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Democrats send Trump a literal trash pile to protest government shutdown

by Kurtis0711 Posted on January 9, 2019

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The U.S. government has been partially shut down for 18 days and counting. Thousands of government employees are going without paychecks, the IRS is in chaos, and the national parks are filling up with human excrement and trash. President Trump says he’s prepared to play this shutdown game for months or years, but a couple of folks in Congress have had enough.

Representatives Jackie Speier and Jared Huffman, two Democrats from California, delivered a blue bin full of garbage collected from national parks to the White House on Tuesday afternoon. It was labeled “Trump Trash.”

The two representatives participated in a cleanup effort in national parks in the San Francisco area last weekend. “Let it never be said that I didn’t give anything to Donald Trump,” Huffman said in a live-streamed video in front of the White House, “because today I am bringing boxes of trash from that rainy Saturday in San Francisco to provide a reality check to the president.”

“There is no reason for this shutdown,” Speier said, thumping the top of a box of garbage for effect. Watch the video to catch Huffman joking that there might soon be enough trash to build that wall Trump wants so badly.

Trump is expected to deliver an address about immigration and the shutdown on Tuesday evening, but Huffman thinks that’s unnecessary. “We don’t need a nationally televised address from the White House to solve this problem tonight,” he said. “What we need is President Trump to wake up and smell the coffee cups and the diapers and burrito wrappers and the trash that is piling up.”

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Democrats send Trump a literal trash pile to protest government shutdown

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Facebook got into hot water for hiring this PR firm. The EPA was another one of its clients.

by shirleenhudson8 Posted on January 5, 2019

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

Newly obtained emails reveal that officials at the Environmental Protection Agency were misleading about the circumstances under which they hired a Republican opposition research firm known for its aggressiveness and willingness to sling mud. They also show the inner workings of a government press office hijacked by political operatives who adopted a combative attitude to the press, seeking to generate rosy headlines from sympathetic outlets while simultaneously lashing out at reporters and whistleblowers who criticized the agency, including by planting negative stories about them.

The EPA’s hiring of Definers Public Affairs stood out in the staid world of government contracting, where any appearance of explicit partisanship, of the kind the organization specializes in, is studiously avoided. Definers’ reputation as partisan and hyper-aggressive has recently helped embroil Facebook in scandal after it was revealed that despite trying to project an inoffensive and bipartisan image in Washington, the Silicon Valley giant had secretly hired the firm to disparage its Washington critics. The lines of attack included spreading supposed evidence showing that opposition to Facebook was fueled by liberal donor George Soros.

After Mother Jones revealed the existence of the EPA’s $120,000 Definers contract in December 2017, the agency’s press office fought back, claiming the contract had been awarded through the agency’s Office of Acquisition Management after a competitive bidding process based solely on cost considerations.“The contract award was handled through the EPA Office of Acquisition Management and was $87,000 cheaper than our previous media monitoring vendor while offering 24-7 news alerts once a story goes public,” then-EPA Spokesperson Jahan Wilcox told Mother Jones last year.

This is not completely true.

It is only one of the findings that appear in thousands of pages of internal EPA emails reviewed by Mother Jones that contradict the reasons Wilcox said the contract had been awarded. Moreover, the emails provide a detailed picture of how the Trump administration immediately and aggressively tried to realign the agency and route taxpayer dollars for partisan purposes. The campaign to undermine environmental enforcement and oversight at the EPA has not ended simply because Scott Pruitt and several of his staff have left the agency.

“One of the main reasons that we have a corps of career government contract personnel is to keep the political people away from giving the taxpayer money out to political cronies,” Charles Tiefer, a professor of contract law at the University of Baltimore, explains. “Politicizing the award of contracts by mugging the career people is the definition of corruption. What the political people made the career people do this time was more like a banana republic than the United States.”

For the Trump administration, politicizing government practices is the norm. But the EPA, an agency that some conservatives, including Scott Pruitt, believe should be eliminated, has long provided a special window into how far the administration is willing to go to assert overt partisanship and override recalcitrant career staff in ways that alter the daily work of government.

Definers was one key piece of that strategy inside the EPA. The Virginia-based PR firm has worked for political and corporate clients alike — Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee, the United Arab Emirates, and America Rising PAC — promising them its “full-service war room,” manned by Republican staffers who bring a unique approach of “intelligence gathering and opposition work.” In fulfilling that mission, Definers was caught filing Freedom of Information Act requests for the emails of EPA career staffers who spoke out publicly against Pruitt.

