Joe Biden is upfront with appointees and intentions

From an Article by Dino Grandoni and Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, January 15, 2021

President-elect Joe Biden added more than a half-dozen climate staffers to his White House team Thursday, drawing from the ranks of green groups, environmental justice advocates and former Democratic administration officials to grow an inner circle that will help him try to slash the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The new hires include David J. Hayes, who served as Interior deputy secretary under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; Cecilia Martinez, a prominent environmental justice advocate based in Minneapolis who advised the transition team; and Stef Feldman, a top Biden campaign aide who helped craft his climate plan. They will work with several incoming Cabinet officials new to Biden’s orbit, including North Carolina environmental regulator Michael S. Regan, picked to run the Environmental Protection Agency, and Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), set to serve as interior secretary.

The incoming White House team — which also includes former secretary of state John F. Kerry and former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, along with Obama administration veterans in the National Security Council and the White House Counsel’s Office — represents the most robust climate-focused group assembled in the West Wing.

“These qualified, diverse and experienced appointees share the president and vice president-elect’s view that there is no greater challenge facing our country and our world than climate change,” the transition team said in a statement. “From marshaling every part of our government, working directly with communities, and harnessing the forces of science these appointees will be instrumental in utilizing all the tools at the incoming administration’s disposal to address climate change head on.”

Biden, set to take office in less than a week, will try to execute a far-reaching strategy to embed climate action across government agencies and in legislation on Capitol Hill. He has also pledged to address the disproportionate pollution burden carried by poor and minority neighborhoods.

In a recent interview, John Podesta, who helped spearhead Obama’s second-term climate agenda as senior counselor to the president, noted that Biden has assembled more expertise on the subject than any of his predecessors. Podesta said, the president-elect is building out the White House staff on both the international and domestic sides. “It shows how central climate change is to Biden’s foreign and security policy, just as it is to his domestic and economic policy,” he said.

Biden wants to ban all new drilling on public lands and waters. There are multiple reasons why that will be hard to do.

Martinez will play a major role in tackling pollution disparities as senior director for environmental justice at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).

In an interview in July, Martinez said addressing the acute impact poor and minority neighborhoods often face from pollution needs to be “a central focus of CEQ.”

The Biden administration’s initiative on environmental justice “needs to really have some teeth to it so that the different federal agencies not only develop their plans and collaborate, but there is accountability,” she added.

David J. Hayes, a former deputy secretary of the Interior under the Obama administration, will be Biden’s special assistant for climate policy.

Martinez is a newcomer to Washington but the new lineup includes some longtime bureaucratic veterans such as Hayes, who will serve as special assistant to the president for climate policy. Hayes spearheaded Interior’s renewable energy development plans and its efforts to address climate change impacts in the Arctic under Obama, before joining the New York School of Law’s State Energy and Environmental Impact Center. From that perch, he helped organize several legal challenges by Democratic attorneys general to the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda.

Maggie Thomas, a former climate adviser to two of Biden’s former rivals for the presidency, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), will serve as chief of staff in the Office of Domestic Climate Policy.

Thomas helped found a green group, Evergreen Action, which pushed Democrats to adopt pieces of Inslee’s comprehensive climate plan and lent policy chops to the burgeoning youth climate movement.

Feldman, a longtime Biden aide who started as his policy intern when he was vice president and rose to become his 2020 campaign’s policy director, will serve as deputy assistant to Biden.

During the presidential race, she helped get the buy-in of young climate activists, union leaders, environmental justice advocates and former Democratic rivals when writing Biden’s proposal to eliminate carbon pollution from the electric sector by 2035 and to spend $2 trillion over four years to boost clean energy.

Jeff Marootian, who directs the D.C. Department of Transportation, will also join the White House and help oversee future hires as special assistant to the president for climate and science agency personnel.
In recent days, Biden has also announced the return to the White House of two Obama-era officials who worked on energy and climate issues: Melanie Nakagawa, a former aide to Kerry at the State Department, and Megan Ceronsky, a former special assistant and associate counsel to Obama.

