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Scott Pruitt never gave up on dream to debate climate science, EPA records show

by ModestoSpeckman Posted on December 24, 2018

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In Scott Pruitt’s final weeks as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, his political advisors were still considering ways to formally raise doubts about climate change science, agency records show.

The scandal-plagued Pruitt had long pushed for a public “red team, blue team” debate between mainstream scientists and the small minority of scientists who disagree with them about climate change and its causes. In late 2017, White House officials urged him to abandon the idea.

Yet according to emails obtained by the Guardian through a Freedom of Information Act request, as recently as mid-May 2018 aides were considering an alternative: The agency could ask for public comments on a 2009 legal finding that requires the U.S. government to regulate greenhouse gases.

If by that process the EPA could successfully rescind the conclusion that greenhouse gases endanger public health, the federal government would no longer have to regulate major sources of carbon pollution, including power plants.

According to a former senior administration official speaking on the condition of anonymity, the plan to ask for comments rather than hold a public debate was a compromise struck between the White House and the EPA. In July, however, Pruitt resigned, following dozens of stories about his ethical troubles.

The emails obtained by the Guardian offer a glimpse of how the Trump administration has struggled to settle on a position on climate change.

President Trump himself has repeatedly doubted overwhelming research that shows humans burning fossil fuels are emitting greenhouse gases that raise global temperatures and cause catastrophic environmental changes. A number of top officials have expressed similar feelings or questioned how bad climate change will be, and federal agencies are reversing climate change mitigation efforts for power plants and cars.

However, many Republicans and large energy companies urging Trump to rescind regulations do not want the EPA to debate the 2009 climate change finding, fearing a losing battle.

The Midwest power provider American Electric Power, for example, opposes reconsidering the finding. It has long relied on coal but is shifting its electricity mix.

“I don’t think the business community wants this at all,” said Paul Bledsoe, who was a climate change advisor to Bill Clinton. “They all came out against leaving [the Paris climate agreement]. They all have statements on their websites that they believe in climate science. The last thing they want is to get thrust into the middle of this.”

Pruitt’s most conservative supporters pushed him to reexamine the finding anyway, a move which would require a full scientific review and prompt massive legal battles.

It is not clear how serious the EPA considerations were or whether Pruitt’s staff intended to eventually propose a rollback. Attachments shared in emails between senior staff members included an “Endangerment ANPRM draft,” referring to an “advance notice of proposed rulemaking,” an early step in the regulatory process. Another email contained a version of talking points for a “Notice of Opportunity to Comment.”

Conservative groups, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, had petitioned the EPA to reevaluate the endangerment finding. The EPA could have posted those petitions and asked for public comments. Or it could have solicited input as part of another climate-related rollback.

The documents referred to in the emails were not released, because the Freedom of Information Act does not require the government to release records that were part of ongoing deliberations. One subject line referenced an afternoon meeting.

The staffers exchanging the drafts, air official Mandy Gunasekara and the policy chief, Brittany Bolen, stayed at the EPA when Pruitt left. In a brief interview this month, Gunasekara said the agency’s “understanding of CO2 and greenhouse gases continues to evolve.” She declined to comment on the released emails. Spokespeople for the EPA and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Emails released to the Guardian also showed the EPA air chief, Bill Wehrum, planning in December to make an announcement about the “RTBT,” the notional “red team, blue team” debate.

This month, in a draft rule to ease standards for new coal plants, the EPA said it would accept comments on whether the agency had correctly interpreted the endangerment finding.

Climate advocates say the EPA should be transparent about its plans now.

“Americans deserve to know whether acting EPA head, Andrew Wheeler, nominated to be EPA administrator, disputes that carbon pollution endangers human health and the environment,” said John Walke, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

According to a peer-reviewed paper published last week in the journal Science, scientific evidence showing that greenhouse gases are dangerous to public health is even stronger than it was when the endangerment finding was established in 2009.

