Pruitt, Auto Industry, and Climate Deniers Retreat Behind Closed Doors to Weaken Fuel Efficiency Targets
By Ben Jervey • Wednesday, April 4, 2018 – 13:09
On Tuesday, April 3, surrounded by representatives of the auto industry and conservative climate deniers, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt formally announced his decision to rewrite greenhouse gas emission standards for cars and light duty trucks, undercutting one of the Obama administration’s most effective climate programs.
From the last-minute, controversial venue change to the hypocritical messaging of its attendees, the announcement reflected the new normal in Trump’s Washington: the placement of industry influence and climate science denial front and center.
Trump, Not Record-Breaking Disasters, Dominated TV News Coverage of Climate Change in 2017
By Farron Cousins • Monday, February 12, 2018 – 16:51
This map depicts the general location of the sixteen weather and climate disasters assessed to cause at least one billion dollars in direct damages during 2017. [CLICK MAP TO ENLARGE] Credit: Climate.gov, public domainExtreme weather events in the United States seemed ever-present in the media during 2017, with historic wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and droughts receiving national coverage. What was less common, however, was major TV news networks making the connection between these kinds of billion-dollar disasters and climate change for their viewers. That’s despite scientific support confirming these links, and some experts even warning that such extreme events may be “the new normal.”
The conclusion about major network coverage of climate change comes from a new report by Media Matters for America.
This report found that the major news networks — ABC, NBC, Fox, CBS, and PBS — spent a combined 260 minutes covering climate change in 2017 on their evening news and Sunday morning talk shows. The report does not include coverage from cable news outlets. While CBS and PBS spent more time on the issue than the rest of the networks, they were also the only ones to feature guests who outright denied the overwhelming scientific consensus around human-caused climate change.
For example, an October 10 edition of PBS NewsHour hosted notorious coal executive Bob Murray of Murray Coal, who made the claim that “I listen to 4,000 scientists … who tell me that mankind is not affecting climate change.” Murray’s interviewer did not question or correct his erroneous claims, and presented Murray’s position as one of two “sides” along with former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy.
Climate Change and Trump
Up from a dismal 50 minutes of total coverage in 2016, last year’s TV news attention on climate change actually rarely discussed extreme weather events — or greenhouse gas emissions, advances in climate science, or much besides the Trump administration’s actions and statements. In fact, the networks only devoted a combined 12 total segments to discussing the link between extreme weather and climate change, and two of those segments were discussing the links between climate change and hurricanes.
The networks, combined, also had four segments on public health issues related to climate change, three on economics and climate change, and just two which discussed the national security issues associated with climate change. There is some overlap in the numbers, as some issues were discussed in the same segments.
Instead, the lion’s share of the climate-related coverage — 205 of the 260 total minutes — was spent talking about Donald Trump and his administration’s actions on climate change and environmental policies.
Of all the network broadcasts, PBS devoted more segments than any other network to the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, with CBS coming in a very close second. PBS spent far more airtime discussing the administration’s rollback of environmental protections than the other four networks combined. Notably, none of the networks devoted a single segment last year to covering the climate implications of the Dakota Access or Keystone XLpipelines, which climate activists have fought vigorously and on which Trump issued decisions last year.
The report also mentions that nearly one-third of the broadcasts that mentioned Trump’s infamous 2012 tweet calling climate change a Chinese “hoax” did not bother to refute the president’s claims.
Billion Dollar Disasters
According to estimates, 2017’s extreme weather and climate disasters in the United States cost the country more than $300 billion. Since 1980, there have been 219 weather and climate catastrophes that have carried a price tag of over $1 billion a piece, according to the government’s own calculations. Between the more than a thousand deaths from natural disasters in the United States last year (mostly due to Hurricane Maria) and the astronomical price tag, it is obvious that major network coverage could have gone far deeper in reporting the context and connections to climate change.
Mainstream media’s overall failure to mention climate change in the context of extreme weather events helps prevent the public from linking the two.
Climate change has far more impacts than just rising temperatures, and until broadcasters begin explaining its links to human impacts, environmental damage, and extreme weather, too many people will be left with only half of the story.
Repost from the Los Angeles Daily News [Editor: This came to us in an E-Alert from Benicia Mayor Elizabeth Patterson, who wrote, “The red lights are flashing – hottest summers and fall, greatest hurricane force, worst fires in history of California, lives lost, air pollution killing millions, and all of this is costing us billions… …rising sea level will affect structures near the Benicia waterfront at 6 feet above current sea level. Our water (sewer) will be affected by rising sea level before 2050. Our water supply may be uncertain. We can mitigate and adapt….” – RS]
US Government Accountability Office: Climate change already costing U.S. billions in losses
By Michael Biesecker, Associated Press, October 23, 2017 8:13 pm
Sarah Boryszewski is helped by her father Gerald Peete as they dig for belongings in the remains of Boryszewski’s home in Coffey Park, Friday Oct. 20, 2017 in Santa Rosa, Calif. Northern California residents who fled a wildfire in the dead of night with only minutes to spare returned to their neighborhoods Friday for the first time in nearly two weeks to see if anything was standing. (Kent Porter/The Press Democrat via AP)
WASHINGTON — A non-partisan federal watchdog says climate change is already costing U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars each year, with those costs expected to rise as devastating storms, floods, wildfires and droughts become more frequent in the coming decades.