Definers is linked to a deeply interconnected network of conservative political groups run by Joe Pounder, a former campaign staffer for Rubio who has been described as “a master of opposition research,” and founded by Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign manager. It lists the same Virginia address as the America Rising PAC and America Rising Squared, a nonprofit that has sent staff to ambush and film environmental activists like Tom Steyer and Bill McKibben. On its website, America Rising Corp. — a separate entity from American Rising Squared, which doesn’t have to disclose donors — describes itself as “an opposition research and communications firm whose mission is to help its clients defeat Democrats.” The news aggregator Need to Know Network, which purports to “work with partners and organizations to provide content that is unique and original to our audience,” was founded by Pounder and other operatives and shares staff and offices with Pounder and Rhoades’ other political entities.

Obtained by the Sierra Club from a FOIA request, the EPA emails show that the press office was interested in Definers and working with NTK from the start, disregarding the cost and concerns about the uncompetitive bid raised by career staff. While one group sought a $120,000 contract, another posted flattering coverage of Pruitt.

A former employee of the EPA’s Office of General Counsel told Mother Jones that the “whole notion that the agency is using a group like Definers and [NTK] and manipulating the media coverage of its activities” in ways the public isn’t aware of could have violated Congress’ appropriations law prohibiting the EPA from using funds for propaganda and publicity purposes. “Somebody reads a story and thinks it’s a straight news story, when in fact the agency is putting out misleading information that’s very offensive and probably violates the Appropriations Act,” the former staffer said.

Jahan Wilcox, a senior strategic adviser in its press office, came from the world of political operatives, working for Rubio’s presidential campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee before being tapped by the EPA. Wilcox did not return a request for comment, nor did Definers or NTK. The EPA’s normal operations have been affected by the government shutdown and also did not return a request for comment.

Shortly after he was appointed to the EPA in March 2017, Wilcox made his first contact with NTK. “With the 100 Days of the Trump Administration coming up, we were curious if Need To Know (NTK) news would like to report on the accomplishments of Scott Pruitt and the EPA?” he emailed Jeff Bechdel, communications director for America Rising PAC and managing editor for NTK the month he arrived.

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NTK, working off a set of talking points about the EPA’s intended rollbacks provided by Wilcox “and other stories out there,” wrote the story: “How Scott Pruitt is Reshaping the EPA in the First 100 Days,” which the EPA in turn shared on social media as laudatory coverage of Pruitt. Wilcox forwarded the story to his colleagues, adding, “I know huge.”

From January to November 2017, NTK ran about two dozen positive stories about Pruitt. One included him on a list of “3 Possible Replacements for AG Sessions if he Returns to the Senate.” Others attacked critics, like in “Dem Senator Files Bogus Complaint Against EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt,” and touted wins, like in “Pebble Mine Settlement Huge Win for Jobs, Trump, and Pruitt.”

The EPA faithfully pushed the stories out on its social-media feeds and in its news clips. “Still waiting on us to tweet out this story from NTK,” Wilcox emailed the comms staff regarding May story “Pruitt Promises to Put States Back in the Driver’s Seat on Regulations.”

When Pounder approached the EPA on May 19, he identified himself in the memo he sent to Wilcox pitching Definers as a potential vendor as the president of America Rising Corp. Wilcox and other political appointees immediately warmed up to the idea of hiring Definers, and they pushed EPA career staff to hire them. Career EPA staff raised concerns about the contract, including that it had not gone through a competitive bidding process, but the political staff dismissed those concerns and pressured contracting officials throughout July and August 2017 to complete the deal.

As the months dragged on without Definers being hired, Wilcox and other political staff repeatedly questioned career employees about the holdup.When told that the effort to hire Definers had slowed because the company wasn’t even registered as a federal contractor and seemed reluctant to do so, Wilcox forwarded the explanation to Pounder. Shortly after, Pounder sent Wilcox a screenshot showing that the company was now officially registered.

According to these emails, the costs associated with the contract were hardly discussed because there was no competitive bidding process. Political appointee Liz Bowman, the EPA’s top spokesperson, complained at one point that George Hull, one of their career colleagues who was responsible for overseeing the contract, “has been dragging on for weeks and weeks.”

“I don’t care how this happens but we need to make this happen as quickly as possible,” Wilcox emailed Hull in June. Hull replied at another point: “We cannot move forward without going through a competitive bidding process,” including a presentation about the product. Wilcox at first dismissed the importance of a demonstration, saying: “I know the quality of their product.” Pounder eventually spoke with a career staffer about the service.

Tiefer acknowledges that while there might have been a legitimate need for a clipping service, Wilcox or any other political staff should not determine the contracting requirements. Career employees are required to vet potential contractors, and Tiefer says he doubts that, given Definers’ background in aggressive political opposition work, the company would have been chosen without interference from the political appointees.

“I have been teaching government contracting for over 20 years, and I have never seen a political operative firm getting a government contract,” Tiefer says.

Wilcox also was in touch with NTK throughout this period. He emailed Bechdel about an exchange with Eric Lipton of the New York Times, who had reached out to the EPA to confirm details for a story in October 2017. The EPA responded with neither a confirmation nor denial, instead linking to other outlets. Wilcox then framed the story for NTK. “You can report that the New York Times is calling USA Today ‘Fake News,’” he wrote. “Let me know if you are interested in this.” Bechdel passed on the pitch.

