NOAA provides leadership on “climate change”

From an Article by Christopher Flavelle and Lisa Friedman, New York Times, October 28, 2020

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has recently removed the chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s premier scientific agency, and installed new political staff who have questioned accepted facts about climate change and imposed stricter controls on communications at the agency.

The moves threaten to stifle a major source of objective United States government information about climate change that underpins federal rules on greenhouse gas emissions and offer an indication of the direction the agency will take if President Trump wins re-election.

An early sign of the shift came last month, when Erik Noble, a former White House policy adviser who had just been appointed NOAA’s chief of staff, removed Craig McLean, the agency’s acting chief scientist.
Mr. McLean had sent some of the new political appointees a message that asked them to acknowledge the agency’s scientific integrity policy, which prohibits manipulating research or presenting ideologically driven findings.

The request prompted a sharp response from Dr. Noble. “Respectfully, by what authority are you sending this to me?” he wrote, according to a person who received a copy of the exchange after it was circulated within NOAA.

Mr. McLean answered that his role as acting chief scientist made him responsible for ensuring that the agency’s rules on scientific integrity were followed. The following morning, Dr. Noble responded. “You no longer serve as the acting chief scientist for NOAA,” he informed Mr. McLean, adding that a new chief scientist had already been appointed. “Thank you for your service.”

It was not the first time NOAA had drawn the administration’s attention. Last year, the agency’s weather forecasters came under pressure for contradicting Mr. Trump’s false statements about the path of Hurricane Dorian.

But in an administration where even uttering the words “climate change” is dangerous, NOAA has, so far, remained remarkably independent in its ability to conduct research about and publicly discuss changes to the Earth’s climate. It also still maintains numerous public websites that declare, in direct opposition to Mr. Trump, that climate change is occurring, is overwhelmingly caused by humans, and presents a serious threat to the United States.

Replacing Mr. McLean, who remains at the agency, was Ryan Maue, a former researcher for the libertarian Cato Institute who has criticized climate scientists for what he has called unnecessarily dire predictions.
Dr. Maue, a research meteorologist, and Dr. Noble werejoined at NOAA by David Legates, a professor at the University of Delaware’s geography department who has questioned human-caused global warming. Dr. Legates was appointed to the position of deputy assistant secretary, a role that did not previously exist.

Neil Jacobs, the NOAA administrator, was not involved in the hirings, according to two people familiar with the selection process

NOAA officials have tried to get information about what role the new political staff members would play and what their objectives might be, with little success. According to people close to the administration who have questioned climate science, though, their primary goal is to undercut the National Climate Assessment.

The assessment, a report from 13 federal agencies and outside scientists led by NOAA, which the government is required by law to produce every four years, is the premier American contribution to knowledge about climate risks and serves as the foundation for federal regulations to combat global warming. The latest report, in 2018, found that climate change poses an imminent and dire threat to the United States and its economy.

“The real issue at play is the National Climate Assessment,” said Judith Curry, a former chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology who said she has been in contact with Dr. Maue, the new chief scientist. “That’s what the powers that be are trying to influence.”

In addition to Dr. Curry, the strategy was described by Myron Ebell, a director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a former member of Mr. Trump’s transition team, and John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Dr. Christy, a critic of past National Climate Assessments, said he was asked by the White House this summer to take on a senior role at NOAA, according to E&E News, but declined the offer. He said he understood the role to include changing the agency’s approach to the climate assessment.

Ms. Curry and the others said that, if Mr. Trump wins re-election, further changes at NOAA would include removing longtime authors of the climate assessment and adding new ones who challenge the degree to which warming is occurring, the extent to which it is caused by human activities and the danger it poses to human health, national security and the economy.

A biased or diminished climate assessment would have wide-ranging implications. It could be used in court to bolster the positions of fossil fuel companies being sued for climate damages. It could counter congressional efforts to reduce carbon emissions. And, it ultimately could weaken what is known as the “endangerment finding,” a 2009 scientific finding by the Environmental Protection Agency that said greenhouse gases endanger public health and thus obliged the federal government to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act.

Other changes could include shifting NOAA funding to researchers who reject the established scientific consensus on climate change and eliminating the use of certain scientific models that project dire consequences for the planet if countries do little to reduce carbon dioxide pollution.

Dr. Noble, the new chief of staff, has already pushed to install a new layer of scrutiny on grants that NOAA awards for climate research, according to people familiar with those discussions.

Meaningfully changing the National Climate Assessment’s findings would be hard to accomplish, according to Brenda Ekwurzel, director of climate science for the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of a chapter in the latest edition of the report.

Still, Dr. Ekwurzel said NOAA’s role leading the report is vital and added that any attempt to undermine climate research for political purposes would threaten public safety and economic growth. “You need to have a well-functioning scientific enterprise,” she said. “The more we back away from that, the more we erode our democracy.”

Most of the changes at NOAA could be reversed by the next president, officials say, making next week’s election a referendum on the future of the agency.