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Scott Pruitt never gave up on dream to debate climate science, EPA records show

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In Which I Waste a Lot of Time on Climate Change Yahooism

by ZUVSharynwebpp Posted on June 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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Boy did I waste some time yesterday. It started with this post from David French:

The Environmentalist Left Has to Grapple with Its Failed, Alarmist Predictions

I’m pasting below one of my favorite videos, from a Good Morning America report in 2008….Truly, it’s a stunning piece of work, depicting the deadly dystopia that awaited Americans in . . . 2015. Manhattan is disappearing under rising seas, milk is almost $13 per “carton,” and gas prices skyrocketed to more than $9 per gallon. But if you’re familiar at all with environmentalist predictions, there’s nothing all that unusual about the GMA’s report (except for its vivid visuals).

….As I wrote in early 2016 — after the world allegedly passed Al Gore’s “point of no return” — environmentalist predictions are a target-rich environment. There’s a veritable online cottage industry cataloguing hysterical, failed predictions of environmentalist catastrophe. Over at the American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry keeps his list of “18 spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions” made around the original Earth Day in 1970. Robert Tracinski at The Federalist has a nice list of “Seven big failed environmentalist predictions.” The Daily Caller’s “25 years of predicting the global warming ‘tipping point’” makes for amusing reading, including one declaration that we had mere “hours to act” to “avert a slow-motion tsunami.”

….Is the environmental movement interested in explaining rather than hectoring? Then explain why you’ve been wrong before. Own your mistakes.

I would be a lot more impressed with complaints like this if conservatives had spent the past decade loudly insisting that although climate change was important and needed to be addressed, we shouldn’t panic over it. That would be defensible. Needless to say, that’s not what they’ve done. Instead, for purely partisan reasons, we’ve gone from lots of Republicans supporting cap-and-trade to a nearly unanimous rejection in 2010 of what they now fatuously call cap-and-tax, followed in 2016 by the election of a man who’s called climate change a hoax.

Still, alarmism from activists is nothing new, so I was ready to believe plenty of them had gone overboard. At the same time, I was suspicious because the GMA video was rather oddly cropped. It was a hyperactive promo for a forgettable ABC program called Earth 2100 that aired eight years ago, so I wasted some time watching it. Here it is, so you can watch it too if you want to make sure I describe it accurately:

The program is very clear at the beginning that it’s dramatizing a worst-case dystopia of climate change if we do nothing. That said, the show’s actual depiction of 2015 includes these vignettes: an oil shortage spikes gasoline prices to $5 per gallon; higher oil prices make suburbs less desirable places to live; eating meat uses a lot more oil than eating grain; Congress approves 40 new coal-fired power plants; a huge storm hits Miami; a huge cyclone hits Bangladesh; a drought in China causes wheat shortages; and world leaders fail to reach agreement on greenhouse gas reductions.

That’s…not at all what French describes. And it’s not especially alarmist, either. The big drought was (is) in South Sudan, not China, and the most intense cyclone ever was in the eastern Pacific, not Bangladesh or Miami. It was the Lima conference that produced no climate agreement (that would have to wait for Paris at the tail end of 2015), and for pretty much the reasons described in the program. Extreme weather events have increased and wildfire damage in the western US has intensified. But the show did get a couple of things wrong: there was no oil shortage and no new coal-fired plants.

After I finished my vintage TV watching, I trudged through each of French’s catalogs of ridiculous environmental predictions. First up was Mark Perry’s list of bad prediction from the first Earth Day. I’m not sure why I’m supposed to care about a random assortment of stuff from 50 years ago, but whatever. Perry has a list of 18 items, and of them, (a) six were from Paul Ehrlich, (b) two were vague warnings about humans destroying the planet, which we were certainly doing in 1970, and (c) four were dire predictions of things that might happen if we did nothing. But of course, we didn’t do nothing. That leaves six: two predictions of famine, two predictions of resource shortages, one prediction of mass extinction, and one prediction of an impending ice age. I can’t find any backup for the mass extinction thing, but the guy who allegedly predicted it got a Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan, so how bad could he be? Nor could I find any backup for the supposed prediction of a coming ice age, and the data it’s based on makes it seem unlikely.

So if we agree that Paul Ehrlich was just way off base, we’re left with four guys who got some stuff wrong. If this is the best we can find from the entire maelstrom of the environmental movement of 1970, it doesn’t sound like those guys did so badly after all.

Next up was the Federalist list, but it was pretty much the same stuff.

