When he was governor of Texas, Rick Perry, our nation’s current secretary of energy, openly expressed his love for fossil fuels. Given that Texas is the largest oil-producing state in the country—and that Perry’s political party has demonstrably close ties to the oil, gas, and coal industries—that position makes a certain amount of sense.

But for all his petrochemical PDA, Perry always billed himself as an “all-of-the-above” kind of guy when it came to energy. He liked pointing out, for instance, that Texas was also the nation’s leader in wind power. And Perry seemed genuinely well liked by the state’s renewables sector, which took the governor at his word when he spoke of “the Texas way” of producing energy: inclusive, cooperative, open-minded, and renewables-friendly.

But now that he’s in charge of our nation’s energy policy, some are wondering if he’s forgotten how much he once admired renewables—and how important he thought they were to his home state’s energy diet.

In a recent memo to his chief of staff, Perry directed members of his own agency to launch an internal audit of any “regulatory burdens, as well as mandates and tax and subsidy policies, [that] are responsible for forcing the premature retirement of baseload power plants.” Later in the memo, he credited “an abundance of domestic energy resources, such as coal, natural gas, nuclear, and hydroelectric” with keeping our grid “stable, reliable, and resilient.”

Note what’s not on that list of reliable energy resources: wind and solar power. Their absence goes from notable to significant when one considers how vigorously the Trump administration has been championing fossil fuels at the expense of renewables—in this most recent case, by implying that investment in wind and solar is somehow leading to the “premature” shuttering of baseload power plants, aka coal-burning plants (and, to a lesser extent, nuclear). In truth, cheap and abundant natural gas has been laying the coal industry low for years.

But the Trump administration would prefer a different scapegoat. So naturally it’s sending Rick Perry to talk smack about wind and solar—and, more insidiously, to lay the groundwork for removing tax breaks and subsidies for those industries. Perhaps this is to be expected from the cabinet of a president whose reflexive dislike of wind power is as selfish as it is senseless. (Wind turbines threaten to ruin the aesthetics of his golf courses. Egads!)

Here’s the thing, though. Trump and Perry can cast aspersions on renewables all they want, and go on publicly pretending that investment in wind and solar threaten grid resilience and are all that's standing in the way of that Great American Coal Renaissance the president has foolishly been promising. But aside from maybe Mitch McConnell, nobody’s buying it.

Just check the headlines. At about the same time that Perry’s deputy secretary was checking that memo draft for typos, two more major American cities were announcing plans to obtain 100 percent of their energy from renewables by a fixed point in the near future. Two weeks ago, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, became the latest cities to join an ever-growing list of municipalities pledging to ditch fossil fuels in favor of wind, solar, and geothermal over the next few decades.

And even though they acknowledge the many environmental, health, and climate benefits that come from making such a switch, the leaders of these cities aren’t just doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. They’ve looked at the projections. They’ve done the math. And they’ve ultimately concluded what any rational, civic-minded numbers-cruncher would have to conclude: that so-called “grid parity”—the point at which wind and solar become as cheap to produce as fossil fuel–based energy—is coming to the United States, and soon. In some parts of the country, it's already here.

Renewables have reached grid parity in more than 30 nations, according to the World Economic Forum. In China—a country whose fate is inextricably tied to its energy and environmental policy, and one that has embraced renewables accordingly—solar capacity grew by 80 percent last year. Between now and 2020, the Chinese government plans to invest at least $360 billion in solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear power, with the goal of getting half of its electricity from these sources.

Rick Perry may be known for his forgetfulness, but I don’t think he’s actually forgotten why it makes sense to continue investing in wind and solar—and to continue helping them on their path to achieving grid parity here. In this case, his memory lapse is a pose. Perry’s just doing the rhetorical bidding of coal and oil companies that are desperate to rescue their preferred, if increasingly endangered, narrative: that renewables are too expensive and too unreliable to fuel the grid and therefore don’t deserve any tax breaks or subsidies.

China doesn’t believe it. The European Union doesn't believe it. Chicago, Portland, Boulder, and Moab, Utah, don’t believe it. I highly doubt that even Rick Perry believes it. 

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Welcome to our weekly Trump v. Earth column, in which onEarth reviews the environment-related shenanigans of President Trump and his allies.

Let’s not make a deal.

