Tag: climate deniers
Trump Officials Order EPA To Remove Climate Page From Agency Website

Trump Officials Order EPA To Remove Climate Page From Agency Website

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website, two agency employees told Reuters, the latest move by the newly minted leadership to erase ex-President Barack Obama’s climate change initiatives.

The employees were notified by EPA officials on Tuesday that the administration had instructed EPA’s communications team to remove the website’s climate change page, which contains links to scientific global warming research, as well as detailed data on emissions. The page could go down as early as Wednesday, the sources said.

“If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear,” one of the EPA staffers told Reuters, who added some employees were scrambling to save some of the information housed on the website, or convince the Trump administration to preserve parts of it.

The sources asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

A Trump administration official did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The order comes as Trump’s administration has moved to curb the flow of information from several government agencies who oversee environmental issues since last week, in actions that appeared designed to tighten control and discourage dissenting views.

The moves have reinforced concerns that Trump, a climate change doubter, could seek to sideline scientific research showing that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming, as well as the career staffers at the agencies that conduct much of this research.

Climate science denier Myron Ebell, who helped guide the EPA’s transition after Trump was elected in November until he was sworn in last week, said the move was not surprising.

“My guess is the web pages will be taken down, but the links and information will be available,” he said.

The page includes links to the EPA’s inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, which contains emissions data from individual industrial facilities as well as the multiagency Climate Change Indicators report, which describes trends related to the causes and effects of climate change.

The Trump administration’s recently appointed team to guide the post-Obama transition has drawn heavily from the energy industry lobby and pro-drilling think tanks, according to a list of the newly introduced 10-member team.

Trump appointed Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a longtime foe of the EPA who has led 14 lawsuits against it, as the agency’s administrator. The Senate environment committee held a tense seven-hour confirmation hearing for Pruitt last week. No vote on his nomination has been scheduled yet.

(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Lisa Shumaker)

U.S. Companies Tout Climate Policies, Fund Climate Skeptics

U.S. Companies Tout Climate Policies, Fund Climate Skeptics

By Richard Valdmanis and Grant Smith

BOSTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. companies that have expressed the most fervent public support for President Barack Obama’s environmental agenda are also funding its biggest enemies – the scores of U.S. lawmakers who are climate change skeptics and oppose regulation to combat it, according to a Reuters review of public records.

Ahead of the Nov. 8 presidential and congressional elections, the donations from companies including PepsiCo, Dupont, and Google reveal a disconnect between how these companies present themselves to the public on environmental issues, and how they manage their political contributions to support business-friendly policy.

(Click here for a graphic: http://tmsnrt.rs/2bWl9dN)

Many companies active in U.S. politics spread their political donations broadly on both sides of the aisle and consider multiple issues when deciding whom to support.

But inconsistency between a company’s environmental positions and its political giving may point up a need for better oversight, according to Jon Lukomnik, head of the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute.

“There really needs to be a process that looks at these issues … at C-suite and board levels on a periodic basis,” Lukomnik said.

The Reuters review covered donations made during the 2016 election cycle by the political action committees (PACs) of 30 of the biggest publicly traded U.S. companies that signed Obama’s “American Business Act on Climate Change Pledge” in 2015, a public promise to enact climate-friendly corporate policies and support strong climate change oversight like the global climate accord signed in Paris.

The review found that 25 of the 30 companies are funding the campaigns of lawmakers featured on a “climate deniers” list that was put together by Organizing For Action, a non-profit created by former Obama campaign aides to advocate his agenda.

The list includes more than 130 members of Congress, nearly all Republicans, and is a who’s who of the biggest opponents of Obama’s plan to combat climate change. Some of those on the list dispute the label “denier” and describe themselves as climate change “skeptics”.

The list includes Republican Congressman Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, an energy advisor to presidential candidate Donald Trump who once argued the Earth was cooling not warming, and Republican U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who last year held up a snowball on the Senate floor as evidence global warming does not exist.