Finally there’s the Daily Caller’s list of bad predictions about a global “tipping point.” I had to trudge through each one and click through to see what it really said, and it turns out the first five cases were all routine statements about how much time we had left until the next climate conference, where we really had to get something done. The sixth was from Prince Charles, so who cares? The seventh was a claim that we needed to do something by 2012 in order to keep climate change from getting out of control. The eighth was a piece about the unsustainability of eating lots of meat. And the ninth was a 1989 prediction that we needed to get moving on climate change by 2000 to avoid catastrophe.

So we have a grand total of two people saying that we need to act fast or else it will be impossible to keep future climate change under 2°C. This is a pretty mainstream view since there’s a lot of inertia built into climate change, so I’m not sure why this list is supposed to be so scandalous in the first place. We do need to act quickly if we want global warming to peak at 2°C or less. What’s wrong with saying that at every opportunity?

When you get done with all this, there’s virtually nothing of substance left. Sure, some people got some stuff wrong. That’s always the case. The whole point of science is not to get everything right, but to have a mechanism for correcting its errors. And if you look at consensus views, instead of cherry picking individuals, I think environmental scientists have as good a track record as anyone. Aside from creating listicles that get passed around forever on the internet by ignorant yahoos, what’s the point of pretending that they’ve been epically wrong for decades and need to offer up abject apologies before we ever listen to them again?

There’s no need to answer that. I think we all know exactly what the point is.

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In Which I Waste a Lot of Time on Climate Change Yahooism

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You can expect Neil Gorsuch to be bad news for the environment.

by ByronLandreneau Posted on April 7, 2017

Catherine Flowers has been an environmental justice fighter for as long as she can remember. “I grew up an Alabama country girl,” she says, “so I was part of the environmental movement before I even knew what it was. The natural world was my world.”

In 2001, raw sewage leaked into the yards of poor residents in Lowndes County, Alabama, because they had no access to municipal sewer systems. Local government added insult to injury by threatening 37 families with eviction or arrest because they couldn’t afford septic systems. Flowers, who is from Lowndes County, fought back: She negotiated with state government, including then-Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, to end unfair enforcement policies, and she enlisted the Environmental Protection Agency’s help to fund septic systems. The effort earned her the nickname “The Erin Brockovich of Sewage.”

Flowers was continuing the long tradition of residents fighting for justice in Lowndes County, an epicenter for the civil rights movement. “My own parents had a rich legacy of fighting for civil rights, which to this day informs my work,” she says. “Even today, people share stories about my parents’ acts of kindness or help, and I feel it’s my duty to carry on their work.”

Years later, untreated and leaking sewage remains a persistent problem in much of Alabama. Flowers advocates for sanitation and environmental rights through the organization she founded, the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise Community Development Corporation (ACRE, for short). She’s working with the EPA and other federal agencies to design affordable septic systems that will one day eliminate the developing-world conditions that Flowers calls Alabama’s “dirty secret.”

Former Vice President Al Gore counts himself as a big fan of Flowers’ work, calling her “a firm advocate for the poor, who recognizes that the climate crisis disproportionately affects the least wealthy and powerful among us.” Flowers says a soon-to-be-published study, based on evidence she helped collect, suggests that tropical parasites are emerging in Alabama due to poverty, poor sanitation, and climate change. “Our residents can have a bigger voice,” she said, “if the media began reporting how climate change is affecting people living in poor rural communities in 2017.” Assignment editors, pay attention.

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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You can expect Neil Gorsuch to be bad news for the environment.

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A coal company just abandoned plans to ruin a river and a bunch of people’s lives in Alaska.

by AmberSuttor Posted on April 5, 2017

Catherine Flowers has been an environmental justice fighter for as long as she can remember. “I grew up an Alabama country girl,” she says, “so I was part of the environmental movement before I even knew what it was. The natural world was my world.”

In 2001, raw sewage leaked into the yards of poor residents in Lowndes County, Alabama, because they had no access to municipal sewer systems. Local government added insult to injury by threatening 37 families with eviction or arrest because they couldn’t afford septic systems. Flowers, who is from Lowndes County, fought back: She negotiated with state government, including then-Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, to end unfair enforcement policies, and she enlisted the Environmental Protection Agency’s help to fund septic systems. The effort earned her the nickname “The Erin Brockovich of Sewage.”