Finally, in early December, the EPA formally approved the Definers contract for $120,000. As soon as Mother Jones broke the story, the EPA faced mounting questions about the nature of the award. When Mother Jones sent questions to the EPA last year, Bowman immediately emailed Pruitt Chief of Staff Ryan Jackson and Enforcement Adviser Susan Bodine, claiming she knew “exactly where this leak came from.”

As Definers and the EPA faced calls for an Inspector General audit and for a Government Accountability Office investigation, the EPA and Definers decided it wasn’t worth the negative publicity. Five days after the report, and six months after Wilcox first advocated the contract, the EPA and Definers mutually agreed to cancel it. Definers said it would forgo contracts under negotiation with at least four other government agencies, including the Department of Education. By then, Pruitt’s trickle of controversies — chartered and first-class flights, a private phone booth, a 24/7 security detail, blurred lines between campaigning and government business — were already becoming regular headlines.

When the mounting investigations into whether he exploited his government position for other gain became too much of a liability, Pruitt resigned from the administration and was replaced by Andrew Wheeler in July. The EPA press shop saw high turnover as well. Wilcox resigned within days of Pruitt’s departure, and was most recently working for Wisconsin Republican Leah Vukmir’s unsuccessful campaign to defeat Senator Tammy Baldwin.

But others from Pruitt’s time remain, and even though the EPA’s media tactics may not be as aggressive as they once were, some of its earlier strategy still continues.

That was clear in late November, when the Trump administration released a thoroughly vetted National Climate Assessment, authored by 13 agencies including EPA scientists. Wheeler responded to the report with a dog whistle, arguing that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the Obama administration told the report’s authors to only look at the worst-case scenario of global warming. The echo chamber kicked in: By the end of the day, the Koch-funded Daily Caller had supposedly proven Wheeler’s point (in a story disputed by the report’s authors), and the EPA blasted it out as a “Fact Check” news alert.

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Facebook got into hot water for hiring this PR firm. The EPA was another one of its clients.

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Senate confirms 4 Trump nominees to top environmental posts in last-minute vote

by jaymeallsop Posted on January 4, 2019

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

The Senate voted to confirm at least four of President Donald Trump’s nominees to top environmental posts Thursday in last-minute votes just hours before the 115th Congress adjourned.

The confirmations, which received mixed reaction from environmentalists, fill long-vacant roles and save the White House from having to restart the nomination process with a newly sworn-in 116th Congress.

The nominees, among more than 60 administration officials confirmed in the 11th-hour voice vote, include those picked for executive posts at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Council on Environmental Quality.

At EPA, Alexandra Dunn was confirmed to lead the agency’s chemical office. Dunn previously served as the EPA administrator for Region 1 in Boston. She won praise overseeing the New England region as an “apolitical” bureaucrat who The Boston Globe described in an August profile as gaining “respect for protecting the environment.”

The position as assistant administrator of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention was left open since 2017, when former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt nominated Michael Dourson, whose consultancy InsideClimate News described in 2014 as the “one-stop science shop” favored by the chemical and tobacco industries. Dourson dropped out as Republican support for his nomination waned.

The other EPA nominee — the Senate’s final confirmation, just minutes before adjourning — faced more intense scrutiny from environmentalists and public health advocates. William Charles “Chad” McIntosh, Trump’s pick for the EPA’s Office of International and Tribal Affairs, came under fire in March when HuffPost reported on his 19-year career as the head of Ford Motor Co.’s environmental compliance and policy divisions.

During his tenure at Ford, degreasing chemicals spilled at a manufacturing plant in Livonia, Michigan, and broke down into vinyl chloride — linked to cancers of the liver, brain, lungs, lymph nodes and blood — and tainted the local groundwater.

“You can’t ignore these kinds of toxic chemicals in such an enormous quantity on your property, so whoever was in charge of the environmental state of affairs at this plant did not do his job,” Shawn Collins, an attorney representing homeowners whose groundwater was affected, told HuffPost in March. “That’s McIntosh.”

Among the most controversial nominees was Daniel Simmons, a former fossil fuel lobbyist who questioned climate science, to lead the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. After the White House nominated him to the post in June, Simmons backtracked on some of his past criticisms of renewable energy, insisting he “likes” zero-emissions energy sources. But, as Utility Dive reported, he previously served as the vice president of policy at the Institute for Energy Research, a coal- and oil-backed think tank, and for the American Energy Alliance, its lobbying arm. The latter organization called for the abolition of the office Simmons will now oversee as recently as 2015.

