EPA Science Under Scrutiny by Trump Political Staff
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> Longtime employees at three of the agencies — including some career environmental regulators who conceded that they remained worried about what President Trump might do on policy matters — said such orders were not much different from those delivered by the Obama administration as it shifted policies from the departing White House of George W. Bush. They called reactions to the agency memos overblown.
> “I’ve lived through many transitions, and I don’t think this is a story,” said a senior E.P.A. career official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media on the matter. “I don’t think it’s fair to call it a gag order. This is standard practice. And the move with regard to the grants, when a new administration comes in, you run things by them before you update the website.”
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/us/politics/some-agenc...
So I think it's plausible that they are mostly just trying to slow the federal machine down a lot, to make it easier for them, as understaffed newbies, to understand and manage.
That said, demanding that the government collect, use, and freely communicate accurate scientific knowledge seems idempotent: you will always get a positive result from doing it.
http://www.cleanairwatch.org/2016/12/scott-pruitt-beware-les...
He also pointed out that Louis Cordia, who was behind the Burford EPA purges, is now working at the Heritate Foundation and advising the Trump administration.
Also here is a perspective from an anonymous EPA staffer:
So I work at the EPA and yeah it’s as bad as you are hearing:
The entire agency is under lockdown, the website, facebook, twitter, you name it is static and can’t be updated. All reports, findings, permits and studies are frozen and not to be released. No presentations or meetings with outside groups are to be scheduled.
Any Press contacting us are to be directed to the Press Office which is also silenced and will give no response.
All grants and contracts are frozen from the contractors working on Superfund sites to grad school students working on their thesis.
We are still doing our work, writing reports, doing cancer modeling for pesticides hoping that this is temporary and we will be able to serve the public soon. But many of us are worried about an ideologically-fueled purging and if you use any federal data I advise you gather what you can now.
We have been told the website is being reworked to reflect the new administration’s policy.
Feel free to copy and paste, you all pay for the government and you should know what’s going on. I am posting this as a fellow citizen and not in any sort of official capacity.
Even if you choose to disbelieve this, the actionable point right now is "if you use any federal data I advise you gather what you can now."
Sleeping while out beds are burning indeed.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/190010/concern-global-warming-eig...
Once it's public, people vote for a blanket solution or government officials (by no means environment experts) decide what to do. Private companies should be free to innovate and try multiple different solutions where the best one sticks.
As for the article at hand, all I can offer is this" Trump's blatant distrust for climate change is just mind boggling. What exactly is he afraid that'll happen? [1] Why all of the resistance? These aren't rhetorical questions. I'm genuinely curious.
This just makes it worse because I've seen so many people defending Trump, or adopting a "what's the worst that could happen?" attitude because they are used to a president who, for 7 years, 10 months and 2 weeks didn't have an ounce of power in congress.
It was a huge, overarching win granting Republicans unprecedented power. Much like Obama's 2009 win which gave Democrats a ton of power.
There's nothing "single person" about Trump's victory. The fact of the matter is that Republicans won more States, Representatives, and Senators in local elections across the country. So yeah, the Democracy is working fine, as long as you sorta ignore the electoral college stuff.
Believe it or not, that's what people "wanted". The Democrats IMO were just too lazy with the get-out-to-vote attempts and support Clinton. The Republicans wanted victory more, and managed to pull it off.
Trump was voted in by coal miners. Coal Miners whose jobs have been slipping away and towns devastated by the "Heroin Epidemic"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/white-death...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-h...
Continuing to ignore rural America will only make them more angry and continue to vote in assholes like Trump. Clinton lost precisely in the rural states that mattered: Pennsylvania, West Virginia, etc. etc.
As long as liberal Americans are unable to understand that coal miners are literally losing their jobs and dying in their hometowns, then the discussion will not move forward.
The numbers aren't pretty for rural America. It's a legitimate problem, and those citizens are blaming the EPA.
Clinton lost Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Michigan, the entire damn south (aside from New Mexico), etc. etc.