A Government Accountability Office report released Monday said the federal government has spent more than $350 billion over the last decade on disaster assistance programs and losses from flood and crop insurance. That tally does not include the massive toll from this year’s three major hurricanes and wildfires, expected to be among the most costly in the nation’s history.
The report predicts these costs will only grow in the future, potentially reaching a budget busting $35 billion a year by 2050. The report says the federal government doesn’t effectively plan for these recurring costs, classifying the financial exposure from climate-related costs as “high risk.”
“The federal government has not undertaken strategic government-wide planning to manage climate risks by using information on the potential economic effects of climate change to identify significant risks and craft appropriate federal responses,” the study said. “By using such information, the federal government could take the initial step in establishing government-wide priorities to manage such risks.”
GAO undertook the study following a request from Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
“This nonpartisan GAO report Senator Cantwell and I requested contains astonishing numbers about the consequences of climate change for our economy and for the federal budget in particular,” said Collins. “In Maine, our economy is inextricably linked to the environment. We are experiencing a real change in the sea life, which has serious implications for the livelihoods of many people across our state, including those who work in our iconic lobster industry.”
The report’s authors reviewed 30 government and academic studies examining the national and regional impacts of climate change. They also interviewed 28 experts familiar with the strengths and limitations of the studies, which rely on future projections of climate impacts to estimate likely costs.
The report says the fiscal impacts of climate change are likely to vary widely by region. The Southeast is at increased risk because of coastal property that could be swamped by storm surge and sea level rise. The Midwest and Great Plains are susceptible to decreased crop yields, the report said. The west is expected to see increased drought, wildfires and deadly heatwaves.
Advance copies were provided to the White House and the Environmental Protection Agency, which provided no official comments for inclusion in the GAO report.
Requests for comment from The Associated Press also received no response on Monday.
President Donald Trump has called climate change a hoax, announcing his intent to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accords and revoke Obama-era initiatives to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Trump has also appointed officials such as EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, all of whom question the scientific consensus that carbon released into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels is the primary driver of global warming.
Earlier this month Trump nominated Kathleen Hartnett White of Texas to serve as his top environmental adviser at the White House. She has credited the fossil fuel industry with “vastly improved living conditions across the world” and likened the work of mainstream climate scientists to “the dogmatic claims of ideologues and clerics.”
White, who works at a conservative think tank that has received funding from fossil-fuel companies, holds academic degrees in East Asian studies and comparative literature.
Hartnett-White, as previously reported by DeSmog, is a prominent climate change denier and former Chairman and Commissioner of the Texas Council on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) under then-Texas Governor Rick Perry. Perry now heads up the U.S. Department of Energy and is reported to have advocated for her to run CEQ. She is also an outspoken advocate of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and of exporting oil and gas to the global market.
Long seen as the presumptive front-runner to take the CEQ role, Hartnett-White also worked on President Trump’s presidential campaign on his Economic Advisory Team. And her name was once floated to head up the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as well, currently led by Scott Pruitt.
The head of the CEQ coordinates interagency science, climate, and environmental policy, and is tasked to oversee things like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review process and agencies’ compliance with that law. The CEQ as an entity itself was actually a creation of NEPA, mandated by that law.
Though CEQ oversees the NEPA process, it remains unclear how seriously Hartnett-White will take the NEPA review process, for decades seen as a bedrock of U.S. environmental regulation since NEPA became law in 1970.
Hartnett-White has long positioned herself as an opponent of environmental and climate actions taken by regulatory agencies. She currently works as a fellow-in-residence at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which receives fundingfrom ExxonMobil, the Heartland Institute, Koch Industries and others. White also helped head up the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Fueling Freedom Project, which had among its stated goals to “explain the forgotten moral case for fossil fuels” and “end the regulation of CO2 as a pollutant.”
In September 2016 during campaign season, Politico’s Morning Energy reported that Hartnett-White was “among a small group of people who have Donald Trump’s ear on energy policy.” Hartnett-White and Stephen Moore, who also worked on Trump’s campaign, co-authored a 2016 book titled, Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy. The book promoted fracking and said the U.S. shale gas bounty could be worth $50 trillion, a statement which has been called false by an energy analyst who crunched the numbers.
