Purging the experts

One of the political trends I understand least is the increasing distrust of scientists by elected officials.

It's not like this disparagement of experts is across the board.  When you're sick, and the doctor runs tests and diagnoses you with a sinus infection, you don't say, "I don't believe you.  My real estate agent told me it sounded like I had an ulcer, so I'm gonna go with that."  When you get on an airplane, you don't say to the pilot, "You damn elite aviation specialists, you're obviously biased because of your training.  I think you should hand over the controls to Farmer Bob, here."  When you have your car repaired, you wouldn't say to the mechanic, "I'm not going to do the repairs you suggest, because you have an obvious monetary interest in the car being broken.  I'll get a second opinion from my son's kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Hinkwhistle, who is a disinterested party."

But that's how scientists are treated by politicians.  And it's gotten worse.  Just yesterday, Scott Pruitt, who is the de facto leader of the Environmental Protection Agency despite his apparent loathing of both the environment and the agency, announced that there was going to be a purge of scientists on EPA advisory boards.

"What’s most important at the agency is to have scientific advisers that are objective, independent-minded, providing transparent recommendations,” Pruitt said when he spoke to a group at the Heritage Foundation, an anti-environmental, pro-corporate lobby group.  "If we have individuals who are on those boards, sometimes receiving money from the agency … that to me causes questions on the independence and the veracity and the transparency of those recommendations that are coming our way."

Well, of course environmental scientists get funding from the EPA, you dolt.  One of the EPA's functions is providing grants for basic research in environmental science.  Saying that environmental scientists can't be on EPA advisory boards is a little like excluding doctors from being on medical advisory boards.

Can't have that, after all.  Those doctors are clearly biased to be in favor of policies that promote better health care services, because then they get money for providing those services.  Better populate the medical advisory boards with people who know nothing whatsoever about medicine.

Of course, I am morally certain that the purging of trained scientists from EPA advisory boards is not simply because of this administration's anti-science bent, although that clearly exists as well.  The fight between corporate stooges like Scott Pruitt and the scientific community stems from the fact that much of what the scientists are saying runs counter to economic expediency.  You know, such things as:

• Climate change exists and is anthropogenic in origin
• Dumping mining waste into streams and lakes is a bad idea
• Corporations need strictures on the impact of what they do on the environment, because they have a poor track record of policing themselves
• Reducing the allowable amounts of air pollutants improves air quality and eases such conditions as asthma and chronic bronchitis
• Oil pipelines have a nasty habit of breaking and leading to damaging oil spills
• It's a stupid idea to store pressurized natural gas in unstable underground salt caverns

All of which we environmental types -- by which I mean, people who would like future generations to have drinkable water, breathable air, and a habitable world -- have had to fight in the past year.  The Trump administration's approach to environmental policy is like the Hydra; you cut off one foul, pollution-emitting head, and it grows two more.

The whole thing is driven by a furious drive toward deregulation, which in turn comes out of unchecked corporate greed.  Jennifer Sass, senior scientist for the National Resources Defense Council, nailed it:  "Pruitt’s purge has a single goal: get rid of scientists who tell us the facts about threats to our environment and health.  There’s a reason he won’t apply the same limits to scientists funded by corporate polluters.  Now the only scientists on Pruitt’s good list will be those with funding from polluters supporting Trump’s agenda to make America toxic again."

Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Center for Science and Democracy, agreed.  Halpern said that if Pruitt succeeds in his purge, he "would be willfully setting himself up to fail at the job of protecting public health and the environment."

The problem is, stories like this get buried in the ongoing shitstorm that has characterized the leadership of the United States in the last ten months.  It's another Hydra, and people simply can't pay attention to all of the horrible news at the same time.  That's what they're counting on -- that with outrages over kneeling athletes and disrespect by the president of military widows and allegations of sexual impropriety, we'll just ignore the fact that while all this other stuff is happening, our leaders are gutting every protection the environment has gained in the last fifty years.

You'd think that with the natural disasters this year -- unprecedented hurricanes and wildfires and floods -- we'd wise up and say, "You know, maybe it's time we started paying attention to the damage we've done."  But unfortunately, we're heading in exactly the opposite direction.  My fear is that by doing this, we're making the eventual backlash from the environment unstoppable.