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See also: UN urges nations to scale up climate change adaptation to avoid major economic loss, Emma Newburger, CNBC News, January 14, 2021

The effects of “climate change” are many and varied

Letter to Editor by Larry Harris, Morgantown Dominion Post, June 2, 2019

The news has been full of stories of disastrous weather events of late: Heavy rainfall followed by floods in the Midwest; increased numbers of tornados, high temperatures, melting ice packs and so on.

A Washington Post article pointed out that it was 84 degrees in the Arctic last week. Eighteen of the hottest years on record have occurred since 2000. These are all indications that our climate is changing.

What is causing the extremes of temperature? Climate scientists point to increased greenhouse gases such as CO2, which reached 415 ppm (parts per million) this week — the highest in human history. In fact, CO2 levels are rising in an exponential manner due to our continued burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.

Most countries in the world recognize the need to reduce the use of fossil fuels, but our country, the greatest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, is denying there is a problem.

This week it was announced that the EPA was told to change the way it reports climate information. No more reports will be allowed that show how bad things will be after 2040 if we do not limit our use of fossil fuels.

Our current administration in Washington is interfering with the reporting of science, thereby allowing politics and money interests to trump the scientific method. It has become difficult to know what is true in our society, due to the increased occurrence of fake news.

But real science is based on truth, on studies that correlate physical data to events. If our president can step into the scientific world and tell scientists what they can and can’t report, then we have slipped to a dangerous place for the future. This has to change.

We are fortunate to be able to vote for better leadership, and 2020 is the time to do so.

>>> Larry Harris, Retired Professor of Biochemistry at WVU, has served on the Environmental Protection Advisory Council for the WV-DEP

We are not ready for these climate impacts ...

From an Article by Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, November 23, 2018

In a move environmentalists and journalists denounced as a blatant effort to bury facts that conflict with the president’s denialism and pro-fossil fuel agenda, the Trump administration used the Friday after Thanksgiving to quietly release Volume II of the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), which warned “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization” and concluded that “greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the only factors that can account” for planet-threatening warming.

“Climate change is spawning more extreme weather, causing irreparable harm to communities, costing billions of dollars a year, and leading to countless deaths. We can stop climate destruction, but only if we act quickly to end the use of fossil fuels.”
……………. —Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch

“The decision to release this damning report when families are beginning to celebrate the holidays and newsrooms are short-staffed is a brazen attempt to bury the truth from the public that we must act now to move off fossil fuels and stabilize the climate,” Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said in a statement.

“Releasing this report when no one is looking, tweeting his annual nonsense about global warming and cold weather, and announcing that he’ll use the upcoming U.N. climate meetings as a fossil fuel tradeshow, Trump is doubling down on his climate denial for the holidays—as many families are still reeling from unnatural climate disasters across the country,” Hauter continued. “The science is way past in on climate change… We must prepare for our climate future in spite of Trump.”

From deadly wildfires to catastrophic hurricanes and other extreme weather events, the “impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future,” notes the congressionally mandated report—the first of its kind released since President Donald Trump took office in 2017.

Authored by officials from over a dozen federal agencies, the report warns that in the absence of aggressive action to quickly slash carbon emissions, the climate crisis will continue to have increasingly devastating effects on the environment, wildlife, and human health.

“It is very likely that some impacts, such as the effects of ice sheet disintegration on sea level rise and coastal development, will be irreversible for many thousands of years, and others, such as species extinction, will be permanent,” the report warns.

Using the hashtag #ClimateFriday, environmentalists worked to overcome the Trump administration’s attempt to hide the NCA4 amid the chaos of the holidays by highlighting the report’s findings and stressing its dire implications if ambitious and global climate action is not taken.

“This report makes it clear that climate change is not some problem in the distant future,” Brenda Ekwurzel, the director of climate science at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), said in a statement. “It’s happening right now in every part of the country.”

The Washington Post summarized the report’s key findings with regard to major regions of the U.S.:

Already, western mountain ranges are retaining much less snow throughout the year, threatening water supplies below them. Coral reefs in the Caribbean, Hawaii, Florida, and the U.S.’s Pacific territories are experiencing severe bleaching events. Wildfires are devouring ever larger areas during longer fire seasons. And the country’s sole Arctic state, Alaska, is seeing a staggering rate of warming that has utterly upended its ecosystems, from once ice-clogged coastlines to increasingly thawing permafrost tundras.

