Donald Trump Throws Climate Science In Salvadoran Supermax
Better cover up those science-affiliated tattoos, y'all.
Former Trump homeland security advisor Olivia Troye recalled being astonished in 2018 that officials were discussing deep-sixing the National Climate Assessment report, firing all the scientists, or even replacing them with an oil-friendly version.
“That was one of the meetings where I was like, ‘Holy shit, what the hell have I done?’” she said. “Hearing it firsthand and being like, ‘Oh my God, they’re actually going to get rid of scientists who are just simply operating on facts.’”
Ultimately, though, John Bolton, then Trump’s national security adviser, went all Adult In The Room and pointed out that the report was mandated by Congress, and said it had to be released. Russell Vought, the Heritage Foundation/Project 2025 guy who was then and is now head of the Office of Management and Budget, was among those at the meeting who opposed its release altogether. The administration quietly released it the day after Thanksgiving 2018 in hopes it wouldn’t be noticed, but that move only brought it more publicity.
Trump clearly learned his lesson, as did Vought. No adults are in any rooms this time around, and in Project 2025, Vought specifically targeted the National Climate Assessment because the wealth of scientific data it provides keeps showing that the US will suffer economically as climate change grows worse. Obviously, then, the solution is to kill off the science. Climate research, Vought complained, could “reduce the scope of legally proper options in presidential decision-making and in agency rulemakings and adjudications.”
And so the Trump administration on Monday did just that, and fired all the scientists working on the sixth National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report that’s published every four years to explain how the country is being affected by global warming.
As The New York Times puts it with just a bit of an understatement (gift link), “The move puts the future of the report […] into serious jeopardy, experts said.” Hey, Congress may have required the report be compiled every so often since 2000, but is there anything in the law requiring the executive branch to actually pay for it? Or maybe Trump will simply have his climate denier friends put together a slapdash replacement contending that climate change is actually good for America.
The comprehensive climate reports cover every aspect of how climate affects the country in sectors like human health, agriculture, water supplies, transportation, and the like. The most recent National Climate Assessment, published in 2023, also included, for the first time, a chapter on the economic effects of a changing climate, pointing out the increasing costs of climate-related extreme weather and explaining that “the benefits of deep emissions cuts for current and future generations are expected to far outweigh the costs.”
The report also emphasized that transitioning away from fossil fuels would reduce pollution, resulting in “widespread health benefits and avoided death or illness that far outweigh the costs of mitigation.” In other words, the transition would pay for itself in lower health and mortality costs.
But the people who wouldn’t be getting sick or dying would only be all of us, not specifically fossil fuel stockholders or GOP donors, so no, we won’t be having any of that crazy talk under Donald Trump.
The periodic climate reports are a huge undertaking, with hundreds of contributing scientists who volunteer their time to write it, bringing to it a vast range of expertise.
But Monday, the researchers preparing the next assessment got an email telling them that their services are no longer needed.
“We are now releasing all current assessment participants from their roles,” the email said. “As plans develop for the assessment, there may be future opportunities to contribute or engage. Thank you for your service.”
The scope of the next climate assessment, an email sent Monday said, “is currently being reevaluated in accordance with the Global Change Research Act of 1990,” which established the body that creates the periodic climate reports. Under Trump, of course, “in accordance with” translates to “finding every conceivable way to distort the law’s meaning we can get away with.”
That Global Change Research Program established by that law was empowered by Congress to develop policy related to climate change and other environmental crises. One of its early achievements, back in the 1990s, was in pulling together research that guided regulations to prevent depletion of the ozone layer. Remember how the world headed off that potential disaster with science, international agreements, and regulations? And the economy didn’t even collapse, either! Since then, the program has coordinated the periodic climate assessments across a range of federal agencies.
The detailed scientific data collected in each National Climate Assessment are used by state and local governments, as well as by industry, to prepare for and to try to mitigate the effects of more extreme weather, so not updating the reports as required by Congress leaves the country to rely on other, less comprehensive data.
But Monday’s firing of the scientists working on the report was only the final blow; earlier in April, the administration canceled a key contract that paid for the production of the climate reports, effectively defunding the Global Change Research Program. That will have other fallout beyond just killing off the next climate assessment, since the program’s “interagency working groups are the primary way that federal agencies collaborate on climate problems, sharing data and expertise on greenhouse gas monitoring and sea level rise.”
Beyond that, the USGCRP also coordinates America’s contributions to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which of course is the biggest international body dealing with climate science. No big deal, since the US has decided we’re not part of the world anymore.
There’s no getting around the fact that Trump is doing all he can to disrupt climate science — hell, all science — in the US, and the damage he’s doing will take years to fix, however quickly he’s removed from office. But there’s also this to keep in mind: Trump’s efforts to boost fossil fuels keep crashing into his insane tariffs, which may harm Big Oil as much as other policies may aim at helping them. His whopping tariffs on cheap imported fast fashion and other goods from China will almost certainly reduce the emissions from all that air freight, though the details may not be clear for a while. And Crom help us if we have an international depression as a result, but that would mean lower emissions as well, in the worst way you could get them.
With the US determined to go the wrong way on climate, we sure hope China keeps accelerating its massive transition to renewables.
[NYT (gift link) / E&E News / Grist / NYT]
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Alternate photo caption: "Oh no. We are truly le phoqued"
Hey kids, if you need a little climate hopium, here's Bill McKibben on the climate bona fides of Canadian PM Mark Carney. I'm working on a wonket for you on him and Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum, who is herself an actual climate scientist. (yes, I'll get into Carney's lifting of the consumer carbon tax too)
Trump's surrounded, in other words!
https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/the-world-politely-tells-trump-to