The Trump/Pence Regime Continues Its War on Science

Science is the way of the future.  It also has the ability to show the falsity and/or wrongness of past ways of doing things, including the manner in which humans - especially large greed driven corporations - have ravaged the environment.  For Trump's far right Christian base, it also has shown more and more the falsity of their world view and shown aspects of their faith to be false.  The Trump/Pence solution?  Gut environmental laws and drive scientists from government agencies.  Meanwhile, of course, the rest of the world presses on with scientific research and China may soon pull ahead of the United States in the realm of science - and the future. Gutting wetlands protections and clean air and water regulations will not make for a better future - not that Trump and his sycophants care. Its a mindset reminiscent of post WWI Britain which failed to adapt to the changing world and ultimately lost its empire as a consequence. A piece in the Washington Post looks at this war on science and the potential long term consequences for America's future.  Here are excerpts:

Dozens of government computers sit in a nondescript building here, able to connect to a data model that could help farmers manage the impact of a changing climate on their crops.

But no one in this federal agency would know how to access the model, or, if they did, what to do with the data.  That’s because the ambitious federal researcher who created it in Washington quit rather than move when the Agriculture Department relocated his agency to an office park here last fall.

He is one of hundreds of scientists across the federal government who have been forced out, sidelined or muted since President Trump took office.

The exodus has been fueled broadly by administration policies that have diminished the role of science as well as more specific steps, such as the relocation of agencies away from the nation’s capital.

While the administration has come under fire for prioritizing the concerns of industry at the expense of science in government decisions, the cumulative effects are just beginning to appear after three years of Trump in the White House.

Some farmers said the USDA staff upheaval has made it harder to access information they need.

Torrential rains last spring dashed the plans of Liz Brownlee, who runs a livestock farm with her husband, to expand her pasture in Crothersville, Ind. Then an unseasonably dry autumn brought 90-degree days that baked the farmers’ seeds. “With all this uncertainty from climate change, I need the best data possible” to know when to plant, she said. “I’m worried I’m not going to have it.”

In the first two years of the Trump administration, more than 1,600 federal scientists left government, according to Office of Personnel Management employment data analyzed by The Washington Post. That represents a 1.5 percent drop, compared with the 8 percent increase during the same period in the Obama administration.

One-fifth of the high-level appointee positions in science are vacant — normally filled by experts who shape policy and ensure research integrity.

Of those who departed, the numbers were greatest among social scientists, soil conservationists, hydrologists and experts in the physical sciences — chemistry, geology, astronomy and physics.

At the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly 700 scientists have left in the past three years, according to The Post analysis. . . . . the loss of expertise weakens the government’s ability to make sound decisions.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump called climate change a “hoax.” Once in office, he began dismantling much of President Barack Obama’s climate plan. He has installed industry figures in regulatory roles and rolled back scores of rules and policies that he considers harmful to the fossil-fuel industry. Trump’s actions spurred scientists into the streets, joining protesters for a March for Science rally on the Mall in 2017 and again in 2018.

After historic rainfall last spring swept away livestock and grain in the Midwest, crop planting was delayed by weeks. Andrew Crane-Droesch, 38, a researcher at the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service, started work on a data tool that could predict months in advance the impact of, say, heavy rainfall on crop prices or planted fields. He hoped that knowledge could help farmers, commodity traders and government disaster planners prepare.

But when Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue moved forward with his controversial plan to relocate the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture — two key research agencies — to Kansas City, Crane-Droesch headed for the exit.

He joined two-thirds of affected employees in his division who either retired or found other jobs rather than move to the greater Kansas City region. At the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which oversees $1.7 billion in scientific funding for researchers, nearly 8 of every 10 employees have left.

The move to Kansas City has also meant dozens of reports and millions in research funding have been delayed or scuttled as the Agriculture Department scrambled to keep up with departures.

Current and former employees interviewed said they felt the move to Kansas City was intended to diminish research areas such as trade policy, farm income and climate change; Perdue is a climate skeptic who recently described the problem as “weather patterns, frankly.”

Some federal researchers said they left the Trump administration after concluding their work was being undermined.

The study found that long-term exposure to levels of soot and smog lower than current national standards can cause premature death among older Americans. Such a finding suggests that current standards don’t adequately protect public health, which would have implications for industries that pollute. An unidentified EPA spokesman attacked the study in an interview with the Washington Times, an act Costa called “scientifically unethical.”