If Clinton had slightly better showing with manufacturing-based southerners or the energy sector, she would have won.
Clinton lost because she wasn't able to get out her base in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
If Trump lost Texas you wouldn't be talking about how he failed to reach voters in Washington.
1. I completely understand that coal miners are literally losing their jobs.
2. I understand that Trump was voted in by coal miners.
3. I didn't mention Clinton, like, at all.
In any case, Clinton's failure to rally rural America to her side cost her the election. She tried of course. In any case, you gotta offer something to the Coal Miners.
They're not stupid ya know. They know that pro-environmental policy is hurting their jobs and they voted somebody in to push back against the EPA. Seems like a legit strategy to me.
Yes, tens and tens of millions of Americans work in coal mines. No.
But the social issues do merit addressing
Yeah, but that's not a winning message to the Coal Miners. Trump's fake promises won them over.
Judging from the research, the approach for sequestering is quite expensive. In addition, pumping CO2 into subsurface layers of the earth only increases the risks of leaks.
Basically, this is probably where the industry is headed and some states are probably going to go full board with this approach while others will pursue renewables.
I will say, despite the issues I've seen regarding climate change denial - it is promising to hear the use of "clean coal" tech, as much as I cringe hearing it. Seems to imply that there is at least some level of concern for the environment - rather than none at all.
We've got over 150 years of solid temperature measurements. We can reach into historical measurements of varying accuracy as well (such as that Japanese ritual where they measured an ice bridge for the past 600 years for religious reasons).
The average temperature of the world has rose by approximately 1.5 degrees Celsius since the 1850s. Do you agree or disagree with this fact?
Water lines are not necessarily indicative and we didn't have satellite pictures or detailed measurements 100 years ago but you can definitely see the sea rise affecting some areas in the world, like islands in the Pacific Ocean or the extensions of salt water marshes. In satellite pictures is posible to appreciate the change the shape of the shores in some points of the globe, if you have a good resolution capture, comparing pictures of just a decade ago.
Here's the kicker. You don't even need to see pictures. We have constant detailed measurements of sea levels (better than water lines) taken all around the planet going back to several decades.
If you want to check them, NASA has a great page for it. http://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/ (and yes, they have pictures too).
And if you think NASA is somehow biased, you can check pretty much any other environmental agency or space agency in the world.
We rather give coal-miners theirs old jobs back rather than protect the future generations.
We've submitted a patch and are waiting for enough reviewers to approve: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
Some other systems: http://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_HOR.htm http://www.elections.org.nz/voting-system/mmp-voting-system
That's one of the most perniciously false equivalence I've seen in a while, and that's saying something. The US has elected congressmen, elected senators, elected governors and an elected president. Even the top two presidential candidates are chosen from a wide field in primary elections. Portraying that as a stark choice between only two options and saying it's practically the same as China and North Korea, which provide no choice whatsoever, is really pretty disgusting.
Rest of world have multi-party governments. Many more choices.
So much for an example that puts people on defensive instead of raising awareness of how distorted the electoral system in USA is.
If anything, the problem was too many candidates, combined with a first-past-the-post system. The majority of primary voters disliked Trump, but were split between several preferred candidates (who I group because they were far more similar to each other than to Trump). Trump got a certain segment of the vote all to himself.
Look at USA, it's duopolistic due to the system set up. There's only republicans and democrats.
What's funny is that China (Don't know about NK) brags that anyone can run for government but people only vote for one party. Just like USA brags that anyone can run for government but it ends up becoming republican/democrat.
Do you see the monopolistic/duopolistic point I was making?
I can't comment on China, NK.
The average German has less say in EU politics than the average Luxembourger.
Similarly, the average Californian has less say in US politics than the average Wyomingite.
Quite frankly it's asinine that my town has more population and less representation than 6 states.