Last week, the G7 meeting in Rome ended in discord, as some of the world’s leading economies failed to agree on a statement—not an actual course of action, mind you, but just a collection of bland words on paper—about the way forward on climate change. This week, Politico exposed the role the United States played in scuttling the agreement.

According to drafts, the United States insisted on language indicating that fossil fuels “including coal and natural gas will remain part of the global energy mix for the foreseeable future.” The other G7 countries objected, probably because they had already agreed to phase out coal by the end of the century. Is the end of the century foreseeable? I suppose it’s a matter of interpretation, but many of the children born today will still be alive well into the next century. (Especially in G7 member Japan, where the average life expectancy is already 83 years; because mortality patterns are likely to change in the future, children born today will probably live longer than 83 years…but I digress.)

U.S. negotiators also attempted to characterize fossil fuels and nuclear as “clean, reliable, and affordable energy.” In fact, fossil fuels are not clean, and nuclear is neither affordable nor clean. To put the cherry on top of this coal-flavored cake, Trump’s negotiating team refused to provide assurances that the United States would remain in the Paris climate agreement.

So, to recap, our country wanted to undermine G7 progress on clean energy by reclassifying dirty energy as clean energy, then tried to get its partner countries to promise to keep using coal, and finally refused to meet them halfway by agreeing to stay in the Paris climate agreement. Can you believe the rest of the G7 wouldn’t take that deal?

We’ll always have Paris?

Speaking of the Paris climate agreement, the Trump administration kept its “Will we or won’t we?” saga going for yet another week. There was supposed to be a showdown meeting on Tuesday, where Paris advocates like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Jared Kushner, and Ivanka Trump were going to do rhetorical battle with EPA Administrator (and science denier) Scott Pruitt and prince of darkness Stephen Bannon. But the meeting was postponed at the last minute. The official reason for the delay was that many of the gladiators were traveling. But it’s equally likely that no one really wants to discuss the issue, because climate change deniers adore endless debate without ever coming to a conclusion. I guess the meeting about the long-term fate of our civilization will have to wait until the president takes care of more important things, like meeting some of the New England Patriots.

Pruitt wants to outsource clean water.

Scott Pruitt has a problem—most of his employees at the EPA hate him and everything he stands for. 

Now imagine Pruitt walking into a cubicle farm of employees, flanked by a couple of burly bodyguards, to ask his employees to write a rationale to repeal the Clean Water Rule—a rule that these very same employees labored for five years to enact—and then to write a replacement rule that would not protect U.S. rivers and streams. Do you believe that those employees would do a good job? A good enough job to win over the judge who will review the new rule in the inevitable legal challenge?

Luckily for Pruitt, some of his old pals in industry have a solution: outsourcing. According to reports, industry groups want Pruitt to ask outside attorneys to rewrite an industry-friendlier version of the Clean Water Rule. Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, the highest-ranking Democrat in EPA oversight, expressed “incredulity” at the move, which would be largely unprecedented and others described as “absolutely, wildly unethical” . . . so it’s exactly the kind of thing the Trump administration would do.

Wait . . .

If I had to sum up Trump’s presidency in one word—a word that is not an obscenity—I would say unprepared. One manifestation of Trump’s unpreparedness is that his lawyers are constantly asking courts to postpone their review of regulations. The administration asked the Supreme Court to delay its review of the Clean Power Plan as well as its review of the Clean Water Rule, and it asked a federal judge to delay review of the controversial travel ban. And now Trump’s lawyers want to delay oral arguments in the review of a rule that regulates the emissions of toxic air pollutants from power plants. Three months into the administration, Trump’s attorneys say they still have not had a chance to establish a viewpoint on the rule.

To help them decide, I want to pass along some information. The Mercury and Air Toxics Standards are already saving 11,000 lives every year. On the average day, the rule prevents 356 asthma attacks in America, with children reaping most of the benefit. The rule keeps thousands of people out of the emergency room and prevents 850,000 lost work days every year.

So think about that, Trump attorneys, as you mull over whether or not you want to defend the mercury rule in court. When you get around to it, of course.

Stay up-to-date on Trump’s environmental antics by visiting NRDC’s Trump Watch or following it on Facebook or Twitter.

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Regardless of how you vote or self-identify politically, I’m betting we can all agree that the concept of basic, factual truth has never, in our lifetimes, seemed more vulnerable.