The review found PepsiCo and DuPont’s political action committees gave about half or more of the money from their top donations in support of senators and congressmen on the list. That amounted to $56,500 from the Pepsi PAC’s 29 donations of $2,500 and above, and $40,000 from the DuPont PAC’s 19 donations of $2,000 and above.

Other signatories to the American Business Act on Climate Change Pledge that gave more than a third of their top political contributions to lawmakers on the list include Google, AT&T, GE, Verizon, and Mondelez, according to the review.

Those levels of donations given to climate skeptics are relatively high given that the list covers about a quarter of U.S. Congress members.

Officials from PepsiCo, Google, AT&T, and Verizon did not respond to requests for comment. DuPont declined to comment, and Mondelez referred Reuters to the press release announcing its participation in the climate pledge.

A GE spokeswoman said the company supports “elected officials based on a wide range of issues, but we have consistently been outspoken about the need to address climate change and have invested over $17 billion in cleaner technology R&D over the last 11 years.”

PepsiCo has also been working to become more energy efficient, and now operates the country’s largest fleet of electric delivery trucks. But it still has a sizeable carbon footprint: It produced some 4.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents in 2013, down 2 percent from 2012, according to its website. A more recent figure was not available.

DuPont, also working to increase its energy efficiency, emitted 16.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2013.

POLITICALLY CHARGED

Congressman Cramer, a self-described climate skeptic who opposes Obama’s climate agenda but has taken donations from companies that signed the climate pledge, said companies tend to consider issues like tax policy, national security, and regulatory policy when picking who to support – as opposed to a single issue like the environment.

He, like other lawmakers featured on the Organizing For Action “climate deniers” list, said the debate over climate change was not as clear cut as Obama’s allies depict it.

“It is not a black and white issue, like if you agree with Obama you’re enlightened, and if you don’t you’re in the dark,” he said. “It is more of a spectrum.”

A spokeswoman for Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, another lawmaker featured on the list, said he had “done more than almost any other member of Congress to increase the use of clean energy” sources like wind and biofuels.

But she added he was opposed to Obama’s climate change initiatives, like the Clean Power Plan to curb carbon output, because he felt that it could hurt the competitiveness of U.S. businesses globally.

Senator Inhofe, who said he doesn’t mind the label “climate denier”, suggested that some companies had signed the American Business Act on Climate Change pledge for superficial reasons.

“These are competitive companies, and the board might have said ‘Look, right now it might be a popular thing to join this, and there’s no downside since we’re not really committing to anything.’ That absolutely goes on,” he said.

The five companies reviewed by Reuters that did not fund opponents to Obama’s climate change agenda either had no political action committee, like Apple, or made only a small number of contributions, like Coca Cola.

Lauren Compere, managing director at sustainable investment manager Boston Common Asset Management, said consistency between policy and political giving was becoming increasingly important to environmentally-minded investors.

“No company should want to be perceived as espousing progressive climate policies on the one hand, while funding climate deniers on the other,” she said.

(Editing by Stuart Grudgings)

Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama hosts a roundtable with CEOs to discuss efforts to tackle climate change both in the United States as well as on a global scale at the White House in Washington, DC, U.S. on October 19, 2015. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo

Democratic Candidates Must Remain The Standard Bearers On Climate Change

Democratic Candidates Must Remain The Standard Bearers On Climate Change

During the last Democratic debate, moderators from CNN failed to ask even a single question about climate change or clean energy. In fact, despite record global temperatures in the past months, extreme flooding from North Carolina to Scotland, and increasingly dire predictions about shrinking coasts and expanding deserts, there has been far too little conversation about climate change so far during the 2016 campaign.

Failing to address climate change is a mistake—one the party, the nation, and ultimately the world cannot afford to repeat at next Sunday’s fourth #DemDebate.