Why don't liberal states push for a smaller federal government, and more power for their own governments? Mitt Romney introduced a law to that became a blueprint for Obamacare, when he was governor of Massachusetts..if Trump were to abolish Obamacare, why couldn't states introduce their own programs? Similarly, if Trump appoints a conservative who wants Roe v Wade overturned, states that want to maintain abortion could do so, right? States that value clean water could enact regulations protecting their water supplies, while those that value economic growth sacrifice the health of their residents a little. And citizens could vote with their feet. If a state like Kansas ended up gutting its government by cutting taxes (as it has), surely the problem would self-correct at some point, and set an example for other states?
Pollution is often a cross-border problem, but why couldn't states sue each other to enforce pollution controls? Why couldn't liberal states impose taxes and fund their own EPAs (perhaps with bigger budgets, since federal taxes would be cut), or do interstate compacts to fund agencies for basic science that would be too expensive to fund alone?
The constitution and Bill of Rights would still be in force, but it seems like the federal government's actions seem to lead to great unhappiness, from both sides, when the other party is in power. Why is there such opposition to cutting the power of the federal government, from liberal Americans?
I'm not an American, but I do follow US politics somewhat closely, and I'm genuinely perplexed by this.
> Similarly, if Trump appoints a conservative who wants Roe v Wade overturned, states that want to maintain abortion could do so, right?
Yeah, but a lot of people aren't content with that. Some people want to force it to be legal everywhere, even in states that wouldn't otherwise want it.
It absolutely panned out. Smaller states joined a union they would not otherwise have joined. To change the system requires 3/4ths of the states to sign on, too, so it's not going to change.
All the states admitted to the union with one notable exception were territories controlled by the United States, and all were dominated by American citizens. These populations had nowhere else to go. Do you honestly think that Idaho was going to join Canada, or strike out on its own? Of course not.
The idea that people would have a primary allegiance to their state absolutely did not pan out. No one puts South Dakotan at the center of their identity in 2017, but in the late 18th century they certainly did. For evidence look at how many signers and organizers of the revolution failed to bother to show up to the constitutional convention. There was no United States or national identity at the time. At best, it was like claiming to be a citizen of the European Union today.
They could have created a different union, or struck out on their own. The idea they had no other options is, well, ahistorical.
>There was no United States or national identity at the time. At best, it was like claiming to be a citizen of the European Union today.
Which bolsters whose point, yours or mine?
Since 2000, it's clear that voter majorities have been underrepresented in presidential elections. And as we claim to be the world's largest democracy, we have been, in fact, the world's largest republic.
She has, in many respects, just as many problems as Trump. If the US used the popular vote, we would just be screwed in a different manner.
This is not a "patchable" problem with some implementation detail. It's a fundamental problem with trying to force hundreds of millions of people with dozens of vastly different cultures to live under the same overburdened legal and regulatory system.
Arguably the US 2 party system is still better than the Yugoslav 1. And while the multiparty system common in much of EU is crazy inefficient, it sure makes This Current Problem high unlikely.
Furthermore, the Constitution can change. That's why there's amendments; quite a few have already gone through, in fact.
The other colonies begrudgingly added this, opting for changes to the wording of the clause to enshrine slavery into the constitution, and did everything they could to violate their constitution until South Carolina wrote them back saying it is best if South Carolina exited.
I think what would improve US elections is rather this:
Publish results in real time. Most people don't seem to realize consequence of not voting . If results comes in real time then people who are lazy might get extra prode. If 95% of the population votes, there is less likelyhood of nasty surprises as opposed to say only 60%.
But honestly, its the size of the nation thats the problem. People in the northeast have fundamentally different beliefs than those in, say, Alabama and california... and trying to rule over all of them as a single government is only going to cause pain...
To take the South as but one example, the average African-American lives in a world that is completely different than your average white Southerner. The interaction on political, social and even geographic levels is extremely limited. They may as well live in different countries.
Then there's regions like New England that don't interact with the Southern group, and the West Coast which does its own thing as well. You're left with these quasi-independent groups of states that are thrown together under a single national banner and forced to pick who gets to drive every four years.