Among the least controversial was Mary Neumayr, Trump’s pick to lead the Council on Environmental Quality. The president initially nominated Kathleen Hartnett White, a die-hard climate denier and fossil fuel ideologue, to run the seldom-discussed White House agency, which oversees the National Environmental Policy Act. But Hartnett White flamed out during her confirmation hearing, delivering one of the most embarrassing performances of any nominee as she withered before senators’ questions about basic earth science.

Neumayr, by contrast, appeared to be a “more middle-of-the-road” pick, The Washington Post surmised in June, citing her “reputation as a pragmatist.” She spent much of her career working for the federal government, including eight years as the chief counsel on energy and environmental issues for the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. During her confirmation hearing, she told senators, “I agree the climate is changing and human activity has a role.”

But unnamed insiders close to Neumayr, who until Thursday served as the Council on Environmental Quality’s chief of staff, told the Post she’s a strong supporter of the president’s deregulatory agenda. ThinkProgress criticized Democrats on the Senate committee that vetted Neumayr’s nomination for going easy on her.

The power of the Council on Environmental Quality changes from administration to administration. But the White House released a 55-page infrastructure plan in February that calls on the council to “revise its regulations to streamline NEPA would reduce the time and costs associated with the NEPA process.” Neumayr would be central to overseeing that process.

EPA declined an interview request, sending an email stating: “Due to a lapse in appropriations, the EPA Press Office will only be responding to inquiries related to the government shut down or inquiries in the event of an environmental emergency imminently threatening the safety of human life or where necessary to protect certain property.”

Neither the White House nor Energy Department immediately responded to requests for comment.

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Senate confirms 4 Trump nominees to top environmental posts in last-minute vote

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Life after EPA: What is Scott Pruitt doing now?

by dla@kk2.pl Posted on December 28, 2018

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Ever wonder what happens to people when they get booted from President Trump’s graces? (They don’t all wind up with a Saturday Night Live trip down memory lane.)

It’s been almost six months since Scott Pruitt was cut loose as head of the EPA, and for the most part he’s been keeping out of the spotlight. According to sources, Pruitt is using his industry connections to launch a private consulting business — you know, promoting coal exports and consorting with coal barons, the way a former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency would.

However, Pruitt’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, says these new career pursuits will stop short of violating an official five-year ban on lobbying the EPA. After a mess of ethics violations and legal scandals, Pruitt is proceeding with caution. Mitchell says: “He has discussed multiple opportunities with me and has been quite careful not to do anything that is even close to the line.”

Although Pruitt’s fall from grace hasn’t been memorialized on SNL, he did become the butt of a few jokes by someone else — his former bestie, Donald Trump.

Evidently, Trump has congratulated Andrew Wheeler, Pruitt’s replacement, several times for not trying to buy used mattress from Trump Hotel. Yep. Pruitt did that. But hey, there’s nothing wrong with a little reuse, reduce, recycle — it may turn out to be one of Pruitt’s better moves for the environment.

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Life after EPA: What is Scott Pruitt doing now?

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Here’s how the government shutdown hurts disaster recovery

by EDYIrma680989308 Posted on December 28, 2018

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We don’t yet know if 2019 will be a letdown, but it will likely start with a shutdown.

Seven days in, the budget gridlock between Congress and the President over federal funding for his proposed border wall remains at a standstill. The House and Senate adjourned Thursday without a budget deal, meaning the partial government shutdown, which affects about a quarter of the federal government, will continue until at least Monday.

For President Trump, that means no Mar-A-Lago trip for New Year’s. For around 800,000 federal workers, that’s no paycheck for the foreseeable future.

The shutdown caps off a year that’s been marked by several climate-related disasters, from Hurricanes Michael and Florence, which pummelled states like Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, to California’s deadly wildfires. Among the Americans affected by the partial shutdown are disaster survivors — and the federal workers and lawmakers working to help them recover.

The failure to pass a federal spending bill also has repercussions for those who have survived disasters and intimate partner violence, as the Violence Against Women Act lapsed during the shutdown. (Studies show that there are upticks in domestic and gender-based violence after super storms.)

Because of the current shutdown, The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Flood insurance Program has stopped issuing new flood insurance policies and will not renew existing policies that lapse. “FEMA’s decision will cause upheaval for home buyers and sellers across the country,” Louisiana Senator John Kennedy said in a statement.

As long as the shutdown drags on, federal employees will be furloughed or required to work without pay. FEMA officials have said that staff will stay on the job, much to the relief of residents in hurricane and wildfire-affected areas.

Folks over at the National Weather Service are also still on the job after an exhausting year. “We’ll be here every night, in bad weather or not,” said Jonathan Blaes, acting meteorologist-in-charge at the Weather Service in Raleigh, in an interview with CBS News. “We’ve been tremendously busy weather wise here, to be honest with you, with multiple hurricanes, floods and now a winter storm. So, I know our staff is tired. And, the holidays are a little harder because they’re away from their families.”