The federal report comes as climate activists and progressives like Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are pushing for the Democratic Party to combat the Trump administration’s fossil fuel agenda with ambitious climate action centered around a Green New Deal.

“It’s not enough to think it’s ‘important.’ We must make it urgent,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter. “That’s why we need a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, and why fossil fuel-funded officials shouldn’t be writing climate change policy.”

“Climate change is spawning more extreme weather, causing irreparable harm to communities, costing billions of dollars a year, and leading to countless deaths. We can stop climate destruction, but only if we act quickly to end the use of fossil fuels and transition to 100 percent clean renewable energy,” concluded Hauter of Food & Water Watch. “This transition is not only possible, but necessary for the health and prosperity of people and the planet.”

Climate change is the primary issue confronting the world today

From the Opinion Column of Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, Sept. 11, 2018

What if Trump’s tax cuts, deregulation, scrapping of Obamacare without any alternative and military spending surge were actually ill-thought-through, short-term-focused initiatives that all ignored expert opinion — because they mostly emerged from off-the-cuff remarks at Trump pep rallies — and collectively amount to a sugar high that not only will be unsustainable but will leave our economy far more vulnerable in the long term?

Let’s take that view for a spin: I favor corporate tax cuts — big ones. But I would have offset them with a carbon tax, a tax on sugar and a small financial transaction tax. That way, we’d unleash the energy of our corporations while mitigating climate change, spurring the next great global industry — clean power — curbing childhood asthma and diabetes and not adding to our national debt, thereby making ourselves more resilient as a country.

When Trump simultaneously cuts corporate taxes and withdraws America from the Paris climate accord, tries to revive the coal industry by lowering pollution standards and weakens fuel economy standards for U.S.-made cars and trucks, he is vastly adding to the financial debts and carbon debts that will burden our children.

And he is doing this despite many economists warning that increasing thedeficit when your economy is already growing nicely is really, really reckless — because you may need that money to stimulate your way out of the next recession.

And he is doing this at a time when virtually every climate scientist has warned that global-warming-driven extreme weather events — droughts, floods and wildfires — are sharply on the rise and we are staring through the last window of time to mitigate climate change so that we can manage the impacts that are already unavoidable and avoid the impacts that will be terrifyingly unmanageable.

In June, The Associated Press reported on the latest International Monetary Fund survey of the U.S. economy, which concluded that as a result of Trump’s “tax cuts and expected increases in defense and domestic programs, the federal budget deficit as a percentage of the total economy will exceed 4.5 percent of G.D.P. by next year — nearly double what it was just three years ago.” Such a “big boost … has not been seen in the United States since President Lyndon Johnson in the late 1960s boosted spending on the Vietnam War at the same time it was adopting Johnson’s Great Society programs.”

The National Debt Clock topped $21 trillion in July. (Associated Press)

Faced with so much debt, which the country will not be able to grow out of, The A.P. story continued, paraphrasing the I.M.F. report, the U.S. “may need to take politically painful steps,” such as cutting Social Security benefits and imposing higher taxes on consumers. (We’ll probably also have to limit spending on new roads, bridges and research.)

You might want to let your kids know that. You might also want to share with your kids the recent study from a group of Australian climate scientists who modeled the damage to different economies if we don’t work together to achieve the Paris climate accord’s goal of limiting the increase in global average temperature by 2100 to less than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The rise in sea level will require massive movements of people and cities, and the soaring heat levels will cause losses in agricultural productivity and declines in human health across the globe. As a result, the study found, the economic impacts of ignoring the Paris limits will be “comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s, with its global fall in G.D.P. of 15 percent, except these will occur year after year, with no way for effective redress. … Many governments around the globe won’t be able to cope and will, to put it simply, fail.”

Note: President Trump promised to support the coal industry (again) at a rally in Charleston, W.Va., in August.

Many urgent lessons for all ...

From Katharine Hayhoe, Texas Tech University, November 3, 2017

The new Climate Science Special Report confirms what we’ve known for decades:

~~ Climate is changing!
~~ Humans are responsible!
~~ The risks are serious!
~~ The time to act is now!