Spain has a similar problem, as does Belgium, and in more extreme cases such as Iraq where stark religious and tribal differences make conflict very difficult to reconcile.
It's not population, it's consensus, and that gets harder and harder to achieve when you have large, demographically incompatible groups.
No amount of fussing with the rules is going to fix this. Weakening the Federal government and empowering the states could alleviate some of the pressure, but it also puts a lot of people in a very bad place: They have to pick between living with their family in the place where they have a lot of roots, or cutting loose like some refugees for another state that will treat them better.
Name any country that's been as functional as the United States has been, given our size, and especially given the enormous amount of diversity we have?
We've been doing the grinding, painful and hard work of real national diversity, at scale, for hundreds of years.
We've gotten it wrong a lot; we're still getting a lot of it wrong.
But here we are, perhaps the most vibrant, large population in the world. We have a lot of problems...more problems now than we had 10 or 15 years ago.
But damn it, looking back, it's really an amazing thing we've accomplished.
Trump seems to be, more than anything, an agent of chaos. I suspect his presidency will harm us. But we've handling a lot worse in the past, from within and from without.
Indeed, I like to think that the beautiful and painful results of our centuries long diversity have made us exceptionally strong.
It started as a series of colonies that could have agreed to disagree. It grew through lucky aquisition: Florida from the Spanish, Alaska from the Russians, Louisiana from the French, Texas and California from Mexico. It split up, the Confederate States left, and was unified at great risk and even greater cost. If any one of those things hadn't happened the very concept of America would be fundamentally different.
It's also a country flanked by two relatively agreeable nations, Canada and Mexico, so there's little risk of armed conflict. This gives the country disproportionate control over its home turf. Even regional powers like Germany still have to answer to their neighbours, squabbles have gotten ugly and expensive.
It was also extremely lucky to have such a ridiculous abundance of natural resources. With perhaps the exception of Canada, and to a degree Russia no other country in the world has massive reserves of fresh water, prime agricultural land, lumber, fish, coal, copper, iron, oil, nuclear fuel, and a long list of other things. Name a resource and the US probably has it in a massive quantity. I don't think most Americans realize how blessed their country is.
It's amazing how much political cohesion you can have when resources are abundant, cheap, and there's no reason to fight over them. This could change as fresh water becomes more scarce and states start to bicker over who gets what. When there's not enough to go around things could get very, very ugly and America's entire character could change.
At the same time, we have gone through the hard and painful process of trying to make diversity work as I described, though it has been slow, incremental and still incomplete.
I don't know of any other nations that have done that.
Our luck has certainly enabled it!
Compared to others it's practically homogeneous: India, Papua New Guinea.
For an example closer to home: Canada is probably more ethnically diverse than the United States and, Quebéc aside (which is sort of our lone-star province) has a lot more political cohesion. Toronto is vastly more ethnically diverse than New York City today despite New York having representation from every country in the world.
Similar factors are in play, though: Generally there's enough resources for everyone, so there's no need to fight for scraps.
The US has a lot of work to do to bring itself truly together. I just worry that things are going in the opposite direction now with infighting being encouraged to divide and conquer all those opposed to the current administration.
I think think about and study that, thank you.
> I just worry that things are going in the opposite direction now with infighting being encouraged to divide and conquer all those opposed to the current administration.
Aye..I think we're on the cusp of taking some steps back.
He is afraid of being proved wrong. It's a very common problem with climate change deniers. Facts and figures keep piling up but they always grasp any possible alternative explanation. The longer they sustain their position, the fooler the look if they backtrack, so they tend to become more and more entrenched in their opinions. Trump just happens to have the opportunity to silence government funded organizations.
This is why there's been a push towards the "climate change" wording in the first place.
That's because, in a mistaken campaign to get people motivated, AGW activists say "See how hot it is today? Global warming is the reason!" Remember how the northern ice cap was supposed to be gone by 2013? Polar bears extinct?