With Lindsey Graham out of the race, the Republican field is—at least until the eventual nominee might choose to rush to the center for the general election—effectively a wash for serious policy prescriptions on climate change. Between Sen. Ted Cruz inviting climate deniers to Congress, Sen. Marco “I’m Not a Scientist” Rubio’s wishy-washiness, and frontrunner Donald Trump’s characteristically confusing and wrong conviction that climate change doesn’t exist, there is scant hope for the GOP to offer anything substantive on this front.

But “because the Republicans aren’t doing it” isn’t the only reason for the Democrats to talk about climate change; if that were our only criteria for debate topics, each one would take days.

For one thing, fighting climate change is a national security issue. The men and women of the U.S. military are the ones deployed to deal with the consequences of climate change, whether that means resource shortages that empower extremist groups in already fragile states, or natural disasters requiring urgent humanitarian aid. And whatever love some lobbyists may have for fossil fuels, I know plenty of sailors who protected traffic through the Persian Gulf choke point and personally saw soldiers protecting fuel convoys in Iraq who have a clear view of oil’s harmful effect on our—and their—safety.

Moreover, fighting climate change isn’t a zero-sum game between economy and environment. When we work to move towards 50 percent clean energy nationwide by the year 2030, we are creating the clean energy tech that will drive the next century just like oil did the last and getting the jump on our competitors around the world. And a bonus? Almost 10 percent of those employed in the solar industry in particular are U.S. veterans, finding an outlet for their technical and leadership skills after returning home.

But beyond these benefits, President Obama’s efforts to coordinate and lead the global fight against climate change should simply be a point of pride for the Democratic Party. At home, his EPA’s Clean Power Plan raised standards across the board while letting states choose how to meet their individualized targets. And abroad, his State Department secured not only the first bilateral climate deal ever with China, but also a truly global climate deal that creates a reporting structure to hold every country—rich and poor, large and small—accountable for showing progress on the world stage.

This election, voters will head to the polls juggling national security and economic issues alike. Climate change touches both of these policy areas and more, and it is time for Democratic candidates to press their advantage on this key national challenge. 2016 is a chance for every candidate who shares the values of security and prosperity to continue President Obama’s legacy of decisive, comprehensive action. Here’s hoping we hear that incredibly opportunity reflected on the debate stage next week.

Jonathan Freeman is a fellow with the Truman National Security Project and a Ph.D. student in international relations at the London School of Economics. He has deployed twice to Iraq, once to Afghanistan, and is currently in the U.S. Army Reserves.

Photo: Participants are seen in silhouette as they look at a screen showing a world map with climate anomalies during the World Climate Change Conference 2015 (COP21) at Le Bourget, near Paris, France, December 8, 2015.  REUTERS/Stephane Mahe 

This Week In Crazy: Welcome Back To The Nuthouse

This Week In Crazy: Welcome Back To The Nuthouse

And we’re back. The right wing kicked the year off by freaking out in spectacular fashion to President Obama’s executive actions on gun control, indulging in some pandering to those precious Iowan evangelical ballot punchers, and kicking that dead horse called “traditional marriage” into a pulp.

Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:

5. Crying Truthers

The president betrayed some raw emotion at the presser where he announced his executive actions, allowing a brief stream of tears to fall down his face when he mentioned the Sandy Hook massacre where 20 first-graders were murdered.

Not so fast, said the Crying Truthers. Just because he let loose a little weep-juice doesn’t mean the chattering class is going to let this tyranny slide. And who’s to say the tears were real, anyway?

Rather than take aim at the (really pretty modest) gun control measures the president announced, right-wing pundits devoted themselves to the holy work of exposing an ocular fraud.

Fox News host Andrea Tatalos opined that the White House had deployed a supply of raw onion to the podium.

Breitbart‘s John Nolte suggested the president had rubbed a little Ben-Gay on his lids to induce the “fake fascist tears.”

Red Eyepanelist Michael Gunzelman suspected that the culprit was red pepper: “He put pepper to his eye,” he said. “And that’s how he started to cry. This is the breaking news that you need to know. He was not really crying there.”