And it would be a Pyrrhic victory, but I hope Scott Pruitt is around to watch it happen.

Blinding me with science

Call me naïve, but on some level I still can't quite believe we've gotten to the point in the United States where our elected officials pride themselves on ignoring science.

The latest example of this kind of idiocy is the chief administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, who in my opinion was appointed to this position in order to give him the leverage to dismantle the EPA entirely.  That he hasn't done so yet -- although steps have been taken, in the form of cutting part of the staff and muzzling the remaining ones -- is more a testimony to the complete inability of this administration to accomplish anything, good or bad, than it is to a lack of will.

But Pruitt has made it mighty clear what his attitude is.  If there was any doubt of that, consider his statement last Thursday, given during an interview on a Texas radio program: "Science should not be something that’s just thrown about to try to dictate policy in Washington, D.C."

In other words: those damned ivory-tower scientists should keep their noses where they belong, in their electron microscopes and particle accelerators and reaction flasks, and stop trying to use what they know to accomplish anything practical.

I find this stance to be nothing short of baffling.  If we don't use science -- i.e., facts and evidence -- to drive policy, what the hell are we supposed to use?  Party affiliation?  Guesses?  The Farmer's Almanac?  Our daily horoscopes?

How have we gotten here, to the point that science is considered somehow disconnected from the real world?  Where people say, "If the scientists messing around in their labs say one thing, but the folksy musings of non-scientists say something else, I'm gonna believe the non-scientists?"  Part of it, I think, is the fault of us science teachers.  The fact that a governmental leader -- of the Environmental Protection Agency, for fuck's sake -- can say something like this and not be immediately laughed into an embarrassed silence is more of an indictment of our public school system than anything I can think of.  We've for years largely taught science as a list of disconnected facts and vocabulary words; no wonder that our students grow up to think of science as something weird, hard to pronounce, and not quite real.

But it's worse than that.  Our leaders, and pundits on television and talk radio, have trained us to disbelieve the facts themselves.  Never mind such incontrovertible hard evidence as the melting of the polar ice caps (just last week, a ship made it for the first time across the northern sea route from Norway to South Korea, without an icebreaker).  Never mind the thousands of pages of worldwide temperature data, the shifting of migration times for birds, the changes to the timing of flowering and leaf-out in northern deciduous forests, and even a recent study that in the northeastern United States, snowshoe hares are no longer growing in a white coat in the winter -- they're staying brown all year, because now that there's no reliable snow cover, being white in January is poor camouflage.

But none of those facts matter when compared to the ranting of people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, not to mention Donald Trump and his proxy at the EPA, Scott Pruitt.  Ironically, Pruitt's statement, delivered last week in Texas, came as a category-4 hurricane was bearing down on the Texas coast, and has so far delivered an estimated 15 trillion gallons of water -- and it's not done yet.  It's being called a "500-year storm."

I'm trying to figure out how many storms in the past ten years have been labeled that way.  I've lost count.

And yet Ann Coulter is still discounting any possibility that this storm could be the result of anthropogenic climate change.  "I don't believe Hurricane Harvey is God's punishment for Houston electing a lesbian mayor," Coulter tweeted yesterday.  "But that is more credible than 'climate change.'"

Thanks for weighing in, Ms. Coulter.  I'll give your opinion serious consideration once I see your degree in climatology.

Or, for that matter, in any scientific field.

But that kind of har-de-har-har statement from a layperson is somehow given more weight than all of the academic papers, solid research, projections, and predictions -- than all of the actual facts -- generated by the smartest and best-trained people in the world.

Hurricane Harvey prior to landfall [image courtesy of NASA]

As far as Scott Pruitt, he couldn't resist the opportunity to follow up his statement about how we shouldn't "throw science around" to generate policy with a dig at President Obama, who at least listened to scientists, even if he didn't always give them the attention they deserved.  "[Climate change] serves political ends," Pruitt said.  "The past administration used it as a wedge issue."

So in this topsy-turvy bizarro world we're in, to use facts, evidence, and science is creating a politicized "wedge issue," and to ignore them is the way to create sound policy.