Elsewhere in the government, political appointees have delayed grants for scientific work.

Across the government, the administration is scaling back advisory committees that offer input to policymakers from scientists and other experts. Last year, Trump required agencies to eliminate one-third of their advisory panels, with a few exceptions.

Much of the impact of the federal government's shrinking science capacity will not be felt for years, observers said.

"If we're gone, is the world going to be a worse place?" he mused. "I like to think so. But it's not going to be immediate."

Trump Rule Would Exclude Climate Change in Infrastructure Planning

As Australia literally burns due to climate change which its prime minister denies is real, the ever toxic Trump/Pence regime is pushing a new federal rule that would bar the consideration of climate change in planning infrastructure construction. The result would be to allow more polluting projects - e.g., pipelines for oil - and pretending that sea levels are not rising. It's true idiocy yet is mainstream Republican thinking (or lack of thinking) and does not bode well for America and the world if implemented. It is but one more reason why removing Trump from office by any means is crucial. Meanwhile, one can only hope that states will enact laws that will hinder the federal effort to destroy the environment.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this latest effort to harm Americans while enriching the fossil fuel industry and other corporate despoilers of the environment. Here are highlights: 

Federal agencies would no longer have to take climate change into account when they assess the environmental impacts of highways, pipelines and other major infrastructure projects, according to a Trump administration plan that would weaken the nation’s benchmark environmental law.

The proposed changes to the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act could sharply reduce obstacles to the Keystone XL oil pipeline and other fossil fuel projects that have been stymied when courts ruled that the Trump administration did not properly consider climate change when analyzing the environmental effects of the projects.

According to one government official who has seen the proposed regulation but was not authorized to speak about it publicly, the administration will also narrow the range of projects that require environmental review. That could make it likely that more projects will sail through the approval process without having to disclose plans to do things like discharge waste, cut trees or increase air pollution.

The new rule would no longer require agencies to consider the “cumulative” consequences of new infrastructure. In recent years courts have interpreted that requirement as a mandate to study the effects of allowing more planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. It also has meant understanding the impacts of rising sea levels and other results of climate change on a given project.

[T]he Trump administration has been aggressive in its efforts to roll back environmental regulations. The 50 or so pages of revisions that the Council on Environmental Quality is expected to make public on Wednesday would not amend the act itself. Rather, they would revise the rules that guide the implementation of the law.

Environmental activists and legal experts said the proposed changes would weaken critical safeguards for air, water and wildlife. The move, if it survives the expected court challenges, also could eliminate a powerful tool that climate change activists have used to stop or slow Mr. Trump’s encouragement of coal and oil development as part of its “energy dominance” policy.

In March, a federal judge found that the Obama administration did not adequately take into account the climate change impact of leasing public land for oil gas drilling in Wyoming, a ruling that also presented a threat to Mr. Trump’s plans for fossil fuel development.

One month later, another federal judge dealt a blow to Mr. Trump’s plan to lift an Obama-era moratorium on coal mining on public lands when he found the administration did not adequately study the environmental effects of mining as required by law.

Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said eliminating the need to consider climate change would lead to more pipelines and other projects that worsen global emissions. It could also put roads, bridges and other infrastructure at greater risk, he said, because developers would not be required, for instance, to analyze whether sea-level rise threatened to eventually submerge a project.

“It has the potential to distort infrastructure planning by making it easier to ignore predictable futures that could severely degrade the projects,” Mr. Gerrard said.

Mr. Gerrard said the environmental review requirements of New York’s state-level version of the environmental policy act had helped to defeat a golf course that Mr. Trump hoped to build in Mount Kisco, N.Y. The Seven Springs golf course would have abutted Byram Lake, a reservoir for drinking water. Mr. Gerrard, who represented opponents of the project, said environmental reviews enabled the community to show that the drinking water supply could have been endangered. Mr. Trump shelved the project in 2004, but his public comments indicate the episode still rankles.

I am old enough that I will not live to see the worse consequences of the efforts of foul individuals like Trump.  My grandchildren will not be so lucky. 