Both sides of the aisle have been using the interruption in disaster relief to shutdown-shame and pressure the opposition. Take Representative Austin Scott of Georgia, a Republican, who tweeted out this burn just before the shutdown (after the House voted to include $5 billion for Trump’s border wall to the budget, forcing another, ultimately unsuccessful, Senate vote).

“What the mainstream media fails to report is that in addition to fulfilling Trump’s request on border security $, the House was also able to secure in the [short-term continuing resolution] $8B in disaster assistance for GA, FL, AL, CA & the Carolinas,” he tweeted.

Representative Scott — who has a record of denying climate change — added in a statement that his constituency needs help: “Georgia families, as well as families in Florida, Alabama, the Carolinas and California, desperately need federal assistance to recover from catastrophic weather events this year.”

If the House-proposed version of the budget had passed, $1.1 billion of the $8 billion allocated for disaster assistance would have gone toward paying for crops lost during hurricanes. Austin says that money is urgently needed before farmers are scheduled to plant crops in 2019.

But just like the larger budget, the allocation of disaster relief is a contentious.. Democratic Representative Sanford Bishop — also from Georgia — said in a statement that the $8 million set aside for impacted rural communities would merely be “token disaster relief.” Instead he asked for $150 million in funding for rural areas hit by disasters. He also called for $600 million for nutrition assistance for Puerto Rico (currently not included in the budget at all) and $480 million instead of the allocated $200 million for the Emergency Forest Restoration Program.

This isn’t the first time this year that a government shutdown has hampered negotiations over disaster relief. It’s the third government shutdown of 2018. (That hasn’t happened since 1977 when President Jimmy Carter was in office.) 2018 began with an immigration-fueled three-day shutdown in January, followed by a brief funding gap in February. Hurricanes Florence and Michael hadn’t yet hit states in the south and southeast, but other communities were still reeling from Harvey, Irma, and Maria.

“The delay in passing a budget with a significant disaster package has been devastating for people in Houston,” wrote Michelle Tremillo, executive director of the Texas Organizing Project, in an op-ed for The Hill early this year.

President Trump eventually signed a spending bill in mid-February allocating nearly $90 billion in disaster relief and ending that government shutdown. Some politicians said it still wasn’t enough — Governor Ricardo Rosselló of Puerto Rico said the island alone required $94 billion for recovery from Hurricane Maria.

As to when we may have an end to this shutdown, the House and Senate will return next week to continue negotiations. But it’s possible a solution will get punted to the next session of Congress, slated to begin January 3, 2019, when Democrats will assume the House majority.

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Here’s how the government shutdown hurts disaster recovery

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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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Someone just paid $25,000 to name a worm-like amphibian after Donald Trump

by AnnettOlmstead Posted on December 18, 2018

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Donald Trump’s name is attached to a lot of things — Trump Towers, Trump University, The Trump Foundation (oops nevermind) — and now, Dermophis donaldtrumpi — a four-inch-long, worm-like amphibian from Panama.

Dermophis donaldtrumpi isn’t the first species to get a presidential naming treatment. President Obama has an watery namesake as well — he earned his by expanding a marine protected area around the Northwestern Hawaiian islands. And President Trump had a species of yellowish-”haired” moth named after him (Neopalpa donaldtrumpi) in 2017. But this newest addition to the Trump family name does not derive not from its physical similarity to the president. Rather, the species’ tendency to bury its head (and body) in the sand drew parallels to Trump’s persistent denial of climate change.

The naming rights for the species were auctioned off to raise money for Rainforest Trust. Dermophis donaldtrumpi is a caecilian, a word derived from the Latin for “blind.” The winning bidder, Aidan Bell, is the head of a sustainable building materials company called EnviroBuild, and wound up spending $25,000 to make the environmental and political jab. .

In a post on EnviroBuild’s blog, Bell wrote: “The dermophis genus grows an extra layer of skin which their young use their teeth to peel off and eat, a behavior known as dermatrophy. As a method of ensuring their children survive in life, Donald Trump prefers granting them high roles in the Oval Office.”

Ooh scientific burn.

But Dermophis donaldtrumpi may not be with us for much longer. he caecilian has a thin skin (sound like anyone we know?) , and like other amphibians, is especially vulnerable to the impacts of global warming. Will President Trump think and act any differently, knowing that his namesake is on the line?

Hey, a herpetologist can dream, right?

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Someone just paid $25,000 to name a worm-like amphibian after Donald Trump

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Team Trump promoted coal at the U.N. climate talks. Young activists busted it up.

by RussellCoverdal Posted on December 10, 2018

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KATOWICE, POLAND – In the middle of the Trump administration’s event to promote fossil fuels at the United Nations climate conference on Monday, the audience erupted into laughter. The laughter was the beginning of a protest, organized by a group of youth and indigenous organizations from the United States, a raucous response to yet another attempt by the Trump administration to tout fossil-fuels.