The whole thing leaves me wanting to scream obscenities at my computer, which I actually did more than once while writing this.

Honestly, I think the only way this will change is if the American people wise up to the extent that all of these ignorant clowns get voted out of office, or if we're struck by an ecological catastrophe so immense that it becomes impossible to deny what's happening.  I'm not secretly hoping for the latter, by the way; but our track record of waking up to reality before serious damage is done is hardly encouraging.

For now, all we can do is watch and wait, and hope that the chickens come home to roost in the 2018 election.  But I'm not particularly optimistic about that, either.

Weasels in charge

In case you still needed something about the current state of affairs in the United States to be distressed about, two days ago the Trump administration announced the firing of the majority of the members of the Environmental Protection Agency's Scientific Review Board.

This board is exactly what it sounds like; it's made up of actual research scientists who have the academic background to evaluate environmental policy and make sure it's based on reliable research.  But that, apparently, is no longer the focus.  Now, the only thing that matters is whether policy is based on what's best for industry.

Especially the fossil fuels industry.

J. P. Friere, spokesperson for EPA chief Scott Pruitt, was up front about it.  "The administrator believes we should have people on this board who understand the implication of regulations on the regulated community."

"Deregulation" is, of course, a euphemism for "giving carte blanche to the corporations to do whatever they damn well please."  Don't consider air and water quality; don't consider standards for protecting the ecosystems; don't even consider whether the industry in question is reasonable or sustainable.  Hell, Pruitt himself has made a point of visiting several coal mines and has promised to restore coal mining to its former prominence -- never mind that besides the danger to coal miners and the communities near mines, and the environmental damage, the rising market share of natural gas and renewable energy makes it nearly impossible that coal will ever regain its status as a viable energy commodity.

I.e., Pruitt is lying.  But that's becoming status quo for this administration.  In fact, it's beginning to seem like the best way not to get hired by Trump or his cronies is to tell the truth.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And it should come as no surprise that the person behind the dismissal of the Scientific Review Board is none other than Lamar Smith, who is the odds-on favorite for winning the Congressional Corporate Stooge of the Year award.  This is the same man who is funded by the fossil fuels industry, is hand-in-glove with the climate-change-denying Heartland Institute, and was responsible last year for the harassment of any government employees involved in making sure that legitimate science was used to drive policy.  With no apparent sense of irony, Smith said, "In recent years, Science Advisory Board experts have become nothing more than rubber stamps who approve all of the EPA's regulations.  The EPA routinely stacks this board with friendly scientists who receive millions of dollars in grants from the federal government.  The conflict of interest here is clear."

How he could accuse someone else of conflicts of interest without being struck by lightning, I have no idea.  But that's what he did.  With a straight face, unless you count the obnoxious smirk he always wears.

Worst of all, they're getting away with it.  Pruitt and Smith are planning on hiring replacements for the fired members who are industry- and deregulation-friendly.  The message is, don't base policy on science, or even on what is good for American citizens; base it on whatever pours the most money into the pockets of corporate interests.

What is happening right now in Washington DC is going to take years to repair, if it's repairable at all.  We are at a tipping point with respect to a lot of things; climate change, biodiversity loss, air quality, collapse of fisheries.  Throwing away the regulations -- which were our last, best hope for mitigating some of the damage our species has caused -- is sure to push us past the point of no return.

Not that Smith and Pruitt care.  In their view, short-term profits and political expediency never take second seat to caring for the environment that is keeping us alive in the long term.  Especially when Donald Trump has put weasels in charge of the hen house.

I honestly don't know how these people can sleep at night.

Science removal

The downward spiral in the United States's commitment to environmental stewardship isn't all big, attention-getting moves like Donald Trump's appointment of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who made a name for himself taking the fossil fuel industry's side in battles over environmental safety, to the post of head of the Environmental Protection Agency -- a man who just yesterday stated that carbon dioxide is not "a primary contributor to the global warming we see."  Sometimes it's the small, seemingly inconsequential changes that are the most chilling, partly because those small changes can so easily slip under the radar.