The Far-Reaching Threats of a Conservative Court

Of all the things Donald Trump and Vichy Republicans have done to date to undermine democracy in America, perhaps the worse is the shifting of the U.S. Supreme Court to the far right.  With a majority of justices who seemingly would undo progressive legislation from the New Deal forward and happily see a return of the robber baron days of the Gilded age, the damage could be immense.  The circumstances also highlight the need to do something to change the make up of the U.S. Senate where the disproportionate representation of small states - Wyoming with two U.S. Senators has a smaller population than the cities of Virginia Beach and Norfolk when added together - wildly exceeds anything the Founding Fathers could have envisioned.  Indeed, the Senate now almost guarantees a tyranny of the minority of anti-modernity, racist red states which in general have smaller populations than blue states which for the most part fund the federal government hand outs to red states. A column in the New York Times looks at the coming threat from a right wing Supreme Court which will likely bring us more pollution, inaction on climate change and an erosion of individual rights and protections.  Here are column excerpts:

With the start of the Supreme Court’s new term, many people are wondering whether the conservative majority, which has taken a further step to the right with the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh, will overturn Roe v. Wade.

But that’s not where the action is. As two cases argued before the court this month illustrate, the real question is whether it will undermine the system of government that has protected the public from abusive business practices since the New Deal.

The two cases might seem esoteric, and far removed from government protection of workers and consumers. Gundy v. United States involved a challenge to the attorney general’s extension of sex-crime-registration law to offenders convicted before the law was enacted. Nielsen v. Preap involved a government policy that deprived certain unauthorized immigrants of some procedural protections against deportation.

The conservative majority can, and most likely will, rule against the government using broad theories that would also eat away at the constitutional foundations of the New Deal system, which is essential for protecting health and safety, the environment and much else.

Since the New Deal, Congress has authorized regulatory agencies to make policy by issuing regulations. These agencies are now a familiar part of our government. They include the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is currently aiding hurricane victims in Florida. Agency regulation became necessary as the problems of a modern industrialized nation overwhelmed the regulatory capacities of states, local governments and Congress itself.

The New Deal agencies initially encountered resistance from the Supreme Court, which was then, like now, a reactionary institution that frowned on novelty. . . . Eventually, common sense prevailed over these legalistic objections. Congress itself lacked the capacity to engage in the detailed regulation that is necessary to keep a modern economy humming while protecting workers and consumers. Agencies were needed.

By the 1980s, half a century after the New Deal, a political and legal consensus in favor of the administrative state had solidified. Left and right argued about how much regulation was needed, of course, but no one doubted the constitutional foundations of the administrative state — not even Justice Antonin Scalia. . .

.But Brett Kavanaugh is a skeptic. And so are Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s first appointment to the Supreme Court, and Clarence Thomas, who was appointed back in 1991. The views of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito are less clear, but their judicial opinions point in the same direction.

The conservative assault on the administrative state has four elements.

First, Justices Gorsuch and Thomas want to revive a discredited legal rule that was invoked by the Supreme Court in 1935 and then abandoned. The “nondelegation doctrine” says that Congress may not “delegate” its legislative power to administrative agencies . . . .

Second, Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas want to undermine a rule called the Chevron doctrine, after a 1984 Supreme Court case. That rule says that when an agency regulation is based on a reasonable interpretation of a statute, courts should “defer” to the agency. The Chevron rule codified existing judicial recognition of the core idea of the administrative state. Specialists — in environmental hazards, in credit markets, in workplace safety — should regulate.

Third, the conservative justices dislike the principle of agency autonomy and have looked askance at job protections for agency officials.

Fourth, the conservative justices have endorsed a novel interpretation of the First Amendment that protects businesses from regulation — from campaign finance regulation, labor regulation and even regulations that require them to disclose information to consumers.

Justices Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Thomas claim to be “originalists,” who believe that the court should strike down laws that violate the original understanding of the Constitution. But the founders did not bar Congress from creating administrative agencies or think that the First Amendment protected businesses from commercial regulation.

The new conservative jurisprudence may help some businesses in the short run but ultimately will undermine the legal structure in which they flourish.

The answer is both obvious and depressing. The modern conservative jurisprudence is an exercise in nostalgia, a yearning for pre-New Deal America when, supposedly, government was less oppressive and people were freer than they are today. You can see this nostalgia in the homilies to olden times in Justices Gorsuch’s and Kavanaugh’s lectures — and their insistence that answers to today’s challenges can be found in a theory of government invented in the 18th century by men wearing breeches and powdered wigs.