“Keep it in the ground!” protestors shouted, crowding the stage and blocking the panel — led by Wells Griffith, President Trump’s energy adviser — from view.

“My government has betrayed me,” said Vic Barrett, a 19-year-old protestor who is also one of the plaintiffs in the landmark climate lawsuit against the federal government. “They are perpetuating the global climate crisis.”

While Griffith and the rest of the men on the panel smirked and shifted awkwardly, a succession of young activists gave speeches, then marched out of the room, shouting “Shame on you.”

This was one of numerous protests launched by young activists over the past week. Along with the official delegations from almost 200 countries, young people from all around the globe have converged on Katowice to share strategies and plans for action.

“The reason that we’re out here is to encourage other youth across the world to take action and really care,” said Michael Charles, a member of the Diné tribe and the Navajo Nation.

Their lobbying, cajoling, and colorful, enthusiastic protests are in stark contrast to the painfully slow process of international negotiation. In many rooms of the Katowice’s gigantic Spodek conference center, suited delegates are grappling over hundreds of sometimes minute disagreements in the text of the new Paris “rulebook.”

These heads of state, diplomats, and dignitaries are trying to hash out their differences over what has been called “Paris 2.0.” The rulebook that they develop will guide how governments implement the landmark Paris agreement. The problem is, they rarely agree. They’re divided on questions of who will pay for what and how to measure and track emissions reductions. And they are still trying to address the terrifying gap between rapidly increasing emissions and slowly advancing efforts to curb them.

But the young attendees at COP 24 keep pushing forward and learning from one another. “I come from a country that does not really acknowledge climate change,” a medical student from Egypt told Grist. “It’s not a priority for us. So it’s a very unique experience to see all the negotiations, all the youth activists, and learn about the efforts they are doing in their home countries.”

In Sweden, a teenager named Greta Thunberg is going on strike from school every Friday. In Australia, thousands of students are protesting government inaction on climate change and the construction of a new coal mine in central Queensland.

Here in Katowice, young people have to walk a fine line between either supporting or disrupting the delegations of their home country. Some activists are at COP24 to lobby negotiators on specific policies, like including human rights in the agreement and providing increased adaptation funding for developing countries.

But they’re aware government negotiators may not respond to their lobbying. “They do like to talk to us, and they are very open — but we don’t actually know how much they take our voices into consideration,” said João Henrique Alves Cerqueira, a young activist from Brazil.

Even when government negotiators are open and available, they are restrained by political pressures. “There’s an acknowledgement that what they do is not national policy,” said Eilidh Robb of U.K. Youth Climate Coalition, referring to negotiators from the U.K. “And they negotiate currently in the EU block – so to an extent we’re limited in what we can push, because they’re limited by an entire continent of voices and opinions.”

When working with delegations fails or falls short, young people turn to protest. Loudly. Almost every day in the hallways of Spodek, amid suited politicians and dignitaries, activists sing and chant their way to a better future. Last week, a group of young people presented the People’s Demands for Climate Justice, calling for an end to fossil-fuel extraction and an increase in financial support for developing countries. Other protests have pointed to the health consequences of climate change and criticized the role of big corporations in negotiations.

Poland’s security forces have cracked down on demonstrations, setting special rules banning spontaneous protests during the conference. Activism within the conference center is tightly controlled — some groups were told that even taking a photo with matching shirts was in violation of policy.

On Saturday, when thousands of conference attendees and environmentalists from across Poland and the rest of the continent staged a climate march in Katowice, they were met by heavily armed police officers in full riot gear. “What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!” marchers chanted, as the officers paced the sidelines.

Meanwhile, inside the conference center, negotiators fought over whether to  “welcome” or “note” the recent, devastating IPCC report. When the U.S. and Russia (joined by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) refused to “welcome” the report, the text was dropped entirely.

It felt like two different conferences — one old and one new, a generation with power and a generation struggling to take any action possible. “Wake up! Wake up!” marchers shouted, waving flags and banners. “It’s time to save our home.”

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Team Trump promoted coal at the U.N. climate talks. Young activists busted it up.

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What the Trump administration got wrong on its own climate report (pretty much everything)

by KirkGroomawqml Posted on November 30, 2018

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

The federal government’s new National Climate Assessment is the latest scientific report to confirm the devastating effects of climate change: Extreme hot weather is getting more common, wildfires are becoming more devastating, rising sea levels are forcing people from their homes, and so forth. “Climate change is transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us,” the report says. And without rapid action to reduce carbon emissions, these problems are going to get worse. A lot worse.

The Trump administration has responded to the climate crisis by rolling back regulations and policies intended to reduce carbon emissions — exactly the opposite of what experts say is required to slow global warming. So it was no surprise when the Trump administration tried to bury the inconvenient report by releasing it on the afternoon of Black Friday. It didn’t work, though.