If you don't want people on the other side to make arguments based on today's weather, you have to call out the people doing it on your side.
[long string of anti-science tweets]
I'm not sure what your point is exactly? That it was a "joke" but he also believed it? Because he says in that "admission":
>And I often joke that this is done for the benefit of China — obviously I joke — but this done for the benefit of China.
So is he saying its for the benefit of China or not? At best it seems that he's trying to say it but weasel out of any accountability for saying it.
I think splitting hairs over the term is unnecessary. I'm sure there are people who believe earth's climate has always been the same but they are probably very few. The most popular position among climate change deniers, as far as I know, is that this changes are part of the natural cycle and humans have little or no impact.
As long as one can say that mankind should not take any action to avert climate change, most "climate deniers" are happy, and whether the myriad of supporting arguments contradict each other is not their concern.
For example, what's Trump's opinion on whether the Earth is warming or not? Does he even care?
Thing is that once you accept climate change as man made event, the immediate consequence is asking all the businesses to spend extra on minimizing impact. That never goes well with businesses. My theory is that republicans initially started denying climate change due to lobbying and then they had to take that as religion because science doesn't support it.
Regulations on the corporate donors and friends of his that can't trash the environment as much as they'd like and hinder their profits.
aka
#profitdecreasinginconveniences
Edit: I'll now include the obligatory "/s" tag that I should have included originally.
It's obviously a lot more complex than a hashtag.
I think that's the wrong question but it leads us to the corrective answer.
The founders provided us with a Bill of Rights, a constitution, separation of powers, and democratic processes for 2 of the 3 branches.
Of these, the first two scale to as large a number as you wish. We need to start insisting on a robust interpretation of our civil rights. That was always the intended protection mechanism.
[fix typo]
1) Climate change (meaning the planet is warming).
2) Climate change is man made and causing the planet to warm.
The jury is the total community of the scientists who devoted their lives to learn as much as possible about the topics they judge.
If you ask "as a beginner" you should first learn about the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
If it's too hard for you to grasp how it functions, imagine that you cover yourself with the invisible plastic bag. The bag won't produce any heat but it would prevent the heat from your body to dissipate as it would otherwise, effectively warming you up. The same way function the greenhauses. CO2 has that effect for Earth, known since 1824 and elaborated since.
I figure that there have to be 2-3 solid research papers on the subject.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core
The expected rise of CO2 closely matches our fosil fuels consumption.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natu...
Note: there was no scientific valid input that would disprove the human-caused climate change, and believe me, different countries would push hard had they been.
The first report was produced 1990, the fifth, updated 2014, here it is the full "synthesis" part of the report, PDF, 14 MB:
http://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/SYR_AR5_FINAL_f...
A little longer explanation then mine in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli...
Additionally, it is proved, by looking at the yearly reports, year after year, that Exxon finances the "deniers." Just to give you the idea how you can possibly doubt: when there's a TV show to be made, there's one real scientist, to represent all the scientists of the world, and on another side a paid pre-selected person to pose as the "alternative view."
So the public sees "oh, it's 50:50." It's not, it's rather more like 99.9:0.1. You can always find some extremists, even among the scientists. But even those found "denying" are typically from some other branch of science, effectively out of their range of expertise.
The another reason for what appears to be 50:50 is that the politicians of a whole big US party, almost without the exception, identify themselves with the financiers and "dance the denial."
The big interested financiers can't disprove it, but they can produce enough confusion to prevent some political decisions to occur, and that is good enough for them. Relatively little money (for them) gives them a lot. That the whole planet is affected, they don't care.
---
Edit: answer to your "ocean temperatures":
Now, it's really measured. For the past, a lot of work:
http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/proxies/paleocli...
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
(Better hurry before it gets taken down…)
Or look at the IPCC's Synthesis Report:
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FI...
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-wo...
(Always press down arrow to get the next page)
To understand why people are obsessed with "just around a degree" of observed change, see this xkcd comics to get an idea how fast the change is compared to what we know (and we, be sure, do!) about the past:
I don't know if we can determine Trump's actual opinion on climate change. He's opportunistically jumping on a bandwagon.