The book also claimed that all of the net jobs gained in the U.S. between 2007-2012 can be linked to the fracking revolution, which they wrote has spawned “millions of new jobs in the energy sector.”
But according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, during that time period, the number of oil and gas industry workers ranged from a low of about 140,700 jobs in 2007 to a high of 194,700 in 2012.
Not only a fracking promoter, Hartnett-White has also called carbon dioxide in the atmosphere a major benefit for society.
“No matter how many times, the President [Obama], EPA and the media rant about ‘dirty carbon pollution,’ there is no pollution about carbon itself! As a dictionary will tell you, carbon is the chemical basis of all life,” White wrote in September 2015.
“Our flesh, blood and bones are built of carbon. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the gas of life on this planet, an essential nutrient for plant growth on which human life depends. How craftily our government has masked these fundamental realities and the environmental benefits of fossil fuels!”
In a September 2016 interview with Politico, Hartnett-White advocated for the creation of a ”blue ribbon commission” on climate change, similar to the “red team-blue team” one being floated by Pruitt’s EPA. The commission, Hartnett-White told Politico, would create an “alternative scientific methodology” to the one used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She has also stated on the record that the UN has “revealed themselves” as advocating for communism.
Under the presidency of George W. Bush, someone with similarly pro-fossil fuels views also ran CEQ. Before taking over the helm at CEQ in the Bush White House, Philip Cooney served as a lawyer and lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute (API), which itself has a long track record of funding climate change denial.
Cooney came under a cloud of scandal and resigned when it was revealed that he had heavily edited scientific data showing a link between carbon emissions and global warming in official U.S. governmental reports.
“In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved,” reported The New York Times. “In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.”
Soon after he resigned, Cooney was hired by ExxonMobil, another key funder of climate change denial.
Harnett-White, too, has some instructive history to look back upon. In 2007, she came under fire for lack of climate and environmental action while chairing TCEQ. This motivated the watchdog group Public Citizen to create a billboard image near the TCEQ headquarters demanding to “Get White Out” and also build a website by the same name.
Public Citizen said she had not done enough to halt issues such as climate change or slow mercury and air pollution. They also stated that she had tried to erode democracy by eliminating the right to comment publicly on a proposed project unless one lived within two miles of its proposed site.
“Chairman White has failed to lead our environmental agency in the right direction. Instead of acting to curb the serious threat from global warming, the TCEQ buried its head in the sand, and determined that global warming impacts would not have to be considered in the contested case hearings for any of the coal plant permits,” Get White Out’s website said of her tenure.
The paper of record in Dallas, Texas, The Dallas Morning News, agreed with this sentiment in a July 2007 editorial written at the end of Harnett-White’s tenure at TCEQ, chiding her track-record in harsh terms.
“She has been an apologist for polluters, consistently siding with business interests instead of protecting public health,” wrote the paper. “Ms. White worked to set a low bar as she lobbied for lax ozone standards and pushed through an inadequate anti-pollution plan.”
In an example perhaps paralleling the Cooney situation most closely, during Harnett-White’s tenure at TCEQ, the agency regularly lowered the statistical data — as compared to federal EPA data — for the amount of alpha radiation traceable in drinking water in places such as Harris County, Texas.
“For years, tests performed by the Texas Department of State Health Services showed the utility provided water that exceeded the EPA legal limit for exposure to alpha radiation,” reported the broadcast news outlet KHOU, based out of Houston, in 2011. “However, the TCEQ would consistently subtract off each test’s margin of error from those results, making the actual testing results appear lower than they actually were.”
In her interview with KHOU, Hartnett-White defended TCEQ‘s actions on this issue during her tenure there.
“As memory serves me, that made incredibly good sense,” said Hartnett-White. “We did not believe the science of health effects justified EPA setting the standard where they did. I have far more trust in the vigor of the science that TCEQ assess, than I do EPA.”
As mandated by the U.S. Constitution’s “advise and consent” clause, Hartnett-White will go through a U.S. Senate confirmation hearing process, during which she will likely face questions about her past record of denying climate change and promoting fossil fuels. The Environmental Working Group says it is dismayed by the choice.
“At least Butch and Sundance had to put some effort into robbing banks and trains,” Ken Cook, EWG‘s president, said in a press statement. “If Hartnett-White joins Administrator Pruitt, polluters will stroll through the front doors of both the EPA and the White House, no questions asked, as the rampant looting of environmental and public health protection policies continues.”
On Tuesday, April 3, surrounded by representatives of the auto industry and conservative climate deniers, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt formally announced his decision to rewrite greenhouse gas emission standards for cars and light duty trucks, undercutting one of the Obama administration’s most effective climate programs.