Look closer, America. Only a brazen fraud would pretend that dead children is a sad thing.

Next: Mike Huckabee

4. Mike Huckabee

Pity Mike Huckabee, who is polling a dismal 1.3 in the polls. It would appear the pastor’s side skirmish for evangelical hearts and minds has been lost to the likes of Cruz, Rubio, and Carson. And Huck isn’t taking the news well at all, lashing out at Christian groups for lining up behind more impure candidates.

Huck went on Todd Starnes’s radio show to take aim at evangelical leaders for operating according to “secular standards.” The former Arkansas governor reiterated his campaign pledges to criminalize abortion by fiat and suggested that so-called Christians endorsing his rival candidates were intimated by Huck’s tenacity and were perhaps a little too focussed on their bottom line. After all, many of these Christian organizations mount successful fundraising efforts based on controversial issues like abortion, and if President Huck “slays the dragon” (i.e. outlaws abortion), then what’s left to sustain these Christian coffers?

A lot of these organizations wouldn’t have the ability to do urgent fundraising because if we slay the dragon, what dragon do they continue to fight? And so, for many of them, it could be a real detriment to their organization’s abilities to gin up their supporters and raise the contributions, and I know that sounds cynical but, Todd, it is what it is.

Yes, it’s breathtakingly cynical, in fact — and more than a little pathetic that Huckabee is justifying his flailing in the polls by basically accusing Christians of not being Christian enough for him. According to Right Wing Watch“Huckabee then went on to flat-out accuse the individuals and organizations that shunned his campaign of operating by ‘secular standards’ and not really believing in the power of prayer or in God’s ability to do great things, saying that they ‘will talk about prayer but [they] really don’t necessarily believe that it will change things.'”

On a related note, in a Facebook post Wednesday, Huck demanded to know why the president was so quick to save lives via gun control, but not by eliminating legal abortion. “As President,” he wrote, “I will repeal Obama’s unconstitutional executive actions AND eliminate ALL abortions in this country instead. I will never restrict our Second Amendment rights. I will vigorously oppose new gun control laws,” and so on and so forth. (You get a gun! And you get a gun!)

 

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Huck’s just airing out his now familiar hypocrisy: As we know, Huck believes that executive action and judicial interpretations of the Constitution are very bad and must not be tolerated, especially when they are used to legalize same-sex marriage or to enforce gun control laws already on the books. But in the same breath, he promises to stop enforcing gun laws and to declare that zygotes are human beings protected under the Constitution. So basically executive and judicial powers are evil, until and unless Huck is the one sitting in the big chair, at which point he can go to town running roughshod over civil liberties and progress on guns.

He is getting kind of desperate, isn’t he?

Next: Bryan Fischer

3. Bryan Fischer

What’s left to say about Bryan Fischer? The American Family Association spokesghoul doubtless has one of the more creative hot takes on the president’s executive action on guns: He declared on his radio program Wednesday that this is all a ploy to disarm Americans who deny climate change.

I give him points for imagination. Fischer synthesizes both the troglodytic denialism of science skeptics and the frothing, paranoid lunacy of gun nuts. PerRight Wing Watch, his logic unfurls with all the majestic free association of fridge magnet poetry: “If you are a danger to yourself or to others because of a mental health issue, then you can be denied the right to own a gun. If you and I deny that man-caused global warming is anything to worry about, then that’s going to make us a danger to others and unfit to own a gun.”

ViaRight Wing Watch

Next: Roy Moore 

2. Roy Moore

Judge Roy Moore — that renegade moral crusader and Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court  — is at it again.

Last year, in his quest to rid America of the scourge of the rule of law, Moore bucked a January federal court ruling that found Alabama’s same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional, and ordered probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. When the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges in June, that should have settled the issue (really, the federal court ruling should have settled the issue, but we’ll get back to that), but Moore, the white knight for Christian piety, is returning to his old game of refusing to bow before the specter of marriage equality.

