Rod Serling’s Prophecy: Trump Takes Aim at Science, Scientists

Republican’s War on Science takes a dark new turn.

Sure, let’s destroy the foundation of US technological leadership over the last century. That’s a plan.

E&E News:

Every few years, the federal government publishes a comprehensive report that chronicles how climate change is transforming the United States and devastating the country with more extreme storms, wildfires and droughts.

But the next installment of the National Climate Assessment — due out in 2026 or 2027 — could dial back the usual scientific rigor in favor of an approach that would both elevate the viewpoint of climate science denialists and jettison all contributions from the Biden administration.

Scientists and climate policy experts say the proposed changes — which are being pushed by aides to President-elect Donald Trump — run the risk of undermining a foundational reference for government officials. And they say it could make it harder to craft future U.S. policies to address global warming.

The drive to reshape the National Climate Assessment is being led by one man: Russell Vought, a conservative warrior whom Trump wants to lead his Office of Management and Budget.

Vought, who ran OMB during Trump’s first term, has long sought to bury or weaken the National Climate Assessment. More recently, Vought has called for greater White House influence over the process, such as giving OMB the power to vet the scientists who will work on the next assessment.

During the first Trump administration, Vought was part of a meeting in the White House situation room where officials discussed firing the scientists who worked on the fourth edition, according to two Trump White House officials who were present.

Vought also is a chief architect of Project 2025, the conservative policy playbook that outlined how a second Trump administration could shift the federal government to the right.

Vought wrote an entire chapter that focused on how Trump could increase his power while diminishing that of Congress. It included a passage on ways to remake the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which produces the National Climate Assessment.

“The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power … to the American people,” Vought wrote.He warned in the Project 2025 playbook that climate research could constrain the incoming administration and “reduce the scope of legally proper options in presidential decision-making and in agency rulemakings and adjudications.”

In addition, he said that “since much environmental policymaking must run the gauntlet of judicial review, USGCRP actions can frustrate successful litigation defense in ways that the career bureaucracy should not be permitted to control.”

To overcome these obstacles, Vought suggested the Trump administration “critically analyze and, if required, refuse to accept any USGCRP assessment prepared under the Biden Administration.”

Salon:

It was not easy for Dr. Kevin Trenberth to leave the United States. An esteemed climate scientist who has published more than 600 articles on climatology, Trenberth spent more than four decades of his life in America, first teaching at the University of Illinois before joining the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), where he eventually became a distinguished scholar.

Yet by September 2019, the New Zealand native decided to return home because he’d had enough of America under President Donald Trump. Trenberth has long been a fierce critic of Trump, but now things were impacting him personally.

“I cannot go to NSF [the National Science Foundation] for research funds because NCAR is base funded that way,” Trenberth wrote in a note to himself at the time. “Nor has it been fruitful to garner funds internally, and the external grants, especially with NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] dried up after 2012 when NOAA put forward a proposal for a climate service but thoroughly messed it up, and Lamar Smith [R-Texas, then-chair of the Science Committee in the House] not only killed it but cut research funds for climate by 30%.”

America’s lack of support for climate science poses a serious problem for the survival of our species, according to Trenberth. Because the United States is both a leading world power and major contributor to climate change (along with China, the European Union and the United Kingdom), Trenberth says it must do its part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As human activity dumps carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases and water vapor into the atmosphere, the overheating planet will cause sea levels to rise, hurricanes to become more extreme and droughts and heatwaves to become more frequent and more intense.

It made Trenberth think of Neil Shute’s 1957 science fiction novel “On the Beach,” in which a nuclear war wiped out the Northern Hemisphere, forcing survivors to flee to southeast Australia and New Zealand. In that fictional scenario, humanity barbecued itself; in reality, Trenberth describes our species’ demise as more of a slow boil. As the temperature rises both figuratively and literally, the question for many scientists is whether they should stay to fight in a nation whose politics make it increasingly hostile to climate science.

By leaving during Trump’s first term, the emeritus Trenberth found one drastic but simple solution to the problem, which was to simply no longer reside in America. 

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In my 14 year old video below, I warned about right wing threats against climate scientists. We’ve now seen these threats expand to anyone who wishes to support clean energy.