Links tagged “epa”

The biggest missed opportunity of the Trump Administration!

Ultimately, Pruitt’s climate debate proposition was killed off before it could be launched, nixed by Chief of Staff John Kelly out of concern about blowback. But internal EPA emails from the time period when the idea was being considered illustrate the degree to which the Trump administration left officials within the EPA deeply shaken and fearful of politics overtaking scientific consensus.

Former EPA Whistleblower Dr. Alan Carlin: "The Trump Administration claims that it never reviewed the report before it was published and that it represented the views of its bureaucratic authors from 13 different departments and recruited from the outside world...the staff that prepared it included some climate activists and featured some research that was funded by noted activists like Tom Steyer.

The Administration now has a problem since some Democrats say they will use the report to oppose a number of the Trump Administration’s attempts to weaken a number of the Obama climate regulations that they have proposed, including using the report to persuade courts to reinstate the original Obama Administration regulations. See: Democrats Will Use US Climate Report Against Trump In Court

One obvious possibility is that they wanted to avoid the charge that they had “corrupted” the report writing process. But the costs are likely to be high...The more normal process is for an administration to make sure that major reports exactly correspond to its policy and technical views before publishing it. This is a far better approach in my view. Then there is no confusion as to whether the report really represents the Administration’s views and cannot be used against it. And it does not later have to disown it, as they have already started to do. It clearly would have been worth the extra effort in this case. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Trump Administration blew it."