Draining the swamp is one thing, difficult enough to do and then contend with the alligators nesting there. Caleb Rossiter is even more concerned about the infiltration of climate change activists into every branch of federal bureaucracy.  His POV is explained in a Washington Examiner article Trump’s agenda faces climate deep state by John Siciliano | Jun 25, 2017.

Background

Rossiter, whose left-liberal credentials included a stint as counsel to former Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-Mass., who was one of Nancy Pelosi’s lieutenants after she swept to power in 2006, is a fervent supporter of clean fossil fuel development, and is sympathetic to Trump’s agenda. He made a name for himself for being a Democrat who is also a fervent critic of alarmist climate policy. His willingness to reject an article of faith in leftist and Democratic circles got him ousted a few years back from the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, where he was an associate fellow.

The Herculean Challenge

“So, there wasn’t much change at EPA this year, not much change at [the] State” Department, Rossiter says. People say Trump will “get it right next time” when it comes to the budget, Rossiter adds, but he isn’t convinced.

“It’s going to be hard … and this stuff is really deeply embedded in the budget. People are doing National Science Foundation studies, transportation studies based on the assumption that carbon dioxide is a clear and present danger to our country.”

Another long-term problem is that Obama planted climate change offices in Cabinet agencies all over the federal government. These climate offices are meant to direct, advise on, and recommend actions that have climate change as their guiding star. Their whole point is to ensure that federal agencies only approve projects that consider the climate consequences of government action.

Deep Green Climate Network

Tentacles are attached everywhere, but Rossiter provides examples of some the most obvious larger and more developed suckers.

The State Department‘s Office of the Special Envoy for Climate Change, or the SECC, which is responsible for negotiating climate deals and implementing U.S. policy on climate change.

The State Department also has an Office of Global Change, which represents the nation in any negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is the same convention that handled the Paris negotiations with 194 other countries. It also handles negotiations with other international organizations that handle climate change policymaking, including the International Civil Aviation Organization and the International Maritime Organization.

The U.S. Agency for International Development also has its own specialized Office of Climate Change. USAID is the nation’s primary distributor of foreign aid, and climate change is seen by the agency as one of the primary reasons its services are in greater need than ever before. USAID spends more than $300 million per year in 50 countries for “climate-smart development,” according to the agency.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has its Climate Change Program Office, which also guides the agency’s response by focusing on how global warming will affect agriculture, forests, grazing lands, and rural communities. It works to ensure that climate change is recognized and “fully integrated” into research, planning, and “decision-making processes,” according to the USDA website.

The Energy Department has at least two climate change or climate-related offices within its Office of International Affairs, overseen by the deputy assistant secretary for International Climate and Technology.  First, there is the Office of International Climate and Clean Energy, which coordinates clean energy development programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Second, there is the Office of International Science and Technology Collaboration, which oversees a number of programs with other countries to develop clean energy programs.

The Department of Transportation is another big Cabinet level agency with climate change policy strewn through it. One of its main initiatives is the Transportation and Climate Change Clearinghouse, which is designed as a “one-stop source of information on transportation and climate change issues,” according to the agency. “It includes information on greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories, analytic methods and tools, GHG reduction strategies, potential impacts of climate change on transportation infrastructure, and approaches for integrating climate change considerations into transportation decision making.”

The list goes on, according to Rossiter. The Department of Justice has its own programs, as does the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Education, he said.

Another large organization that the U.S. government is a part of is the World Bank. It is set up to fund projects all over the world, but has been known to hold up coal-fired power plant projects because of the threat of “climate catastrophe,” Rossiter said.

“A big one is at the bottom of your list at the Department of Transportation,” Rossiter said. “They put a lot of limitations on public transport, what can be approved, and they are very fixated on the greenhouse gas hypothesis.”

Next steps for Trump

Trump has taken some actions to disconnect the climate network, primarily by rolling back climate change regulations, land management decisions and international agreements such as the Paris climate change agreement. But all of these actions just scratch the surface, according to critics of Obama’s policies.

They say Trump hasn’t even begun to address the real grip that climate change alarmism had put in place within the government. Trump can turn off the engine, but other presidents can just as easily turn them on again if they are still there, which would leave Trump’s climate agenda in tatters.

Trump is attempting to strike out climate regulations painstakingly one at a time, which will take years, with no guarantee that a new president wouldn’t reverse all Trump’s actions. Revoking the endangerment finding would be a more secure method, because it would eliminate the raison d’etre for carbon dioxide regulation. At least, that’s what climate skeptics hope.

Rossiter said one of the weaknesses in Trump’s decision to leave Paris was that he failed to mention global warming science. “I wish Mr. Trump would have really cut the Gordian Knot by saying for scientific reasons it’s way too premature to restrict our economy on the basis of fears of climate catastrophe,” he said.

Rossiter believes the science isn’t as strong as most people say it is for taking action to stop global warming. “The 98 percent consensus is carbon dioxide is a warming gas. And it has, probably, some impact on the temperature,” but that “doesn’t mean you are immediately creating floods, hurricanes and droughts and locusts.

