A Solution for the Environmental Protection Agency Surviving Donald Trump and Scott Pruitt

March 8, 2017

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March 8, 2017 – The model exists to ensure that proper science related to tracking climate data and climate modeling will survive the new executive administration in the United States. Just look to Australia under former Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Back in 2013 Australia’s new Conservative government dismantled the Climate Commission, a government body that focused on the impact of and solutions to climate change. The government of the day also dispensed with the Climate Change Authority, an advisory body that provided advice to the state governments and business on how to achieve lower carbon emissions. Abbott also rescinded Australia’s nascent carbon tax and dispensed with a cabinet position focused on science.

How familiar this sounds to what has been happening since the inauguration of Donald Trump and the approval by the Senate of his choice, Scott Pruitt, to head up the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Pruitt considers the EPA, according to an article written in yesterday’s New York Times, to be the equivalent in the public’s mind of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), a predatory and regulatory regime that imposes its will on honest American citizens just trying to make a living. EPA regulations force automobile manufacturers to make cleaner cars that go further on less gasoline and diesel. EPA regulations cause the closure of coal-fired thermal power plants. EPA regulations are based on scientific data that runs counter to everything Pruitt believes. That’s because Pruitt, a former Oklahoma state attorney general is very much a climate change denier, pro fossil fuels, and an enemy of science.

EPA regulations force automobile manufacturers to make cleaner cars that go further on less gasoline and diesel. EPA regulations cause the closure of coal-fired thermal power plants. EPA regulations are based on scientific data that runs counter to everything Pruitt believes. That’s

EPA regulations cause the closure of coal-fired thermal power plants. EPA regulations are based on scientific data that runs counter to everything Pruitt believes. That’s

EPA regulations are based on scientific data that runs counter to everything Pruitt believes. That’s

That’s because Pruitt, a former Oklahoma state attorney general who made a habit of suing the EPA regularly, is very much a climate change denier, pro fossil fuels, an enemy of science, and an appointed fox now in the environmental movement’s henhouse.

Between the President’s requests to dramatically cut the EPA budget and Pruitt’s stocking of administrative positions with like-minded individuals, Americans will no longer have a watchdog monitoring the excesses of mining and utility companies as they pollute the air and water. The watchdog agency’s gloves have been tied up and put back on the shelf for a 4-year interim. There is no more EPA punch to stop polluters. This President, who during his campaign promised clean water and clean air, will deliver neither as he moves on scientists and programs studying climate change. This represents a reprehensible step backward and existential threat to all Americans and the rest of the planet, the only one we know with certainty, that is inhabitable.

How can I say this?

In the headlines the last few days we received an ominous forewarning of future global warming. Scientists, at the Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawaii, reported carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, the greenhouse gas most associated with global warming, will for the first time, surpass 410 parts per million (ppm), a threshold not seen in the geological record since humans first appeared on Earth.

Richard Betts, climate scientist, noted that April or even sooner will see CO2 reach 410 ppm. That follows a record rise last year that put us permanently over 400 ppm. And although 10 ppm seems like a small increment, the greenhouse gas impact of CO2, cumulative over time, will undoubtedly happen, raising global temperatures, and lingering well into future centuries.

Even more frightening is the trending that shows CO2 levels rising at a faster rate than in the 20th century. It wasn’t that long ago that we were at 350 ppm, what many scientists felt was a safe level for atmospheric CO2, creating conditions that were far more benign to human existence. But now at present rates of CO2 contributions made by us, will take us to 450 ppm within 20 years. With levels that high, the forecast for global mean temperature will exceed 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), the upper limit target agreed to by the nations of the world at the Paris COP21 Climate conference.

Pruitt, a fossil fuel man all the way, has appointed climate science deniers (think Senator James Inhofe, for one), to help him try and find alternative facts to the science, ignoring the evidence that abounds. He will declare the news that 2016 was the warmest since human recordkeeping began in the 1870s, to be false. He will argue that everything observed to date is part of the natural cycles of the Earth. He will point to the Sun and blame warming on changes in the solar cycle. He will tell you that axial wobble is the real science responsible for climate change, and not CO2. He has no intention of looking at the real science and data that those in the EPA have compiled for several decades.

So many U.S. scientists have tried to find a safe haven for their research. Recently Canadian universities and companies have volunteered to archive data collected by American environmentalists. Researchers at University of Toronto have been backing up science data from U.S. EPA, NOAA, NASA, the Center for Disease Control, the Department of Agriculture, and other agencies in a race to retain the information before it gets trashed by Trump, Pruitt and their minions.

So what else to do?

In Australia, people and scientific community got together and created a non-government body, the Climate Council, to monitor climate change. The funding came initially from a crowdfunding campaign which in three days raised enough money to allow those laid off or fleeing positions in government to find a place to do their work.

The same can be done in the United States where crowdfunding got its start. To me, an Indiegogo or Kickstarter campaign to create an Environment Climate Council, sounds like the route to go over the next four years or until President Trump is impeached, and his science-denying cadre gets dumped from office.

Although I am not an American, I would be happy to get this started, and invite my readers to give me a shout out to make this a reality.