This jurisprudence appeals to many people in a populist era that distrusts experts, chafes at bureaucracy, fears change and longs for a simpler past. But like so much being peddled by ideologues and partisans these days, it’s a sham.

Trump Moves to Increase Pollution and Disease and HIV/AIDS Deaths

Sitting on the shores of Hampton Roads harbor facing rising sea levels and worries of flooding during tropical storms/hurricanes, global warming and a polluted Chesapeake Bay hit very close to home.  Similarly, as a member of the LGBT community who also worries about the growing epidemic of HIV/AIDS in the black community, medical research to find a cure for HIV/AIDS - and other diseases - is a real concern.  Sadly, such is not the case for Der Trumpenführer who today reversed Obama administration regulations to protect water and air quality and address the very real issue of global warming.  While posturing with oil and gas and coal company executives and miners (the latter refuse to accept the reality that the coal industry is moribund no matter what Trump does) Der Trumpenführer basically gave every other American the middle finger and said "go f*ck yourselves."  Reuters looks at this travesty.  Here are highlights:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an order to undo Obama-era climate change regulations, keeping a campaign promise to support the coal industry and calling into question U.S. support for an international deal to fight global warming.

Flanked by coal miners and coal company executives, Trump proclaimed his "Energy Independence" executive order at the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The move drew swift backlash from a coalition of 23 states and local governments, as well as environmental groups, which called the decree a threat to public health and vowed to fight it in court.

The order's main target is former President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan, which required states to slash carbon emissions from power plants - a key factor in the United States' ability to meet its commitments under a climate change accord reached by nearly 200 countries in Paris in 2015.

Trump's decree also reverses a ban on coal leasing on federal lands, undoes rules to curb methane emissions from oil and gas production and reduces the weight of climate change and carbon emissions in policy and infrastructure permitting decisions. Carbon dioxide and methane are two of the main greenhouse gases blamed by scientists for heating the earth.

Environmental groups heaped scorn on Trump's order, arguing it was dangerous and went against the broader global trend toward cleaner energy technologies. A coalition of mostly Democrat-led states and local governments issued a statement saying they would oppose the order in court.

"We won’t hesitate to protect those we serve — including by aggressively opposing in court President Trump’s actions that ignore both the law and the critical importance of confronting the very real threat of climate change," the coalition, led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, said in a statement.

The coalition includes states such as California, Massachusetts and Virginia, as well as cities including Chicago, Philadelphia and Boulder, Colorado.

 Not content with trashing the environment and endangering the health of Americans, Der Trumpenführer has also proposed drastic cuts to HIV/AIDS and other medical research.  No doubt, his white evangelical Christian supporters (who are responsible for putting him in office) will cheer if these cuts are realized since I suspect a majority of them would love to see gays - and the HIV ravaged black community - simply die off.  Suffice it to say, I am beginning to understand that Trump is an evil person.  Bloomberg looks at Trump's proposals to slash medical research spending.  Here are excerpts:

    President Donald Trump’s administration has proposed cutting $1.23 billion this fiscal year from research funded by the National Institutes of Health, according to a White House document sent to congressional appropriators.

    The reduction is part of $18 billion in cuts that the administration wants in fiscal 2017, which ends in October. Most of the proposed reductions at NIH would come from research grants, with $50 million specifically taken from a program meant to support biomedical research in states that typically get less agency money. 

     A worldwide initiative to help people with HIV and AIDS, known as PEPFARand heavily focused on patient treatment in Africa, would be slashed by almost $300 million under the plan. The savings would be found by slowing the rate of new patients put on treatment and reducing support to “low-performing countries.” States also would face a $50 million cut that would target “less effective HIV research and prevention activities.”

     The Trump administration is requesting $65.1 billion for the Department of Health and Human Services in fiscal 2018, down from $84.6 billion in 2016.

     Other proposed health cuts for the current year include:·        $40 million from staffing funds at the Food and Drug Administration, achieved in part with “slower than anticipated hiring.”
·        $50 million from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which may delay missions and reduce grants.
·        $350 million from research grants at the National Science Foundation for biology, information science and engineering.
·        $372 million from the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program that helps people heat their homes.

If there is a god, many of Trump's working class white supporters will find themselves hard hit from the proposed cut backs.  Frankly, they deserve to suffer since they were stupid enough to vote for this foul, pathologically lying, amoral man.