Flowers was continuing the long tradition of residents fighting for justice in Lowndes County, an epicenter for the civil rights movement. “My own parents had a rich legacy of fighting for civil rights, which to this day informs my work,” she says. “Even today, people share stories about my parents’ acts of kindness or help, and I feel it’s my duty to carry on their work.”

Years later, untreated and leaking sewage remains a persistent problem in much of Alabama. Flowers advocates for sanitation and environmental rights through the organization she founded, the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise Community Development Corporation (ACRE, for short). She’s working with the EPA and other federal agencies to design affordable septic systems that will one day eliminate the developing-world conditions that Flowers calls Alabama’s “dirty secret.”

Former Vice President Al Gore counts himself as a big fan of Flowers’ work, calling her “a firm advocate for the poor, who recognizes that the climate crisis disproportionately affects the least wealthy and powerful among us.” Flowers says a soon-to-be-published study, based on evidence she helped collect, suggests that tropical parasites are emerging in Alabama due to poverty, poor sanitation, and climate change. “Our residents can have a bigger voice,” she said, “if the media began reporting how climate change is affecting people living in poor rural communities in 2017.” Assignment editors, pay attention.

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

Continued:

A coal company just abandoned plans to ruin a river and a bunch of people’s lives in Alaska.

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Victory! A coal company just abandoned its plan to ruin a river and a bunch of people’s lives in Alaska.

by CooperShaver678 Posted on April 5, 2017

Catherine Flowers has been an environmental justice fighter for as long as she can remember. “I grew up an Alabama country girl,” she says, “so I was part of the environmental movement before I even knew what it was. The natural world was my world.”

In 2001, raw sewage leaked into the yards of poor residents in Lowndes County, Alabama, because they had no access to municipal sewer systems. Local government added insult to injury by threatening 37 families with eviction or arrest because they couldn’t afford septic systems. Flowers, who is from Lowndes County, fought back: She negotiated with state government, including then-Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, to end unfair enforcement policies, and she enlisted the Environmental Protection Agency’s help to fund septic systems. The effort earned her the nickname “The Erin Brockovich of Sewage.”

Flowers was continuing the long tradition of residents fighting for justice in Lowndes County, an epicenter for the civil rights movement. “My own parents had a rich legacy of fighting for civil rights, which to this day informs my work,” she says. “Even today, people share stories about my parents’ acts of kindness or help, and I feel it’s my duty to carry on their work.”

Years later, untreated and leaking sewage remains a persistent problem in much of Alabama. Flowers advocates for sanitation and environmental rights through the organization she founded, the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise Community Development Corporation (ACRE, for short). She’s working with the EPA and other federal agencies to design affordable septic systems that will one day eliminate the developing-world conditions that Flowers calls Alabama’s “dirty secret.”

Former Vice President Al Gore counts himself as a big fan of Flowers’ work, calling her “a firm advocate for the poor, who recognizes that the climate crisis disproportionately affects the least wealthy and powerful among us.” Flowers says a soon-to-be-published study, based on evidence she helped collect, suggests that tropical parasites are emerging in Alabama due to poverty, poor sanitation, and climate change. “Our residents can have a bigger voice,” she said, “if the media began reporting how climate change is affecting people living in poor rural communities in 2017.” Assignment editors, pay attention.

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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Victory! A coal company just abandoned its plan to ruin a river and a bunch of people’s lives in Alaska.

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The Senate Should Grill Trump’s FDA Pick on Antibiotics

by Arterisa Posted on April 5, 2017

Mother Jones

When President Donald Trump tapped Scott Gottlieb to lead the Food and Drug Administration, the pharmaceutical industry breathed a “sigh of relief,” reported Reuters and the Financial Times. That’s because he is “entangled in an unprecedented web of Big Pharma ties,” as the watchdog group Public Citizen put it. If confirmed, he’ll jump to the federal agency that regulates the pharmaceutical industry from the boards of GlaxoSmithKline and several other pharma companies. His work for those industry players netted him “at least” $413,000 between 2013 and 2015, Public Citizen reports. Gottlieb is also a partner at New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm that invests in the health care sector.