Take, for example, the change announced this week in the EPA's mission statement.  There was one alteration that jumped out at me, that would only be obvious if you compared the new statement word-by-word with the old one.  There is one word that now appears nowhere in the online description of what the EPA's Office of Science and Technology does.  Any guesses as to what that is?

The word "science."

You read that right.  The Office of Science and Technology now has as its directive evaluating standards for (for example) water quality not on whether the analysis is "science-based" (the old language), but whether it is "economically and technologically achievable."  This may seem like a minor change -- after all, why would we bother trying to address a problem whose solution was not "technologically achievable?" -- but in fact, this is a symbolic shot across the bow to members of the scientific community.  It's a sign that we no longer will hold our environmental policy to the standard of what is scientifically supported; we will instead make decisions based upon what is financially expedient for corporate interests.

Take, for example, the revocation of the Obama-era Stream Protection Rule, which prevents coal companies from dumping mining debris into streams.  The House and Senate both voted to kill the rule, despite copious evidence that so-called "mountaintop removal" methods of coal mining foul streams, leading to contamination of drinking water by heavy metals and other toxins, and all the horrible health effects that come with it.  The death of the Stream Protection Rule was ostensibly to give a boost to the ailing coal industry, but the truth is that a move like this isn't going to improve their odds.  "Coal jobs are not coming back," said James van Nostrand, director of the Center for Energy and Sustainable Development at West Virginia University College of Law.  "The coal industry is being pounded by market forces.  It's not regulation."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So the revocation of the Stream Protection Rule, and the elimination of the words "science-based" from the EPA mission statement, are purely symbolic gestures -- but no less powerful for being so.  They're a clear message to anyone who is listening: "When evidence-based science or a cost in human health or human lives come up against the interests of corporate profit, corporate profit is going to win.  Period."

Given that pro-corporate Republicans now control both houses of Congress and the Executive Branch, and anti-science types like Scott Pruitt, Dana Rohrabacher, Lamar Smith, and Rex Tillerson are now running committees or whole departments, this is only the beginning.  Also on the chopping block are the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Clean Power Acts; the Endangered Species Act; the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability (Superfund) Act; and, of course, any involvement in policy that addresses, or even acknowledges, anthropogenic climate change.  And with the power these people now wield, this kind of a change to our nation's environmental policy isn't just a what if, it's increasingly seeming inevitable.

I recognize that there has to be a balance between smart environmental management and corporate interests.  I'm no tree hugger that goes along with the motto of the ecoterrorist group Earth First -- "No compromise in the defense of Mother Earth."  The human species needs food, living space, a reliable source of energy, clean water, clean air, and clean soil -- and therefore a thoughtful equilibrium between protecting nature and protecting our economy and national interest.  But what we have here is a government that is ceding all control to the corporations, damn the consequences, full speed ahead.

Which is a recipe for disaster.  Because whatever the monetary gains of policy that ignores science, eventually reality catches up with you -- in the form of ruined ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, fouled water and air, and a climate gone haywire.

I can only hope that wiser heads prevail before the tipping point is reached.

Foxes running the henhouse

I can't remember when I've ever been this worried about our capacity for seriously fucking up the world we live in.

Strong words, I realize.  I'm 56 years old, so I remember Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.  I remember the BP Gulf oil spill and the Exxon Valdez disaster.  I've read about the collapse of the entire ecosystem around the Aral Sea, and the slow-motion train wreck of deforestation in the Congo, Amazon, and Southeast Asia rainforests.

All of that is peanuts compared to what we face today.

As the most powerful economy in the world, the United States is uniquely poised either to do tremendous good or to accelerate our downward slide beyond the point where it can be halted.  And this weekend I read three horrifying articles that are leading me to believe that our government is choosing the latter option.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The first is a piece in CNN Politics in which we find out that President-elect Donald Trump is still claiming that "no one knows" if climate change is real.  In interview on Fox News, he made the following statement:

I'm still open-minded.  Nobody really knows.  Look, I'm somebody that gets it, and nobody really knows. It's not something that's so hard and fast...  Now, Paris, I'm studying.  I do say this.  I don't want that agreement to put us at a competitive disadvantage with other countries.  And as you know, there are different times and different time limits on that agreement.  I don't want that to give China, or other countries signing agreements an advantage over us.