On Monday, when asked about the report’s conclusion that climate change will wreak havoc on the U.S. economy, President Trump said, “I don’t believe it.” Tuesday, the White House doubled down on its climate denial, with Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders questioning the methodology and conclusions of the climate report and saying it was “not based on facts.” That phrase is a fitting description for the talking points offered up by the White House. With one exception, none of these points is factually accurate:

Climate change won’t affect the economy. The president may not “believe” it, but economists do. The report released a few days ago says that if climate change is left unchecked, “annual losses in some sectors are estimated to grow to hundreds of billions of dollars per year by the end of the century.”

It’s worth noting that the 1,656-page report was issued by Trump’s own government. It is backed by NASA, NOAA, the Pentagon, and 10 other federal scientific agencies. It represents decades of work by more than 300 authors.

Trump is leading on clean air and water. The president and his spokespeople have repeatedly tried to divert attention from climate change by claiming that what really matters is clean air and water. “The president is certainly leading on what matters most in this process, and that’s on having clean air, clean water. In fact, the United States continues to be a leader on that front,” Sanders said at the White House press conference. In case anyone missed it, she said it three times.

First off, the president is not leading on clean air and water. In fact, he has been working steadily to overturn or relax rules and programs designed to protect air and water, everything from the Clean Power Plan to fuel efficiency standards. The only reason America’s air and water are relatively clean today is because of policies and legislation adopted before Trump took office. The level of particulate matter in the air actually increased last year, after a long period of steady decline.

More important, the continued burning of fossil fuels is expected to make both the air and the water more polluted. The National Climate Assessment estimates with “high confidence” that global warming will increase ozone levels across the nation’s central region, and that it will lead to increased smoke from wildfires.

What the Trump administration fails to understand is that climate change is air pollution. Human activities are polluting the air with heat-trapping gases that are raising the planet’s temperature to feverish levels. Reducing climate change is simply a matter of reducing the air pollutants that are causing it.

America’s air is the cleanest ever. In an interview with the Washington Post on Monday, Trump asserted that the nation’s air and water is “right now at a record clean.” Um, no.

The United States has relatively clean air, but not the world’s best. Canada, Australia, and four other countries have cleaner air by at least one metric. And thanks to wildfires exacerbated by climate change, Northern California literally had the world’s worst air quality earlier this month, dirtier even than the air above smoggy mega-cities in China and India.

The new report relies on extreme climate models, not facts. At the press conference, Sanders claimed that the latest climate assessment “is based on the most extreme model scenario, which contradicts long-established trends … It’s not data-driven.”

Not true, say authors of the report. In a Twitter thread, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University said Sanders actually made two false statements, because Hayhoe and other authors of the report “considered many scenarios” including ones in which carbon emissions would be very low, and the observed increase in carbon emissions over the past 10 to 15 years has been consistent with the scenarios modeled in the report.

The report is based on decades of federal data, not just models — data that show carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures rising in tandem. As Axios reported last week, the Earth has been warmer than average for 406 months in a row: “This means that no one under the age of 32 has ever experienced a cooler-than-average month on this planet.” That’s an entire generation.

Climate modeling is difficult and imprecise. As Sanders said at the press conference, “Modeling the climate is an extremely complicated science that is never exact.” OK, score one true statement for Sarah.

What Sanders didn’t say, though, is that computer models have done a good job of predicting what has already happened to the climate, and they are constantly improving. Also, climate models are more likely to underestimate than overestimate the amount of long-term future change.

Obama’s science adviser agrees with Trump. One of Sanders’ talking points seemed to suggest that skepticism about the climate report was bipartisan: “Even Obama’s undersecretary for science didn’t believe the radical conclusions of the report that was released.” Sanders neglected to mention a few key facts about Steven E. Koonin, the former undersecretary who has frequently argued that climate science is not “settled.”

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Koonin is a theoretical physicist, not a climate scientist. During the Obama administration, he served within the Energy Department for only 18 months, with limited budget authority and responsibilities. Sanders could just as easily have called Koonin “the former chief scientist for the multinational oil and gas company BP,” a position he held for five years. Or she could have called Koonin “the former Obama official that Trump’s EPA administrator wanted to use special authority to hire.” Either of those identifications would have made it clear that Koonin has far more in common with Trump than Obama.

The fact that one of Obama’s high-level employees doesn’t agree with the latest climate report is meaningless. But it’s a classic climate-denier strategy: Lean heavily on the few scientists who don’t agree with the mainstream consensus on climate change, and hope that the public will be fooled into thinking that scientists are evenly divided on the issue.

Based on facts. During its live broadcast of the press conference, CNN took the unusual step of displaying a “Facts First” sidebar next to Sanders. As the press secretary criticized the report, CNN posted a graphic with bullet points about the report: “Climate Change report involved 300 scientists, 13 federal agencies; Co-Author: Not paid for report; Open for review & transparency before publishing.”

