Ever wonder why the Koch brothers want to quash environmental regulations? Why they support ALEC, which writes model legislation for states to deregulate corporations? Why they are in an alliance with far-right titans like the DeVos family?
Ever wondered how they made their wealth?
This article, published in 2014 by Rolking Stone, answers your questions.
I publicly renounced my allegiance to the theology of standards, tests, and choice in 2010 by publishing “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” It caused a stir, and I was asked again and again, why did you change your mind. I thought I had answered the question in my book, but nonetheless people asked again. I was interviewed by Kathryn Schultz, who is now on staff at The New Yorker, because she had published a book about what she called “wrongology,” and how people come to admit their errors in big things.
So whenever I learn of someone who changes course and says so in public, I am interested in learning what persuaded them.
Here is a man who was in the forefront of climate change denial. He changed his mind.
ProPublica and the New York Times collaborated on a report about the flight of scientists and environmental protection specialists from the EPA. Trump made clear that he wants to reduce the role of the agency and to restrict its ability to do its job when he hired Scott Pruitt to run it. As Oklahoma Attorney General, Pruitt had sued EPA many times on behalf of the oil and gas industry. He has busied himself eliminating regulations that protect the environment and pushing out scientists.
Pruitt, Trump, and other administration doubt that climate change is a reality, and they avoid or ban the use of the term.
“More than 700 people have left the Environmental Protection Agency since President Donald Trump took office, a wave of departures that puts the administration nearly a quarter of the way toward its goal of shrinking the agency to levels last seen during the Reagan administration.
“Of the employees who have quit, retired or taken a buyout package since the beginning of the year, more than 200 are scientists. An additional 96 are environmental protection specialists, a broad category that includes scientists as well as others experienced in investigating and analyzing pollution levels. Nine department directors have departed the agency as well as dozens of attorneys and program managers. Most of the employees who have left are not being replaced.
“The departures reflect poor morale and a sense of grievance at the agency, which has been criticized by Trump and top Republicans in Congress as bloated and guilty of regulatory overreach. That unease is likely to deepen following revelations that Republican campaign operatives were using the Freedom of Information Act to request copies of emails from EPA officials suspected of opposing Trump and his agenda.
“The cuts deepen a downward trend at the agency that began under the Obama administration in response to Republican-led budget constraints that left the agency with about 15,000 employees at the end of his term. The reductions have accelerated under Trump, who campaigned on a promise to dramatically scale back the EPA, leaving only what he called “little tidbits” in place. Current and former employees say unlike during the Obama years, the agency has no plans to replace workers, and they expect deeper cuts to come.”
The Trump administration has made clear that it disapproves of the Paris Climate Accord. So long as Trump is in office, there will be no effort to address environmental issues, and the fossil fuel industry will have free reign to pursue its goals.
A remarkable case will be heard in federal appeals court in San Francisco today. A group of young people are suing the federal government, demanding action to protect the environment.
“The kids went to court because young people, present and future, will suffer most from the dangerous impacts of global warming, much worse than the wildfires, floods, hurricanes, droughts and rising seas we see today.
“The stakes are big. In their lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, the youngsters charge that the government is contributing to climate change by doing things like allowing coal and oil to be produced on public lands. They argue that a climate system capable of sustaining human life must be protected by the government as a public trust. But their most important argument – one that could take their case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court – is that the federal government’s failure to do enough about global warming will damage the planet so profoundly that it violates children’s constitutional rights to life and liberty.
“Based on those arguments, lower courts have allowed the case to proceed. A trial against the government is scheduled for next February, but President Trump and his Administration want to keep it from taking place.
“The kids filed their lawsuit when Barack Obama was president, even though he was doing more than any previous president stop global warming. President Donald Trump does not even believe that global warming is a problem, if it’s real at all, and he has been undoing all the climate-action initiatives President Obama put in place. That makes the lawsuit even more important and the federal government even more culpable.”
Despite the Trump administration’s well-known hostility to science, and especially to acknowledging the existence and causes of climate change, it did not block publication of a report prepared by more than a dozen federal agencies.
The Fourth National Climate Assessment concludes that human activities are the primary causes of climate change.
This assessment concludes, based on extensive evidence, that it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” it says. “For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”
“Globally averaged, annually averaged surface air temperature has increased by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1 degree Centigrade, over the last 115 years,” David Fahey, an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and one of the leading authors of the report, told reporters. “This period is now the warmest in the history of modern civilization.”
The report cites “thousands of studies conducted by researchers around the world” that show evidence of a warming globe, including “changes in surface, atmospheric, and oceanic temperatures; melting glaciers; diminishing snow cover; shrinking sea ice; rising sea levels; ocean acidification; and increasing atmospheric water vapor.”
It includes dire warnings about the impact of climate change on human activities.
Heavy rainfall, which causes flooding, is expected to increase over the rest of the century, and heat waves will become more frequent.
Severe weather events like forest fires and drought will grow more prevalent, and sea levels will rise “by at least several inches in the next 15 years and by 1–to-4 feet by 2100.”