None of them are democratic.
Canada is not a republic. The United Kingdom is not a republic.
Those countries are democracies.
The United States is a republic... And a democracy.
All that being a republic means is that you are not governed by a monarch. Whether or not you are a democracy is completely orthogonal to whether or not you are a republic.
I'm really really tired of this misinformation.
A republic simply means that you're a democracy without a king.
Whether it's direct or representative democracy is immaterial.
Unless you somehow think that Canada is a republic and France is not.
The United States of America is formally a constitutional republic.
"Republic" is just a term to refer to a nation that is ruled without a monarch: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/republic
Therefore, the two are not mutually exclusive.
If you actually meant a direct democracy, then you should have said it. Don't expect people to be able to read your mind and then get mad and snarky when they don't. We can only interpret what we read, so being specific that you mean a direct democracy when you say the word "democracy" in a political thread is really needed.
We have given you all the actual definitions on these terms and they show clearly that you're wrong. Just admit it and stop arguing this pointless debate. It's not that hard to do.
Edit: I'm serious, the value of "democracy" over any other term is unclear if it doesn't refer to something specific.
A republic is a government without a king. The United States, Germany, France, and India are examples of democracies that are republics (also known as democratic republics). Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Spain are examples of democracies that are not republics, as they all have a king. All of these are indirect democracies.
An example of a non-democratic republic would be North Korea.
An example of a country that is neither democratic, nor a republic, would be Saudi Arabia.
BONUS ANSWER!
Some countries have powers devolved to independent subnational governments. This system is called federalism. The opposite is a unitary state. The United States and Canada are both federal democracies, while France and Spain are not. (And to reiterate on the previous point: The United States and France are both republics, while Canada and Spain are not.)
Seriously, we went over this stuff in 5th grade social studies. People only unlearn this stuff when it becomes politically convenient to unlearn it.
I'm convinced there are spiritually two Americas here and I'm not sure the founding fathers could have forseen that. There are slow-motion economic wars happening. They are happening at a global level between China and the US and they are happening at a national level in the US between the red and blue states.
I don't think the founding fathers could have forseen the exponential growth in the haves and have nots.
Similar functions also existed in their academic structures, but the official-ness of this order certainly smacks of the politruk.
Then what is actually going on? This article is very confusing on that point.
http://www.wyomingnews.com/news/wyoming-court-ok-to-charge-f...
It's very unlikely Trump will beat his predecessor in that regard.
Have we never considered this scenario before? Has there ever been an attempt to establish independent agencies, not subject to the whims of the White House? (IIRC, maybe the CIA or the FBI are independent agencies?)
There are reasons why all of this is happening. People like us (I guess...I don't want to define your personal echo chamber) look at those tens of millions of people and just can't understand why they voted for Trump, or why they seem to believe what they seem to believe.
But they are people, just like us, but with different and diverse backgrounds.
That's really the answer. If most or all of us can break out of our echo chambers, we might start to develop a path out of this mess.
When you combine this with Drumpf's bigoted, Islamophobic and un-American executive order aimed at banning Muslims from the country (which substantially increases the likelihood of another terrorist attack, by marginalizing Muslims and playing right into the hands of ISIS), it becomes very clear we are facing one of the darkest times in the history of this republic.
For the sake of the world, every decent person who believes in human rights must do everything in their power to resist this tyrannical and illegitimate President. It could very well mean being imprisoned or beaten or even killed by Drumpf's thugs. But if history has taught us anything it is that freedom is worth fighting for.
Like others have pointed out, there are other ways the public can get the information. But it won't be the EPA running a press office counter to the President's.
Like it or not, the Internet is here for those who want to fact check:
https://news.vice.com/story/president-obamas-climate-change-...
I don't like it. I don't really understand the point of your comment, you seem to just be summarizing some of the article. Do you have something substantial to add?