It almost seemed as though CNN was trying to “inoculate” its viewers against what Sanders might say, a communications strategy that may be more effective than debunking false statements that have already been made. If that’s true, perhaps it would be better for me to focus on what the Trump administration isn’t talking about, than on the climate claptrap that came out of the White House over the past few days.

Here’s what Trump and Sanders are mum on: the other climate report published by the federal government on Black Friday. In that report, the Interior Department and the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that the extraction and burning of fossil fuels produced on federal lands, including offshore areas, was responsible for about one-fourth of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 to 2014. The Trump administration wants to lease even more public land to drillers, at bargain-basement prices, which will make global warming worse. That’s not just a bad deal for taxpayers; it’s a bad deal for everyone on Earth.

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What the Trump administration got wrong on its own climate report (pretty much everything)

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As Trump questions warming, climate report warns of dire risks to U.S.

by JeseniaDelaney Posted on November 24, 2018

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

The United States already warmed on average 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the past century and will warm at least 3 more degrees by 2100 unless fossil fuel use is dramatically curtailed, scientists from more than a dozen federal agencies concluded in their latest in-depth assessment.

The 13-agency consensus, authored by more than 300 researchers, found in the second volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment makes it clear the world is barreling toward catastrophic — perhaps irreversible — climate change. The report concluded that warming “could increase by 9°F (5°C) or more by the end of this century” without significant emissions reductions.

“Observations of global average temperature provide clear and compelling evidence the global average temperature is much higher and is rising more rapidly than anything modern civilization has experienced,” said David Easterling, chief of the scientific services division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina. “This warming trend can only be explained by human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”

It’s the sort of staggering reality the Trump administration seems eager to minimize. Ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump antagonized climate scientists by tweeting, once again, that he believes cold weather disproves long-term trends of a warming climate.

“Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS – Whatever happened to Global Warming?” he posted Wednesday on Twitter.

That the White House opted to release the long-awaited update on climate change ― which Congress mandates the administration provide every four years — on Black Friday, a popular shopping holiday the day after the Thanksgiving holiday, indicates it wanted fewer people to see the news about the findings. Monica Allen, a spokeswoman for NOAA, repeatedly pushed back against questions about when the White House decided to move up the release of the report.

“The decision was made in the last week or so,” she said. “Please, I ask you to focus on the content of the report. The substance.”

The report adds to an ever-growing, all-but-irrefutable body of scientific research that shows climate change is real and driven by human carbon emissions ― a reality that President Donald Trump and his team refuse to accept as they pursue a fossil fuel-focused, “energy dominance” agenda.

Last year, the U.S. Global Change Research Program released a special report ― the first volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment ― that found Earth has entered the warmest period “in the history of modern civilization,” with global average air temperatures having increased by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 115 years. And in October, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading United Nations consortium of researchers studying human-caused climate change, issued a report warning world governments must cut global emissions in half over the next 12 years to avoid warming of 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit, beyond which climate change is forecast to cause a cataclysmic $54 trillion in damages.

A series of devastating natural disasters, worsened by rising temperatures, made those findings tangible. In October, Typhoon Yutu, the most powerful storm all year, struck the Northern Mariana Islands, plunging the U.S. territory into chaos just a year after Hurricane Maria left thousands dead in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. California, meanwhile, is suffering its deadliest and most destructive wildfire on record during what was once the state’s rainy season.

Last year was the United States’ second-hottest in history, and the costliest in terms of climate-related disasters, with a record $306 billion in damages. Sixteen of the last 17 years have been the warmest on record globally.

In January, the Trump administration unveiled a proposal to open nearly all U.S. waters to oil and gas development. It has since worked to roll back safeguards adopted after the catastrophic 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In October, the Department of the Interior approved the development of the first oil production facility in Arctic waters off Alaska, but the company behind the project has since had to extend its construction timeline due to dwindling sea ice brought on by Arctic warming, as NPR reported.

The latest findings are likely to bolster the growing protests and legal battles over climate change. Over the past two weeks, activists in the United States and United Kingdom staged major demonstrations. In Washington, youth activists with the climate justice group Sunrise Movement stormed Democratic leaders’ offices demanding support for the so-called Green New Deal, the only policy to emerge in the American political mainstream that comes close to the scale of economic change needed to make a serious dent in national emissions. British activists stopped traffic this week as part of the so-called Extinction Rebellion.

The assessment could have weight in some critical court cases. The Supreme Court is considering a landmark suit brought by 21 plaintiffs between the ages of 11 and 22, who accuse the federal government of violating their civil rights to a safe climate by pursuing fossil fuel-focused energy policies. And various states and cities are suing big oil companies over climate damages, a number that could grow since Democrats scored victories in a number of attorney general seats in the midterm elections.

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As Trump questions warming, climate report warns of dire risks to U.S.

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