House Committee to Challenge Climate Science

The House Science Committee will hear testimony March 29 that will question whether climate change is a human induced phenomenon. The hearing, Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications and the Scientific Method, is a just another prong in the current effort to undo the environmental progress made during the Obama years.

It coincides with the efforts of the Trump administration, which has proposed to strip the federal budget of any monies that would be targeted to cutting carbon dioxide emissions. To that end, the president has signed executive orders to weaken Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which would cut CO2 emissions by 32 percent by 2030, and eliminate rules to cut methane emissions from natural gas drilling.

Witnesses at next week’s hearing will represent all points of view, including Judith Curry, who has serious doubts about climate change and has criticized other scientists for not expressing the same cynicism, and Climate scientist Michael Mann, who was invited by the Democrats on the committee. Mann is a professor of Atmospheric Science at Pennsylvania State University, who told the New York Times earlier this year that if human-induced climate change was not part of the equation, the amount of warming in 2016 would have less than one-in-a-million odds of occurring. “One could argue that about 75 percent of the warmth was due to human impact,” Mann told the Times.

Neither side is likely to persuade the other during the hearings. Each side is dug in, with the Trump administration’s point person being the administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt. He said earlier this month in an interview on CNBC that “I would not agree that (carbon) is a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.”

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Ninety-seven percent of all climate scientists have said that the matter is settled: “Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.”

Trump’s response? He has proposed to cut EPA’s budgets budget by roughly 30 percent, from $8.1 billion to about $5.7 billion, while also slashing the agency’s workforce from 15,000 to 11,800. Among the programs to be shed: Energy Star, which is a globally recognized symbol for the 5 billion products that have met the highest energy efficiency standards. Its supporters say it is a $54 million a year program that saves $34 billion a year in electricity costs.

“The new administration has concerns about the EPA but they have never been about Energy Star,” Lowell Ungar, senior policy director for the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, said in an earlier interview. “This helps consumers across the country: rural, urban, coastal and middle of country. Why threaten a program that saves consumers money?”

It’s important to note that not all Republicans are against action on climate. After all, the EPA was created under Republican President Nixon in 1972.

A conservative group called republicEN is trying to sway conservatives to think differently. The organization believes that the denial of climate science is anathema to both American and conservative causes. As such, it said the loudest voices are drowning out those of the most reasonable, which includes much of the national electorate.

There are “small government” solutions, the organization said. Eliminating subsidies to all energy sources would correct market distortions, the group touts.

Meantime, 13 Republican members of the Climate Solution Cause—a bipartisan group in the U.S. House of Representatives which explores policy options that address the impacts, causes and challenges of our changing climate—are pressing forward, having just invited EPA Administrator Pruitt to Florida to see the effects of rising tides.

“We can’t deal in alternative facts, or alternative realities,” said Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, in a release by republicEN. “We have to deal with whatever there’s consensus about as a starting point in legitimate debates that do exist.” Sanford criticized Republican reluctance to take on the issue, “Even though the scientific consensus has been clear … You talk to old-timers, and they say it’s changing.”