a good reason why, if the Republican Party itself doesn’t evolve and step into the 20th century — much less the 21st — the Grand Old Party might turn into the Grand Dead Party and may not even exist in 30 years as smarter, more conscientious voters come of age.

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Climate change: near ‘tipping’ point?

James Fallows, with The Atlantic, thinks that this story may be the most important to break in 2012.

Of course, as someone who grew up in the early 1980s, I well remember that the nation has been talking about — “talking” being the keyword — about energy conservation for decades without making substantial gains. I remember learning about the greenhouse gas effect, the need to preserve the rainforests and other issues, so it’s not like the problem has popped into the public’s consciousness in the last few years. Scientists have been warning about the potential for irreversible human impacts on the environment for about as long as I can remember.

While it’s frightening to the think that we may have already crossed the threshold in pollution damage to the planet, and subsequently, that the world may be reaching an irreversible tipping point, we have no one but ourselves collectives selves to blame, with a healthy dose of that blame falling to our politicians and world leaders who once again, faced with mounds of scientific evidence, have shirked their responsibilities to enact meaningful regulations.

Here’s part of the report:

BERKELEY — A prestigious group of scientists from around the world is warning that population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, and climate change may be driving Earth toward an irreversible change in the biosphere, a planet-wide tipping point that would have destructive consequences absent adequate preparation and mitigation.

UC Berkeley professor Tony Barnosky explains how an increasing human population, coupled with climate change, could irreversibly alter Earth’s ecosystem. (Video produced by Roxanne Makasdjian)

“It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point,” warns Anthony Barnosky, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of a review paper appearing in the June 7 issue of the journal Nature. “The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations.”

On new energy bill, ctd.

There goes the neighborhood … or eventually, possibly many, many neighborhoods.

The U.S. Senate on Thursday gave up plans to try to pass an energy bill that would have been a start in the right direction in curbing green house gas emissions, and to the glee of our collective humanity, slow the eventual destruction of us all. Or, here’s how The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman has framed it:

When I first heard on Thursday that Senate Democrats were abandoning the effort to pass an energy/climate bill that would begin to cap greenhouse gases that cause global warming and promote renewable energy that could diminish our addiction to oil, I remembered something that Joe Romm, the climateprogress.org blogger, once said: The best thing about improvements in health care is that all the climate-change deniers are now going to live long enough to see how wrong they were.

As Friedman stated in a recent column on the same topic,

… just remember this: If we don’t get a serious energy bill out of this Congress, and Republicans retake the House and Senate, we may not have another shot until the next presidential term or until we get a “perfect storm” — a climate or energy crisis that is awful enough to finally end our debate on these issues but not so awful as to end the world.

It can’t be stated enough that it’s pathetic that not one Republican is even in favor of what Friedman calls a “watered down” bill, much less a robust one which may adequately address the problems that scientists say are already staring us in the face.

On new energy bill, Friedman brings the pain

Like the recently passed health care bill, the energy bill currently being mulled in the U.S. Senate is watered down, as Thomas Friedman, with The New York Times admits, but, as he also admits, at least it’s a start. But if only a few, Friedman numbers it at seven, senators can’t get on board — and it’s not clear they will — we won’t even have a start on energy reform. I will echo Friedman in calling such a scenario “pathetic,” and I would add, utterly pathetic, backward, anti-scientific and contemptible.

Friedman puts the urgency of now, something not many people seem to possess anymore, especially not congressmen, into perspective:

If we don’t get a serious energy bill out of this Congress, and Republicans retake the House and Senate, we may not have another shot until the next presidential term or until we get a “perfect storm” — a climate or energy crisis that is awful enough to finally end our debate on these issues but not so awful as to end the world. But, hey, by 2012, China should pretty much own the clean-tech industry and we’ll at least be able to get some good deals on electric cars.

Realizing that many, if not all Republicans, will skirt away from any bill that culls their precious attachment to the oil industry, Friedman offers this suggestion: forget climate change. Concede the myth. Concede that it doesn’t exist. What then? Here’s what Dems should tell Reps, according to Friedman:

Fine. Forget about global warming. That’s between you and your beach house. How about this? Do you believe in population growth? Do you believe in the American dream? Because, according to the U.N., the world’s population is going to grow from roughly 6.7 billion people today to about 9.2 billion by 2050. And in today’s integrated world, more and more of those 9.2 billion will aspire to, and be able to, live like Americans — with American-size cars, homes and Big Macs. In that world, demand for fossil fuels is going to go through the roof — and all the bad things that go with it.