But Gottlieb, whose Senate confirmation hearing is scheduled for Wednesday, has a scant track record on another aspect of the FDA job: managing the rising crisis of antibiotic resistance. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, germs that have evolved to resist antibiotics sicken at least 2 million people every year and kill at least 23,000. Last fall, all 193 countries in the United Nations—including the United States—signed a declaration calling antibiotic resistance the “biggest threat to modern medicine.”

The FDA’s most direct contribution to the battle to save antibiotics lies in its regulation of farms. About 70 percent of the antibiotics used in the United States go to livestock operations, and the FDA itself, along with the CDC, the World Health Organization, the UK government, and other public health authorities, warn that overuse of drugs in meat farming is a key generator of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

Meat operations feed their animals regular low doses of antibiotics for two reasons—to help them gain weight faster, and to avoid infections despite tight, unsanitary conditions. Way back in 1977, the FDA acknowledged that these practices undermine the ability of antibiotics to fight human infections—and then for decades, it neglected to do anything about it, under severe pressure from the meat and pharmaceutical industries (more on that here).

On January 1, 2017, the agency at long last finalized a voluntary set of new rules designed to rein in the meat industry’s addiction to antibiotics. But even if meat companies comply with the new policy, the FDA’s plan leaves a gaping loophole: It asks farmers not to use the drugs as a growth promoter, but blesses the practice of using them to “prevent” disease. As the Pew Charitable Trust notes, the “lines between disease prevention and growth promotion are not always clear”—and for many antibiotics crucial to human medicine, farmers can continue as usual, changing only the language they use to describe their antibiotic reliance.

A recent report from the Government Accountability Office chastised the FDA for leaving the loophole, complaining that the agency failed to crack down on “long-term and open-ended use of medically important antibiotics for disease prevention.” It also found that the FDA doesn’t demand nearly enough usage data from meat companies or pharmaceutical suppliers to assess whether its voluntary program is working.

David Wallinga, who covers antibiotic resistance for the Natural Resources Defense Council, says the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which will hold Gottlieb’s confirmation hearing, should grill him about how the agency will handle farm antibiotic use. A senator should brandish the GAO report and ask how the FDA nominee plans to address its criticisms of the agency’s current antibiotic policy.

Wallinga says that, despite all his ties to Big Pharma, Gottlieb does not seem to be directly involved with companies like Zoetis and Elanco, which specialize in animal drugs. But Gottlieb’s one public statement on antibiotic resistance does not inspire confidence that he fully grasps the issue. In a 2007 post for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Gottlieb opined that “preventative efforts alone won’t solve our bacterial challenges.” What’s needed, he argued, are incentives for the pharmaceutical industry to develop new antibiotics, which aren’t profitable enough to draw the heavy investment in research and development required for new drugs. That’s true, Wallinga says, but any new antibiotics will quickly succumb to resistance, too, if farm use isn’t reined in.

And this issue is especially relevant for anyone dealing with cancer—that is, everyone. (Gottlieb himself is a cancer survivor, as Wallinga notes. Antibiotic resistance is one of the major threats to chemotherapy patients. A 2015 Lancet study found that at least 26 percent of pathogens causing infections after chemotherapy are resistant to common antibiotics.

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The Senate Should Grill Trump’s FDA Pick on Antibiotics

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Now Trump’s Going After the Bumblebees

by DamionCopeley95 Posted on February 10, 2017

Mother Jones

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First, it was puppies. Now Trump is going after bees.

Just weeks before leaving office, the Obama administration’s Fish and Wildlife Service placed the rusty patched bumblebee on the endangered species list—the first bee species to gain that status in the continental United States. Just weeks after taking office, the Trump administration temporarily reversed that decision. (See great pictures of this charismatic pollinator here.)

The official announcement of the delay cites a White House memo, released just after Trump’s inauguration, instructing federal agencies to freeze all new regulations that had been announced but not yet taken effect, for the purpose of “reviewing questions of fact, law, and policy they raise.” The Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the endangered species list, acted just in the nick of time in delaying the bumble bee’s endangered status—it was scheduled to make its debut on the list on February 10.