The dissonance between NOAA’s work and Mr. Trump’s dismissiveness toward climate change became clear at the end of 2018, with the publication of the latest installment of the National Climate Assessment. The report put Mr. Trump in the awkward position of disavowing the findings of his own government. “I don’t believe it,” the president said of the economic assessment in the report.

But for the president’s advisers, the climate assessment posed a greater problem than being mildly embarrassing. It threatened the administration’s policy aims, because its conclusions about the threat of climate change made it harder, from a legal perspective, for the administration to justify rolling back limits of greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr. Ebell and another former member of Mr. Trump’s transition team, Steven J. Milloy, said they expected that Dr. Legates in particular would steer the next National Climate Assessment in a sharply different direction. They said Dr. Legates intended to question the models that NOAA scientists use to predict the future rate of warming and its effects on precipitation. Climate denialists broadly say the models used by scientists are flawed.

That could ultimately make the endangerment finding, the scientific and legal foundation for regulating greenhouse gas emissions, vulnerable. As recently as July, Mr. Legates explained the connection himself: In an op-ed for Townhall, a conservative website, he noted that the science that underpins the endangerment finding relies primarily on the National Climate Assessment and claimed the models employed by its authors “systematically overestimate” warming.

Officials at NOAA also say they fear that the new staffers will bring more climate denialists into the agency and push out scientists who object. They cite an executive order Mr. Trump signed last week making it easier to hire and fire civil servants involved in setting policy.

The spate of new appointees isn’t the only example of growing political constraints. In August, a few weeks before the new political staff began arriving at NOAA, the Commerce Department, which oversees NOAA and a handful of other agencies, issued a surprise memorandum: All internal and external communications must be approved by political staff at the department at least three days before being issued. The restrictions applied to social media posts, news releases and even agencywide emails.

The new policy meant that Dr. Jacobs, the NOAA administrator, could no longer send messages to his own staff members without having them cleared from above. The goal of the policy was to make sure all communications “serve the needs of your employees and mission while aligning with the over-arching guidance from the White House and Department,” the memo said.

“I think that until recently NOAA has been mostly spared the political interference with science that we’ve seen as a hallmark across this administration,” said Jane Lubchenco, who served as NOAA administrator in the Obama administration.

“That integrity and the credibility that it brings are threatened by these recent appointments,” Dr. Lubchenco said. “The positions that these individuals are in gives them the perfect opportunity to suppress, distort and cherry-pick information to make it whatever the party line is.”

Mountain Valley Pipeline to use 42” diameter pipe

From an Article by Ken Ward Jr., Staff Writer, Charleston Gazette, April 27, 2018

This article was produced in partnership with the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. ProPublica is supporting seven local and regional newsrooms this year, including the Gazette-Mail, as they work on important investigative projects affecting their communities.

More than 26 years ago, I wrote a story about a woman named Dixie Woolum.

I had been at my paper barely six months. At the time, I thought it would be cool that I’d get a dateline from Woolum’s hometown, Cinderella, W.Va. Little did I know then how much that story’s headline — “Broken promises” — really meant in the long history of West Virginia’s relationship with coal.

Woolum’s husband, Jimmy, was a coal miner who had died years earlier.

“Dixie Woolum packed her husband’s dinner bucket every morning,” I wrote. “Jimmy left early to work in the mines outside Williamson, heart of the billion-dollar coalfield.”

I was hoping to illustrate the financial distress faced at the time by Woolum and by thousands of people like her because of the potential collapse of the United Mine Workers of America’s health care plan for retired miners and their families. Miners like Jimmy Woolum thought they were promised health care for life in a long-ago deal between President Harry Truman and legendary UMWA President John L. Lewis.

In reality, protecting that health care has been an almost constant fight, part of the root of the bitter strikes against Pittston Coal and A.T. Massey Coal, the first two in an avalanche of coal operators who tried to stop funding miner benefits and pensions the union had won in its national contract.

Coal miners and coal communities are pretty used to broken promises by now.

Congress promised in 1969 to eliminate black lung disease. But thousands of miners — including Jimmy Woolum — continued to die from it. Today, though the industry knows how to prevent black lung, there’s a resurgence of the disease among miners in Central Appalachia.

Coalfield residents were promised that strip mines would be reclaimed, but most states haven’t required companies to set aside nearly enough money for cleanups, setting the stage for a financial crisis as the industry’s decline puts more and more companies at risk of failing.

Most of all, coalfield communities were promised prosperity — and today some of the places that have produced the most coal are among the region’s poorest.

How can this be?

It’s a crucial question to ask, especially at this critical time in West Virginia, as the state rushes forward with its new relationship with the natural gas industry.

Coal has done a lot for West Virginia. Generations of miners earned a good living, especially after the state’s coalfields were unionized. As Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., likes to remind people in Washington, coal helped win two world wars and built our nation into a global superpower.