“This creates a problem because what we are trying to do, what we need to do, is defang the concept that has spread through the federal government. Once it’s defanged, it’s much easier to go through the executive branch agencies and say ‘look, our goal here is clean as possible generation of electricity for the wealth of the United States and the world.'”

Washington’s Future?

Angkor Wat Ta Prohm Temple overgrown with tree roots.

Update June 21, 2017

A leaked EPA memo (standard journalism these days) reveals that more members of the Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC) will not be renewed in their contracts and roles.

The new wave of dismissals brings the total number of BOSC members who will be out of a job in August to 47, which will leave just 11 members serving on the BOSC and its five subcommittees. None of the subcommittees will have a chair or vice chair, and all committee meetings scheduled for late summer and fall have been cancelled.

“Pruitt has pulled off a devious process here: he’s signaled that he intends to dismiss experienced advisors whose terms are expiring over the next year — and he’s using the fact that he’s dismissing them to immediately block them from doing any more work,” UCS’s Kimmell said.

Sign to be posted soon at the EPA

Background

An update on the power struggle inside the EPA is provided by Ronald Bailey’s May. 9, 2017 article EPA Bureaucracy Strikes Back: The Case of the Board of Scientific Counselors  How will the struggle between the permanent bureaucracy and the EPA’s new leadership play out?  Excerpts below.

The efforts of the permanent bureaucracy at the Environmental Protection Agency to hand the the new political leadership a fait accompli regarding the membership of that agency’s Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC) brought to mind the antics of Yes, Minister. The civil servants at the EPA had apparently assured the members of the BOSC whose three-year terms were ending that they could stay on for another term just as the Obama administration was winding down in January. Since the terms for more than half of the BOSC’s members ran out in late April, the agency bureaucrats essentially went to the new EPA leadership with the old list of Obama administration appointees at the last minute and said, “Sign this.”

The new team appointed by Trump declined to do so. Scorned bureaucrats then leaked the decision to the media shaping the narrative as a Trumpian anti-science “firing” of brave truth-tellers. The Washington Post and the New York Times duly reported just that story. But is it so? “We’re not going to rubber-stamp the last administration’s appointees. Instead, they should participate in the same open competitive process as the rest of the applicant pool,” EPA spokesperson J.P. Freire told the Post. “This approach is what was always intended for the board, and we’re making a clean break with the last administration’s approach.”

Rifling through the Federal Advisory Committee Act database, I find that the terms of 12 members of the BOSC officially expired on April 27, 2017. Another ended in March. Composed of outside researchers, the 18-member BOSC is supposed to provide objective and independent counsel to the agency’s Office of Research and Development (ORD). The committee aids the ORD on research and development with the aim of identifying, understanding, and solving current and future environmental problems; by reviewing ORD’s technical support to EPA’s program and regional offices; by providing leadership in assisting ORD in identifying emerging environmental issues; and by helping to advance the science and technology of risk assessment and risk management.

BOSC members are must be nationally recognized experts in science or engineering. The board should be balanced in disciplines, diversity, and geographic distribution area and include representatives from academia, government, industry, environmental consulting firms, and environmental associations.

As the Membership Balance Plan notes the list of nominees is reviewed by “different levels of EPA managers” before formal letters of invitation are sent out. The Plan notes that “members are usually appointed for a three-year term. Generally, members may be reappointed for a total of 6 years.”

In this case, the EPA bureaucrats in charge of finding and vetting nominees for the BOSC were evidently satisfied with the members who had been appointed during the Obama administration. Spot checking the BOSC’s history, it does appear that in recent years, committee members have generally served two 3-year terms.

EPA spokesperson J.P. Freire released this statement: “Advisory panels like BOSC play a critical role reviewing the agency’s work. EPA received hundreds of nominations to serve on the board, and we want to ensure fair consideration of all the nominees – including those nominated who may have previously served on the panel – and carry out a competitive nomination process.” The EPA plans solicit nominees through the Federal Register and to select new board members quickly. (I reached out to the agency to clear up which and how many BOSC members are not being re-appointed. I have not heard back yet.)

So which members are not being re-appointed? The news reports say that the appointments of up to 9 members are not being renewed. According to the database these 13 members terms are over.

Viney Aneja – North Carolina State University professor of air quality

Shahid Chaudhry – California Energy Commission mechanical engineer

Susan Cozzens – Georgia Tech Sociologist of science

Courtney Flint – Utah State University Natural Resource Sociologist

Earthea Nance – Texas Southern University Civil & Environmental Engineering

Paula Olsiewski – Sloan Foundation Biochemist

Kenneth Reckhow – Center for Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology at Duke University

Robert Richardson – Michiagan State University Ecological Economist

Sandra Smith – Principal Toxicologist AECOM Consultancy

Gina Solomon – California EPA (Former senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council)

Ponisseril Somasundaran- Columbia University Professor of Mineral Engineering

John Thakaran – Howard University Biochemical engineering

Tammy Taylor – Chief Operating Officer of the National Security Directorate at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

The terms of three other members will expire this summer.