Rebecca Riley, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me the move may not be a mere procedural delay. “We don’t think this is just a freeze—it’s an opportunity for the administration to reconsider and perhaps revoke the rule entirely,” she said.

Why would the Trump administration want to reverse Endangered Species Act protections for this pollinating insect? After all, the rusty patched bumble bee has “experienced a swift and dramatic decline since the late 1990s,” with its abundance having “plummeted by 87 percent, leaving small, scattered populations in 13 states,” according to a December Fish and Wildlife Service notice. And it’s not just pretty to look at—the Fish and Wildlide Services notes that like other bees, rusty patched bumblebees “pollinate many plants, including economically important crops such as tomatoes, cranberries and peppers,” adding that bumblebees are “especially good pollinators; even plants that can self-pollinate produce more and bigger fruit when pollinated by bumble bees.”

The answer may lie in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s blunt discussion of pesticides as a threat to this bumblebee species. Like commercial honeybees, bumblebees face a variety of threats: exposure to pesticides, disease, climate change, and loss of forage. FWS cited all of those, noting that “no one single factor is likely responsible, but these threats working together have likely caused the decline.” But it didn’t mince any words about neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides widely used on US farm fields.

Neonics, as they’re known, are a highly contentious topic. They make up the globe’s most widely used insecticide class, with annual global sales of $2.6 billion, dominated by agrichemical giants Syngenta and Bayer (which is currently in the process of merging with Monsanto). They have been substantially implicated in the declining health of honeybees and other pollinators, birds, and waterborne animals. The European Union maintains a moratorium on most neonic use in farming, based on their threat to bees. The US Environmental Protection Agency is currently in the middle of a yearslong reassessment of the risk they pose to bees and other critters.

Here is what the Fish and Wildlife Service wrote about neonics in the context of the rusty patched bumblebee:

Neonicotinoids have been strongly implicated as the cause of the decline of bees, in general, and for rusty patched bumble bees, specifically. The introduction of neonicotinoid use and the precipitous decline of this bumble bee occurred during the same time. Neonicotinoids are of particular concern because they are systemic chemicals, meaning that the plant takes up the chemical and incorporates it throughout, including in leaf tissue, nectar and pollen. The use of neonicotinoids rapidly increased when suppliers began selling pre-treated seeds. The chemical remains in pre-treated seeds and is taken up by the developing plants and becomes present throughout the plant. Pollinators foraging on treated plants are exposed to the chemicals directly. This type of insecticide use marked a shift to using systemic insecticides for large-scale, preemptive treatment.

Note also that of the 13 states that still harbor scattered rusty patched bumblebee populations, four—Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Ohio—are in the US Corn Belt, where corn and soybean crops from neonic-treated seeds are common.

The NRDC’s Riley noted that as the EPA reassess neonics, it is obligated to consider the insecticides’ impact on endangered species. If the rusty patched bumblebee makes it onto the list, that would place an endangered species that’s clearly harmed by neonics directly into the region where the lucrative chemicals are most widely used—possibly forcing it to restrict neonic use in those areas. It’s worth noting that the man Trump chose to lead the EPA transition team, Myron Ebell, works for the industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, which runs a website, SafeChemicalPolicy.org, that exists to downplay the health and ecological impacts of chemicals. More on that here.

If science guides the Trump team, this fast-disappearing bumblebee will get its endangered status soon, Riley said. “We don’t think there’s any legitimate basis to roll this rule back,” she said. “The original decision to protect the bee was based on compressive scientific analysis.” The question is the degree to which science will guide the administration as it decides the fate of this once-flourishing insect.

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Now Trump’s Going After the Bumblebees

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Fake news is old news to climate scientists

by c7u433n Posted on December 26, 2016

Think fake news is a recent plague, borne of the presidential election? It’s not.

“The notion of ‘fake news’ is hardly new to climate scientists like myself,” Penn State climatologist Michael Mann told Grist. “We’ve known about it (and written about it) for years.”

Thanks to researchers like Mann — the originator of the famed “hockey stick” chart and a frequent target of fake news himself — the science behind climate change is settled. And yet there remains a vocal contingent of ideologues who refuse to accept the connection between carbon emissions and a warming planet. For example, Donald Trump and a good portion of his proposed cabinet. For years, right-wing news organizations like Breitbart, Infowars, the Daily Caller, and Climate Depot have fed their denial, publishing stories that misinterpret, misrepresent, or distort scientific findings — or just outright lie.