This underlines warnings from scientists around the globe who say the only way to get climate change under control will be to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide.
Emission growth has slowed in recent years, but the report concludes it’s not enough to keep temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, the limit at which scientists expect the worst effects of climate change to be irreversible…
The report is mandated by Congress, with three federal agencies — NOAA, NASA and the Department of Energy — coordinating its publication. It uses research from thousands of scientists around the world.
Another way to look at climate change: by the year 2070, Mar-a-Lago might be underwater.
Rick Perry, Secretary of the Department of Energy, said a few days ago when interviewed on Meet the Press that fossil fuels were a deterrent to sexual assaults. When the lights are on, he said, bad things are less likely to happen. When Perry accepted the offer to be Secretary of Energy, he thought that his job was to promote the sale of fossil fuels; he didn’t realize that the main job of the Secretary is to oversee the nation’s nuclear arsenal. But he is nonetheless promoting fossil fuels. Not the brightest bulb in the Cabinet. Wonder what powers that bulb?
Scott Pruitt, director of the Environmental Protection Agency, has announced that any scientist who receives a grant from the agency may not serve on an advisory panel. He says they have a conflict of interest.
However, representatives of the coal, oil, and gas industries may serve on these panels because they do not get grants to study the environmental effects of their activities.
Pruitt continues as a faithful servant of the industries that pollute the environment.
The madness continues.
Trump names lobbyist for coal industry to be second in command at EPA.
To those who said there was no difference between Trump and Clinton, take note.
And take a deep breath, while you can. Before the air is so polluted that you can’t breathe.
I hope you can open this. It worked for me. It captures the near-apocalyptic moment we are in.
We have heard for years the complaints of red state elected officials about federal aid subsidizing the undeserving. Ted Cruz of Texas and other red state conservatives opposed federal aid to the northeastern states devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Now the same conservatives want the federal taxpayers to help them out in the aftermath of a Hurricane Harvey and Irma.
Garrison Keillor called them out for their hypocrisy in this brilliant article.
He writes:
“The Republic of Texas believes in self-reliance and is suspicious of Washington sticking its big nose in your business. “Government is not the answer. You are not doing anyone a favor by creating dependency, destroying individual responsibility.” So said Sen. Ted Cruz (R), though not last week. Sunday on Fox News, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said Texas would need upward of $150 billion in federal aid for damage inflicted by Harvey. The stories out of Houston have all been about neighborliness and helping hands and people donating to relief funds, but you don’t raise $150 billion by holding bake sales. This is almost as much as the annual budget of the U.S. Army. I’m just saying.
“I’m all in favor of pouring money into Texas, but I am a bleeding-heart liberal who favors single-payer health care. How is being struck by a hurricane so different from being hit by cancer? I’m only asking.
“Houstonians chose to settle on a swampy flood plain barely 50 feet above sea level. The risks of doing so are fairly clear. If you chose to live in a tree and the branch your hammock was attached to fell down, you wouldn’t ask for a government subsidy to hang your hammock in a different tree.
“President Ronald Reagan said that government isn’t the answer, it is the problem, and conservatives have found that line very resonant over the years. In Cruz’s run for president last year, he called for the abolition of the Internal Revenue Service. He did not mention this last week. It would be hard to raise an extra $150 billion without the progressive income tax unless you could persuade Mexico to foot the bill.
“Similarly, if a desert state such as Arizona expects the feds to solve its water shortage, as Sen. Jeff Flake (R) suggested recently, by guaranteeing Arizona first dibs on Lake Mead, this strikes me as a departure from conservative principles. Lake Mead, and Boulder Dam, which created it, were not built by Lake Mead Inc., but by the federal government. The residents of Phoenix decided freely to settle in an arid valley, and they have used federal water supplies to keep their lawns green. Why should we Minnesotans, who chose to live near water, subsidize golf courses on the desert? You like sunshine? Fine. Take responsibility for your decision and work out a deal with Perrier to keep yourselves hydrated.
“Arizona is populated by folks who dread winter and hate having to shovel snow. In Minnesota, we recognize that snow is a form of water and that it’s snowmelt that replenishes the aquifers. So we make a rational decision to live here. A warm, dry winter is a sort of disaster for us, but we don’t apply to Washington for hankies. If we made a decision to live underwater on a coral reef off Hawaii, we wouldn’t expect the feds to provide us with Aqua-Lungs. If we chose to fly to the moon and play among the stars and spend spring on Jupiter and Mars and we got lost out there, we wouldn’t expect NASA to come rescue us. Get my drift here?”
The Gulf of Mexico sustains a large fishing and tourism industry. Not for long.
Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, wants to gut environmental protection regulations that prevent the dumping of toxic chemicals into the Gulf.
Pruitt sued the EPA a dozen times when he was attorney general of Oklahoma. Oklahoma now has so much fracking that fracking is blamed for extraordinary earthquakes in the state.
Fracking involves pumping chemicals into the earth to force the release of natural gas. What to do with the chemical waste? Pruitt says, dump it into the Gulf.
If you want to learn about fracking, see a film that was nominated for an zacademy Award called “Gasland.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 