Lisa Dilling – University of Colorado biologist

Diane Pataki – University of Utah ecologist

Joseph Rodricks – Principal Arlington of Environ International Corporation toxicologist

Predictably, activists are outraged. “This is completely part of a multifaceted effort to get science out of the way of a deregulation agenda,” said Ken Kimmell, the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists to the Times. Clearly to Kimmel’s mind, science could never support deregulation or declining to regulate.

Cleaning BOSC is only scratching the surface

In addition to these few entitled scientists, there are a raft of others filling the SAB (Scientific Advisory Board) which of course has numerous committees, including the notorious CASAC (Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee).  A look at the EPA website shows another 47 scientists working on the taxpayers’ dime. Apparently there are briefings where both BOSC and SAB members participate. The article above does not talk about conflicts of interest, but the EPA has been frequently criticized about the activities of SAB and CASAC.

Senator James A. Inhofe, Chair of the Senate Environment and Energy Committee wrote this in a formal letter to the Obama EPA Director last year:

The new CASAC panel further illustrates EPA’s disregard for policies requiring EPA shift membership on CASAC. Specifically, EPA’s Peer Review Handbook advises membership rotation on standing committees, such as CASAC, “to obtain fresh perspectives and reinforce the reality and perception of independence from the Ageney.”I3 However, the chartered CASAC includes four of seven members that have already served on CASAC.14 Among the three who have not served on the chartered CASAC, two have served on CASAC subcommittees15 while the other one has served on EPA’s Advisory Council on Clean Air Compliance Analysis (Council)16 which is also designed to advise the Administrator on the impacts of the Clean Air Act on the public health, economy, and environment of the U.S.I7 Given the number of well-qualified nominees and thousands of scientific experts across the country, it is deeply concerning EPA continues to select the same people. This practice runs counter to EPA policy and unnecessarily blocks other experts from serving as advisors.

The majority of CASAC members have also received considerable financial support from EPA, which calls into question their independence and therefore the integrity of the overall panel. While EPA has taken the position that receipt of grants do not constitute a financial conflict of interest, the NAS and EPA’s own Peer-Review Handbook state that grants can constitute a conflict or lack of impartiality.I8 For the newly appointed panel this conflict is on full display–six of the seven members have received a total of $119,217,008 in EPA research grants.

Much to my dismay, three of the seven members have received in excess of $25 million each. This is not limited to the chartered CASAC as 22 of the 26 newly appointed members to the CASAC subcommittee on particulate matter have received more than $330 million in EPA grants. These vast sums of money certainly constitute a conflict of interest and at a minimum give the appearance of a lack of impartiality.

Another investigative journalist added:

Among the members of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB), CASAC and subcommittees, 60 percent of them have received research grants from the EPA costing taxpayers more than $140 million. Many are involved in research, funded by those grants, while they are serving on their committees in a role advising the EPA on clean air policy.

CASAC’s chairman, Chris Frey, is also a representative on the SAB. While serving on SAB, the EPA extended his $893,439 grant to study the heath effects of air pollution and approved about $2.9 million in grants to North Carolina State University, where he teaches as a professor of environmental engineering.

All eight members on the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) have extended, been recipients of or are overseeing more than $19 million in agency grants earmarked to the institutions they work for or directly to themselves, procurement records show. Outside science advisers collect EPA grants while guiding agency 

Entitled scientific bureaucrats rise up to defend their nest.

Footnote 1:

In Ottawa, the problem is somewhat different. There we have an infestation of bureaucrabs. The term refers to a creature that appears to be making progress, but on closer inspection is moving sideways.

There is also a rumor that increasingly in Ottawa lawyers are being used for scientific experiments instead of rats.  There appear to be three reasons for this:

1.  There are more lawyers than rats in Ottawa.
2. People sometimes get emotionally attached to a rat.
3. There are some things the rats won’t do.

Footnote 2:

For a scientific analysis of how government works, we have a paper reprinted below:

New chemical Element Discovered

The new element is Governmentium (Gv). It has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312, the heaviest of all. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lefton-like particles called peons.

Since Governmentium has no electrons or protons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction normally taking less than a second to take from four days to four years to complete.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 3-6 years. It does not decay but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.

When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons. All of the money is consumed in the exchange, and no other byproducts are produced. It tends to concentrate at certain points such as government agencies, large corporations, and universities. Usually it can be found in the newest, best appointed, and best maintained buildings.

Scientists point out that administratium is known to be toxic at any level of concentration and can easily destroy any productive reaction where it is allowed to accumulate. Attempts are being made to determine how administratium can be controlled to prevent irreversible damage, but results to date are not promising.

Credit: William DeBuvitz, http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/administ.htm

Footnote 3:

The article above mentioned Yes Minister classic British tv series, but readers may not be aware that the last season of the show, Yes Prime Minister ended with an hilarious send up of the global warming scare. BBC blocks the video outside of UK, but the best parts of the transcript are at Climate Alarms LOL