This kind of fake news has set progress back years, if not decades, Mann said. It’s a “crime against the planet,” he told Grist, and a “crime against humanity.”

All the news that’s unfit to print

There are many flavors of fake news. Some of these stories push the idea that, yes, the climate is changing, but it’s just a natural effect of changes in the sun’s activity and humans have nothing to do with it. This theory has been a favorite of deniers for three decades, and even though it’s been widely discredited, Breitbart reported it in again in 2014, under the headline, “Solar Activity Could Cause Global Warming, New Paper Says.” Of course, this runs contrary to actual science, but Breitbart never lets that stop them.

Other fake stories claim that carbon dioxide is good because it increases plant growth, as the ever-optimistic Breitbart declared again last year. But while it’s true that CO2 can be beneficial for plants, it doesn’t outweigh the fact that increasing concentrations in the atmosphere are toasting our home planet. Good for plants does not equal good for people.

Bogus climate stories also allege that a so-called “pause” in global warming undermines established climate science. Although climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that temperatures are rising and climate change is real, there has been debate over whether the rate of temperature increase slowed in the early 2000s — which climate deniers refer to as the “pause” or “hiatus.” Fake media outlets have seized on this debate and tried to spin it as proof that climate change isn’t real: Breitbart even claimed that Mann jumped on the pause bandwagon, deserted his scientific colleagues, and decided that there’s been no global warming since 1998. This was likely news to Mann himself.

There’s also the classic seasonal variety of stories alleging that cold, snowy weather disproves climate change. This reached a fever pitch in 2015, when Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe threw a snowball on the Senate floor. What Inhofe and his fellow deniers don’t get is that weather is not climate. Climate change is about long-term warming trends, not individual weather events, and so snow and climate change just aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, a warming climate could actually lead to an increase in snowfall in some places as melting sea ice in the Arctic alters jet streams.

And, of course, some deniers claim that this whole thing is a vast conspiracy perpetrated by scientists hungry for government research money. (They have never, apparently, seen what climate scientists drive.) Others — like our president-elect — say it’s a hoax created by China to crush U.S. manufacturing. Still other deniers insist that it’s a scheme cooked up by Al Gore to make himself rich — but, not to worry, they also tell us that Al Gore was sued by 30,000 scientists for his global warming fraud.

Unfortunately, conspiracy theories are hard to combat. Research shows that when presented with evidence that contradicts our beliefs, instead of reconsidering those beliefs, we humans tend to double-down on our preconceived notions. So if you already believe climate change is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American public or that the Earth hasn’t warmed in 17 years or that this is all a big Communist plot, it’s unlikely that evidence to the contrary will dissuade you.

Some deniers — perhaps those who really believe Al Gore was sued by 30,000 scientists — think climate science is a lie because of the misinformation they absorb every day on TV and through social media. But other deniers have a more base motivation: money. The most high-profile deniers — people like Inhofe and Climate Depot’s Marc Morano — are backed by the fossil fuel industry. Exxon alone spent over $30 million to fund climate-denying organizations between 1998 and 2014, and an investigation by Carbon Brief found that nine of the 10 most prolific authors of papers skeptical of climate change have ties to Exxon. The industrialist Koch brothers, too, have spent a fortune on climate denial, donating nearly $50 million between 1997 and 2008 to groups that work to undermine climate science.

The money, it seems, was well-spent. Right-wing media outlets spread those groups’ misleading messages far and wide. So while the rest of the world has long since accepted the reality of climate change and humanity’s role in causing it, in the U.S., not only are we still debating its existence, but a climate change denier is about to occupy the White House.

Reality strikes back

Soon, however, there may be a cost to spreading misinformation about climate scientists, if not about climate change itself. The D.C. Court of Appeals recently ruled that Mann can proceed with a defamation suit against two bloggers who called his work fraudulent — and worse.

“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science,” wrote Rand Simberg in a 2012 post on the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s blog, “except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in service of politicized science that could have dire consequences for the nation and planet.” The National Review’s Mark Steyn then quoted these comments in a post of his own, writing that Simberg “has a point” and calling Mann’s work “fraudulent.”