The industry’s downsides are, if not always acknowledged by political leaders, well-documented. The great Appalachian historian John Alexander Williams listed coal’s “repetitive cycle of boom and bust, its savage exploitation of men and nature, and its seemingly endless series of disasters,” in an often-cited passage from his seminal history of the state.

And now, in the face of a major decline in the coal industry, families and entire communities that depended on it are hurting.

What will coal leave behind? Many in West Virginia are starting to understand the painful answers to that question: Abandoned mine lands, abandoned pension plans, polluted streams, empty government coffers — giant challenges for local communities in supporting schools and other basic needs.

At the same time, political leaders and business boosters are pointing to natural gas as the way out of West Virginia’s downward spiral, as the answer to our state’s economic problems.

But others worry that the state is headed down the same road with natural gas that it’s been on with coal.

We’ve just published a story detailing those similarities. Earlier this year, for example, Gov. Jim Justice proposed and then quickly backed away from a natural gas tax earlier to help fund our state’s schools. Gov. William Marland did the same thing with a proposed coal tax in the 1950s.

And Marland was far from the first to offer warnings about West Virginia’s wealth being dug from the ground and hauled out of state.

As early as 1884, a state Tax Commission report said, “The question is whether this vast wealth shall belong to persons who live here and who are permanently identified with the future of West Virginia, or whether it shall pass into the hands of persons who do not live here and care nothing for our state except to pocket the treasures which lie buried in our hills.”

In this series of stories, with the help of ProPublica, I hope to bring readers here in West Virginia, and those around the country, a clearer view of how history could be repeating itself.

For example, as my first story illustrates, West Virginia lawmakers and regulators have moved quickly to give gas developers broad latitude to operate, weakening environmental and public safety rules that govern the industry. Over the course of the year, I plan to more fully illustrate the ways the gas boom and what it brings with it are changing our communities and our landscape.

I also plan to look at the impact on workers. Are the jobs from the Marcellus Shale gas boom really going to West Virginians, or are companies bringing in seasoned hands from Texas and Oklahoma? Unlike our experience with coal, is West Virginia using the wealth created during this boom to plan and prepare for some day in the future when the gas is gone and we need a more diverse economy?

Who is in the room when decisions about the gas industry are being made? Are our communities empowered, or are government officials and gas lobbyists working out deals behind closed doors?

Hopefully, the stories about this crossroads in our state will shine some light on how West Virginia can learn from our past and the experience of people like Dixie Woolum. Follow along, and please tell us your stories, about your experience with the coal or the natural gas industry in West Virginia.

You can email us at changingwv@wvgazettemail.com or call 304-348-1702. You can also send us regular mail to Ken Ward Jr., Charleston Gazette-Mail, 1001 Virginia Street, East., Charleston, W.Va., 25301 Plus, we’ll be giving you more information in the days to come about how to take part in this conversation.

Reach Ken Ward Jr. at kward@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1702, or follow @kenwardjr on Twitter.

On the 28th of January, 2012, two lectures were presented at Athens, Ohio.  The local speaker was Dr. S. Thomas Bond of Harrison County, WV. He is active in the Guardians of the West Fork as well as the WV/PA Monongahela Area Watersheds Compact. The other speaker was Calvin Tillman, former mayor of DISH, Texas. Mr. Tillman talked about the destruction in the Dish area and the health effects on his family and his neighbors associated with the drilling and fracking of shale for oil and gas.

Tom Bond wanted to reach three audiences: the older people and very busy people present, who rely mostly on verbal communication, the larger portion of the group, who rely mostly on reading and the third part who are internet savvy and have enough time and inclination to follow up.

A comprehensive talk was presented, as can be found on the web-site referenced here.  In Dr. Bond’s introduction, he said:

My view of the earth is Biblical: it was put here for our use.  But we are here as cultivators, not to be desecrators.  Our use is to be prudent, not extravagant.  It is not to destroy our resources and our selves and the good earth we have been given. I hope this ties together for you three things: conservationism, environmentalism, and a moral approach to use of the earth, given our individual, indefinite tenure on the earth.  

Some of the topics covered by Dr. Bond were air pollution, water pollution in streams, contamination of aquifers, heavy trucks destroy inadequate roads, landmen and leases, a corruption of the political process, drill site damages, explosions, health issues, life style issues, transient workers, population scale issues, loss of surface (land) values, and the overall impacts of drilling and fracking.

In conclusion, Dr. Bond said “Everyone has to fight his own battle in this, as far as his own property is concerned.  It is your property against one of the greatest concentrations of wealth ever known. But we have the law, such as it is. And you have your MIND and TIME TO THINK AND TO LEARN. You must be well informed, you must keep your eyes open and you must consult with other people. Stick your head in the sand and they will bury the other end!  We need to cooperate to move the political process, too.  It is hard work and difficult for people who have many other responsibilities.  Ultimately, it is the only hope.”

For the full text of this talk in PDF format, see “Overview of Shale Drilling” presented in Athens, Ohio, on January 28th.