Here is a thread on the most important findings of our new climate science report: https://science2017.globalchange.gov

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The contents of the report contradict claims by President Trump and his team, who have continually downplayed the human contribution to climate change and questioned the ability of scientists to predict its effects.

Earlier this year, Trump said he planned to withdraw the U.S. from the landmark Paris climate agreement, which requires countries to establish ambitious targets to reduce the greenhouse gasses that cause global warming.

There are no policy recommendations in the report, only scientific information, according to coordinating lead author David Fahey of NOAA. There was also no interference from policymakers, he said.

In addition, the White House Office of Science and Technology signed off on the report, said Virginia Burkett, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey and acting chair of the subcommittee on Global Change Research.

The report was prepared by hundreds of scientists from 13 federal agencies, who assessed more than 1,500 scientific studies and reports to write it. It was also peer reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences.

Some of the report’s findings included:

>>> Global average sea level has risen by about 7–8 inches since 1900, with almost half (about 3 inches) of that rise occurring since 1993.

>>> Global average sea levels are expected to continue to rise — by at least several inches in the next 15 years and by 1–4 feet by 2100. A rise of as much as 8 feet by 2100 cannot be ruled out.

>>> Heavy rainfall is increasing in intensity and frequency across the United States and globally and is expected to continue to increase.

>>> The incidence of daily tidal flooding is accelerating in more than 25 Atlantic and Gulf Coast cities.

>>> Heatwaves have become more frequent in the United States since the 1960s, while extreme cold temperatures and cold waves are less frequent.

>>> The incidence of large forest fires in the western United States and Alaska has increased since the early 1980s and is projected to further increase.

>>> Annual trends toward earlier spring melt and reduced snowpack are already affecting water resources in the western United States.

The report noted that the global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has now passed 400 parts per million, a level that last occurred about 3 million years ago, when both global average temperature and sea level were significantly higher than today.

The only solution to the problem is to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide) that are emitted globally.* – See Note below.

For the first time, the report also included a list of climate-related “surprises,” or unanticipated changes, in which tipping points in the Earth’s systems are crossed or climate-related extreme events happen at the same time, creating “compound extreme events,” multiplying the potential damage and destruction. They include large-scale shifts in major worldwide climate patterns that would wreak havoc on the global climate system.

The report concludes that “climate models are more likely to underestimate than to overestimate the amount of long-term future change.”

The second part of the assessment — which focuses on the impacts of climate change on human systems and ecosystems — was also released as a draft for public comment Friday.

“The Climate Science Special Report is the most up-to-date comprehensive report on climate science available right now anywhere on the planet,” said Robert E. Kopp, a climate and sea-level rise expert at Rutgers who helped write the report. “It confirms that climate change is real, occurring today, and principally caused by human emissions.”

Rachel Licker, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said “the assessment is like a doctor’s report that evaluates a patient’s vital signs and uses that information to diagnose a medical condition. In this case the medical condition is climate change and the symptoms are rising temperatures, higher sea levels and more extreme weather events,” she said.

“Experience tells us, and the Climate Science Special Report confirms, the United States is experiencing recurring heat waves, heavy rainfalls, more intense wildfires, and greater flooding from rising seas,” Licker said.

“The National Climate Assessment is only further proof that the Trump Administration can no longer attempt to misrepresent climate science of the country’s highest caliber as ‘fake news,’ said Ken Berlin, president the Climate Reality Project. “The American people deserve to know the truth about the reality staring us square in the face, and I urge the Trump Administration to seriously consider scientists’ findings and the input of the American people.”

Former Vice President Al Gore also chimed in on Twitter, noting that “if the Administration won’t listen and if the federal govt won’t act, states, cities, businesses, investors, & citizens will.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Reference Citation — USGCRP, 2017: Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I [Wuebbles, D.J., D.W. Fahey, K.A. Hibbard, D.J. Dokken, B.C. Stewart, and T.K. Maycock (eds.)]. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA, 470 pp, doi: 10.7930/J0J964J6.