For this, the court has ruled that Mann can sue both bloggers as well as their institutions — but you wouldn’t know that from the headlines in the climate-denying press. Climate Depot reported, “Court dismisses Michael Mann defamation lawsuit against National Review.” This is a clear manipulation of the truth: While the court did dismiss Mann’s claims against one National Review editor, its ruling clearly says that Mann can proceed with his suit against Steyn and National Review itself. But if we learned anything from the election of 2016, it’s that truth no longer carries much weight.

In the court’s ruling, Judge Vanessa Ruiz wrote, “Tarnishing the personal integrity and reputation of a scientist important to one side may be a tactic to gain advantage in a no-holds-barred debate over global warming.” It’s not a new tactic, but tarnishing reputations and publishing lies has proved to be an effective one. As for how destructive, we’re soon to find out.

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Fake news is old news to climate scientists

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Seth Meyers devoted a full nine minutes to Trump and climate change.

by LynetteNettleto Posted on December 22, 2016

Penn State’s Michael Mann will be permitted to proceed with a lawsuit against writers from the conservative National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute after an appeals court ruling in his favor Thursday.

Mann, the scientist behind the “hockey stick” graph, has been a frequent target of climate change deniers’ harassment.

“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science,” wrote Rand Simberg in a 2012 Competitive Enterprise Institute blog post, “except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in service of politicized science that could have dire consequences for the nation and planet.”

The National Review’s Mark Steyn quoted these comments in a post of his own, writing that Simberg “has a point” and calling Mann’s work “fraudulent.”

Mann accused the two writers of libel, and now a three-judge panel for the D.C. Court of Appeals has ruled that he may proceed with his defamation suit against the authors and their institutions.

“Tarnishing the personal integrity and reputation of a scientist important to one side may be a tactic to gain advantage in a no-holds-barred debate over global warming,” wrote Judge Vanessa Ruiz in the court’s decision. Now it could be a costly one.

Original article: 

Seth Meyers devoted a full nine minutes to Trump and climate change.

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Trump Should Think Twice Before Flying Off the Handle About China

by FrederiBoatman Posted on November 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump—or someone speaking for him, anyway—says that he plans to label China a currency manipulator on “day one” of his presidency. Fair enough. China does intervene in currency markets to manipulate the value of the yuan. Unfortunately, Trump might not like what would happen if China decides to call his bluff:

The simple act of calling out China for manipulating the value of its currency to gain an export advantage shouldn’t roil Beijing to the point of retaliation, said Derek Scissors, a China economy expert at the American Enterprise Institute….But slapping retaliatory tariffs on Chinese goods would be more difficult because it would require congressional approval — a problem given that Republican leaders have been opposed to legislation to punish Chinese currency devaluation with duties, Scissors said.

There’s also the question of whether China is actually devaluing its currency. Most economists agree Beijing intervenes heavily in its currency markets, but in recent years has actually been propping up the value of the renminbi rather than lowering it.

Hmmm. Here is Brad Setser:

The monthly data suggest China has not bought foreign exchange in the market to keep the yuan from appreciating in the past 6 quarters or so, only sold. Its intervention in the market has worked to prevent exchange rate moves that would have the effect of widening China’s current account surplus over time. Every indicator of intervention that I track is telling the same story.

….If China stopped all management (“e.g. manipulation”) and let the yuan float against the dollar, China’s currency would drop. Possibly precipitously. China’s export machine would get a new boost. And rising exports would take pressure off China’s governments to make the difficult reforms needed to create a stronger domestic consumer base.

In other words, right now China’s currency is overvalued. If they weren’t manipulating it, it would most likely have fallen even more than it has—something along the lines of the chart on the right. This would mean Chinese imports get even cheaper, American exports get more expensive, and the trade deficit increases. This is exactly the opposite of what Trump wants.

Demonizing foreigners as the cause of all our problems is apparently a good campaign tactic. Dealing with the real world is a little different. Hopefully Trump will talk to a few actual economists and trade experts before he makes good on this particular promise.

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Trump Should Think Twice Before Flying Off the Handle About China

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