“If we take that threat seriously now and pass an energy bill that begins to end our oil addiction, we can shrink the piles of money we send to the worst regimes in the world, strengthen our dollar by keeping more at home, clean up our air, take away money from the people who finance the mosques and madrassas that keep many Muslim youths backward, angry and anti-American and stimulate a whole new industry — one China is already leapfrogging us on — clean-tech. Nothing would improve our economic and national security more, yet Republicans won’t lift one finger to make it happen.

Personally, I’m not willing to go that far and concede the point on science. If I were a congressman in favor of energy reform because I saw the real dangers of doing nothing and were faced with no-nothing fellow senators who denied global warming, as if to deny sunlight or the roundness of Earth, I would take whatever measures necessary to ram the bill through in spite of them. But, of course, that’s the damnable part of it. Half of the entire Senate, or more, are no-nothing regarding much of science, and that’s just frightening, not to mention the throngs who voted them into office. To rethink the logic, I doubt I would have the patience to be a congressman.

Sometimes it snows rains in April

Admittedly, the above headline is from a Prince song, but this seems to be no joke.

A highly unusual occurrence of April rain was reported this week on the island of Ellef Ringnes near the North Pole. Scientists working at the island said they witnessed a three-minute shower.

Credit: Terra MODIS, 31 July 2006

According to David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,

My business is weird, wild and wacky weather, and this is up there among fish falling from the sky or Niagara Falls running dry.

I mean, it really is strange. You just don’t expect it to rain in the High Arctic in April; maybe in July and August. And certainly for these scientists from Europe coming over, they must have been also mystified.

Phillip told the CBC that data showed that rain had not occurred in April in the High Arctic in 50-60 years. Consequently, the scientists were visiting the island to research how climate change is affecting the Arctic. Phillips speculated that the team probably did not bring along rain gauges.

And understandably:

The scientific group was on Ellef Ringnes Island as part of the Catlin Arctic Survey, which is gathering data on the effects of climate change on the Arctic Ocean.

The researchers have been working on determining the amount of carbon dioxide that’s trapped in the ocean.

“It’s definitely a shocker … the general feeling within the polar community is that rainfall in the high Canadian Arctic in April is a freak event,” Pen Hadow, the team’s expedition director, told Reuters in an interview from London this week.

“Scientists would tell us that we can expect increasingly to experience these sorts of outcomes as the climate warms.”

Tyler Fish, a polar guide at the base, said the rain fell after temperatures had been rising for a couple of days.

“I think we were disappointed. Rain isn’t something you expect in the Arctic and a lot of us came up here to be away from that kind of weather,” he told Reuters.

All the usual arguments that climate change is a reality apply here. For more information, see here, here, and here.

FOX News’ continued dance with illegitimacy

Since FOX News embarrasses itself, and journalism, just fine all by itself, I don’t really even need to mention this, but I do so because I recognize that many still believe the station is a legitimate source for fair and balanced, and dare I say, accurate news.

That wasn’t the case Monday, however, when FOX Nation presented as a “serious” news story a tale about a global warming activist who had frozen to the death this past weekend in Antarctica, meanwhile apparently not catching the irony. But here’s the hang of it: the original story came from faux and satire news site, EcoEnquirer.com. And straight from FOX’s Web site, here is the now-dead link.

Obviously continuing the 24-hour smear campaign against anything that may be called progressive (“Progress?” We wouldn’t want that.), FOX ran the story because it makes a roundabout, assumptive case that, in fact, global warming is a myth, as if to say:

See, it’s right there, clear as day. We still have people freezing to death in Antarctica!

Forgetting the fact that even after sea levels rise and most of the arctic sheet is toast, temperatures on this planet will still, and quite often, indeed, get cold enough for people to freeze to death. We are, after all, talking about an exceeding slow process, like evolution or other natural processes. But unlike evolution (Maybe we should welcome its intensification …), climate change is escalating with most of the warming since 1880 coming in recent decades. It’s a brute fact by now, and we might as well come to terms with it. Attempts to subvert it are, and here’s the nasty word again, retarding our progress as human beings.

But never a station to trade unscientific, fear-mongering nonsense for the scientific record or pesky truths, FOX actively looks for ways to conservatively pad its news hole, and the evidence has been mounting for years. By the way, I don’t need to link to probable liberal sites to prove my point. If I had the inclination, I could flood this site with egregious nonsense I hear from this outfit. But it’s too easy, and since so many others are sawing away at it, I don’t see the need to add my voice to the fray, or at least not on a daily basis.

Thanks to Media Matters for this screen shot:

Credit: Media Matters