So we've taken a nine-year step backwards in time to George W. Bush's tired mantra that "we need more data" before we can act.  Which, of course, is simply a way to stall, a way to let corporate interests trump science -- because the fact is, we do know that climate change is real.  We've known for years.  There is no more an argument among the scientists over whether climate change is real than there is over whether evolution is real.

Oh, wait, we're still fighting that battle, too.

Then we have a New York Times piece by Coral Davenport in which we find out that the transition team of President-elect Trump has sent out a 74-piece questionnaire to employees of the Department of Energy asking if they had attended climate change policy conferences -- and if so, who else they might have seen there.  It asks that copies of emails referencing climate change be submitted for review.

If this brings up comparisons in your mind to the McCarthy blacklists, you're spot-on.  But Michael McKenna, a former member of Trump's transition team who stepped down when his status as a lobbyist became known, begs to differ.  "If meetings happened and important stuff was decided, voters have a right to know," McKenna said.  "It’s not a matter of national security.  The transition is not asking about nuclear weapons.  They are asking about meetings about modeling for God’s sake...  The career staff at D.O.E. is great. There’s not a soul in the world who wants to do any harm to those guys."

No?  Take a look at Lamar Smith, head of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, who has spent the last three years harassing administrators at NASA and NOAA for supporting research into climate change.  And Trump's team has already pledged to defund the Earth Sciences Division of NASA -- the department that is in charge of climate research -- calling their findings "politicized science."

So I'm perhaps to be forgiven for thinking that Mr. McKenna's reassurances are horseshit.  And my suspicions only strengthened when I read the report of a Nexus Media reporter, Philip Newell, about his attendance at an all-day Heritage Foundation event last week -- an event that can be summed up as the fossil fuel industry saying over and over, "We're in charge now, we can do whatever the hell we want."

Lamar Smith was in attendance, as were Representatives Gary Palmer and Pete Olson, and Senators Mike Lee and James "Senator Snowball" Inhofe.  All of them heaped praise upon the Trump choice for head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who has been described as "a blunt tool of the fossil fuel industry."

Inhofe was the one who made the most puzzling statement, that he "believed in climate change until he heard about the costs of doing something about it."  Because clearly if your car's transmission is going, and the mechanic says it'll cost $1000 to replace, you can magically make the transmission work again by saying "That's too expensive."

But such a meeting would not be complete without a contribution from climate denialist and general crank Craig Idso, who was the lead author of the cherry-picked and scientifically invalid report from the "Non-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change," and who ended his talk by saying that "carbon dioxide is the elixir of life."

So the foxes are running the henhouse, and we're in for a slaughter unless responsible, informed people start confronting corrupt elected officials and corporate interests.  We need ethical congresspeople -- and I know there are some out there -- to make a commitment to fight tooth and nail against the ones who would sell our planet's future to the highest bidder.  The pro-science members of our government, on the local, state, and federal level, need to say to the President-elect, "You are dead wrong.  Anthropogenic climate change is real, and the consequences will be devastating."  They need to stand up to goons like Inhofe and Smith and say "Enough.  Go ahead and add me to your blacklist.  I will fight you every step of the way."

Resisting strong-arm tactics can work.  If you need an example, read this New Yorker piece about the David-vs.-Goliath fight of California state controller John Chiang against then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Schwarzenegger, in an attempt to leverage the Democratic-led state legislature into accepting his budget, issued an executive order reducing the salaries of two hundred thousand state employees to the minimum wage (then $6.55 an hour) until they met his demands.

Chiang stood up and said, "No.  Not on my watch, you won't."  Schwarzenegger sued him, but the suit languished in the courts and found little popular support.  In 2011, Schwarzenegger stepped down, his ratings at near record lows, and the incoming governor, Jerry Brown, dropped the suit entirely.

As for Chiang, far from being hurt by his act of bravery in the face of authority, he became California's State Treasurer and plans to run for governor in 2018.

So it can be done, but it requires backbone, and a willingness to stand up to power being wielded unethically.  And I hope like hell that the Congress has its members who are willing to be this fight's John Chiangs.  Because this time, what is being gambled is not the salaries of state employees, but the long-term habitability of our planet.