Rallying behind the flag of his faith and some perverse interpretation of the notion of states’ rights, Moore has instructed probate judges in Alabama once again to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The problem, he says in his statement issued Wednesday, is that since the Obergefell ruling contradicts an Alabama Supreme Court ruling, there exists a state of “confusion and uncertainty” with regard to the law. And so, until his court renders a new judgment, Moore writes, “the existing orders of the Alabama Supreme Court that Alabama probate judges have a ministerial duty not to issue any marriage license contrary to the Alabama Sanctity of Marriage Amendment or the Alabama Marriage Protection Act remain in full force and effect.”

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Judge Moore’s order. (Click to enlarge)

Moore’s argument rests on the highly suspect logic that since Obergefell united four direct challenges to same-sex marriage bans in states within the Sixth Circuit, marriage laws in dispute outside of the Sixth Circuit do not fall under the jurisdiction of the ruling. Moore dubiously cites an “apparent conflict between the decision of the Alabama Supreme Court […] and the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Obergefell.”

This is patent bull excreta.

Look. You don’t have to be a legal expert to appreciate that when a state supreme court disagrees with the highest court in the land, no such “conflict” exists. The Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex marriage bans are unconstitutional. That means they’re unconstitutional everywhere in the nation. But, as we noted, a federal court in Alabama had already ruled that Alabama’s same-sex marriage was unconstitutional months before SCOTUS rendered its rulingSo we’ve been here before with Moore.

This has nothing to do with the rule of law, which Moore seems so eager and willing to flout, and everything to do with Moore’s personal religious beliefs. He has said in the past that marriage equality is “going to destroy the nation,” cited his duty to enforce a “higher law,” and unimaginatively likened Obergefell to both Nazism and the Dred Scott decision.

Moore does not even have the intellectual honesty to mention in his recent order the federal court ruling that struck down Alabama’s same-sex marriage ban months before Obergefell. Incidentally, the judge in that case orderedthat the Alabama Attorney General is prohibited from enforcing the Alabama laws which prohibit same-sex marriage. This injunction binds the defendant and all his officers, agents, servants and employees, and others in active concert or participation with any of them, who would seek to enforce the marriage laws of Alabama which prohibit same-sex marriage.”

That includes you, Judge Moore. That’s how it works.

ViaRight Wing Watch

Next: Marco Rubio

1. Marco Rubio

Marco Rubio dials the God gab up to 11 in a new TV ad targeted to Iowa evangelicals.

“Our goal is eternity,” Rubio begins, apparently ignorant of the two-term limit of the office he seeks.

Safety, prosperity, and the right to live and worship (or not) in peace — that is not what Americans want. Rubio informs the American electorate that what they really desire is “the ability to live alongside our Creator and for all time, to accept the free gift of salvation offered to us by Jesus Christ.” Can I get an “Amen”? Or can I at least get someone to bludgeon a disabled man to a pulp because he doesn’t believe in God?

There’s some kowtowing to the Christian persecution complex, in references to Christians’ “struggle on a daily basis.” He notes his intention to “cooperate with God’s plan” — not necessarily to, you know, cooperate with the federal, state, and local laws of a country that has enshrined separation between church and state as one of its core values. (Kim Davis for Attorney General — praise be!)

Oddly for a candidate who has made keeping Americans safe through hawkish military action abroad a cornerstone of his campaign, Rubio seems eerily chill with the notion of sending everyone to the afterlife for their eternal reward. Invoking the Gospel of Matthew, he asks voters, “Were your treasures stored up on earth or in Heaven?” In light of his notorious money management problems, the senator had better hope his treasure in Heaven is better maintained than his treasure on Earth.

It all begs the question, as Mediaite succinctly put it: Does Rubio want to run the country or a mega-church?

Hat tip Mediaite

Photo: Fibonacci Blue via Flickr

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