* – NOTE: Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Scientists are essential to the future of mankind

Letter to the Editor by Joel Clement, Washington Post, July 19, 2017

NOTE: Joel Clement was director of the Office of Policy Analysis at the U.S. Interior Department until last week. He is now a senior adviser at the department’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue.

I am not a member of the deep state. I am not big government.

I am a scientist, a policy expert, a civil servant and a worried citizen. Reluctantly, as of today, I am also a whistleblower on an administration that chooses silence over science.

Nearly seven years ago, I came to work for the Interior Department, where, among other things, I’ve helped endangered communities in Alaska prepare for and adapt to a changing climate. But on June 15, I was one of about 50 senior department employees who received letters informing us of involuntary reassignments. Citing a need to “improve talent development, mission delivery and collaboration,” the letter informed me that I was reassigned to an unrelated job in the accounting office that collects royalty checks from fossil fuel companies.

I am not an accountant — but you don’t have to be one to see that the administration’s excuse for a reassignment such as mine doesn’t add up. A few days after my reassignment, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke testified before Congress that the department would use reassignments as part of its effort to eliminate employees; the only reasonable inference from that testimony is that he expects people to quit in response to undesirable transfers. Some of my colleagues are being relocated across the country, at taxpayer expense, to serve in equally ill-fitting jobs.

I believe I was retaliated against for speaking out publicly about the dangers that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities. During the months preceding my reassignment, I raised the issue with White House officials, senior Interior officials and the international community, most recently at a U.N. conference in June. It is clear to me that the administration was so uncomfortable with this work, and my disclosures, that I was reassigned with the intent to coerce me into leaving the federal government.

On Wednesday, I filed two forms — a complaint and a disclosure of information — with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. I filed the disclosure because eliminating my role coordinating federal engagement and leaving my former position empty exacerbate the already significant threat to the health and the safety of certain Alaska Native communities. I filed the complaint because the Trump administration clearly retaliated against me for raising awareness of this danger. Our country values the safety of our citizens, and federal employees who disclose threats to health and safety are protected from reprisal by the Whistleblower Protection Act and Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act.

Removing a civil servant from his area of expertise and putting him in a job where he’s not needed and his experience is not relevant is a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars. Much more distressing, though, is what this charade means for American livelihoods. The Alaska Native villages of Kivalina, Shishmaref and Shaktoolik are perilously close to melting into the Arctic Ocean. In a region that is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, the land upon which citizens’ homes and schools stand is newly vulnerable to storms, floods and waves. As permafrost melts and protective sea ice recedes, these Alaska Native villages are one superstorm from being washed away, displacing hundreds of Americans and potentially costing lives. The members of these communities could soon become refugees in their own country.

Alaska’s elected officials know climate change presents a real risk to these communities. Gov. Bill Walker (I) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) have been sounding the alarm and scrambling for resources to help these villages. But to stave off a life-threatening situation, Alaska needs the help of a fully engaged federal government. Washington cannot turn its back.

While I have given small amounts to Democratic candidates in the past, I have no problem whatsoever working for a Republican administration. I believe that every president, regardless of party, has the right and responsibility to implement his policies. But that is not what is happening here. Putting citizens in harm’s way isn’t the president’s right. Silencing civil servants, stifling science, squandering taxpayer money and spurning communities in the face of imminent danger have never made America great.

Now that I have filed with the Office of Special Counsel, it is my hope that it will do a thorough investigation into the Interior Department’s actions. Our country protects those who seek to inform others about dangers to American lives. The threat to these Alaska Native communities is not theoretical. This is not a policy debate. Retaliation against me for those disclosures is unlawful.

Let’s be honest: The Trump administration didn’t think my years of science and policy experience were better suited to accounts receivable. It sidelined me in the hope that I would be quiet or quit. Born and raised in Maine, I was taught to work hard and speak truth to power. Trump and Zinke might kick me out of my office, but they can’t keep me from speaking out. They might refuse to respond to the reality of climate change, but their abuse of power cannot go unanswered.

Read more:

Letters to the Editor: Interior Department cuts represent an assault on our public lands

Jacquelyn Gill: The ‘war on science’ doesn’t just hurt scientists. It hurts everyone.