The degradation of truth has played out most visibly in the political arena. Many of us are still trying to wrap our heads around the idea that the dissemination of “fake news” during the 2016 campaign may well have led to the election of our current president, whose press secretary betrays no compunction whatsoever regarding the mistruths he routinely spouts to journalists—and, by extension, to the American people. Meanwhile, cable news and social media amplify the echo-chamber effect, making it easier than ever for individuals to have their biases reinforced by dubious assertions dressed up as facts.

Most people see this weakening of our ability to detect the truth as a modern tragedy. But some see it as a golden opportunity.

Among the opportunists are the well-funded cynics at the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank whose raison d’être is mainstreaming the denial of anthropogenic climate change. After years spent swimming against the tide of science, reason, and consensus, they sense that the cultural waters are finally shifting—that we’re entering a new, post-truth era in which empiricism is subject to ideology and facts can be selected or rejected, buffet-style, according to one’s tastes.

Late last month, 25,000 science teachers around the country received a slick, well-packaged, and wholly unsolicited book (with accompanying DVD) titled Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming. The book was gifted to these teachers by its publisher: the Heartland Institute. Over the next month or so, the organization says, it plans to send the book to every last science teacher in the country—which means they’ve got about 175,000 more to go. The ultimate goal is clear: to seize this post-truth moment in time by encouraging educators to “teach the controversy”—classic climate denier parlance for sowing disinformation under the guise of fostering debate.

As soon as the mailing came to light, news outlets such as The Washington Post and PBS’s Frontline kicked into gear, exposing the Heartland Institute as a political (as opposed to scientific) organization and revealing its many ties to the fossil-fuel industry. And there’s been admirable pushback from science teachers themselves, the overwhelming majority of whom accept current climate science and don’t buy the denialist line that any open, honest discussion of global warming requires lying to students about a debate among scientists that—let’s be perfectly clear—doesn’t exist. (One particularly angry educator in Georgia went so far as to publish a brilliant chapter-by-chapter rebuttal of Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming that absolutely demolishes any of the authors’ claims to scientific integrity.)

The Heartland Institute’s attempts to sway public opinion are so frequent (and largely ineffective) that they almost don’t qualify as newsworthy. My own internal debate over whether to give this nefarious gang of anti-science apparatchiks the free publicity that comes from excoriating them in a column is mirrored by many environmental organizations who would just as soon ignore the group’s dark doings altogether. As I’ve written before, climate deniers crave nothing more than the appearance of a spirited public argument over climate change; that’s what helps them launder their lies in the marketplace of ideas and makes their illegitimate obfuscation look like legitimate dissent.

But suddenly, ignoring the deniers—refusing to dignify their lies by engaging with them at all—no longer seems like an option. The demonstrable mendacity of our nation’s top elected official, coupled with the public’s willful conflation of fake news with real news, has changed the rules of the game. With climate deniers now occupying the White House, leading the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, chairing the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and possibly heading the Council on Environmental Quality, we can no longer afford to put our faith in Americans’ ability to discern fact from fiction, truth from ideology.

This, in other words, is the cultural and political moment that the Heartland Institute has been waiting for. As much as we’d like to believe that sending 200,000 schoolteachers a free lesson plan that might as well be called How to Lie to Kids About Climate Change reflects the desperation of climate deniers, the truth is that it’s a sign of their revived self-confidence.

Most science teachers will toss the Heartland Institute’s propaganda into the trash, where it belongs. But some won’t. Some will fall for the line that their commitment to academic integrity requires them to suggest that there’s a significant debate among scientists over climate change—when, in fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. Whether they intend to or not, these teachers will then set about planting the seeds of doubt in young minds, all the while telling themselves that by “teaching the controversy” they’re somehow honoring the intellectual legacy of science.

That’s all that climate deniers could ever dream of asking for right now: Plant those seeds. They’re perfectly happy—not to mention well equipped—to take things from there.

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Welcome to our weekly Trump v. Earth column, in which onEarth reviews the environment-related shenanigans of President Trump and his allies.

Hey Italy, Rick Perry Wants to Sell You Some Coal

The G7—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—was supposed to lead the world in the fight against climate change. And they were starting to make progress. In 2015, the assembled leaders agreed to limit the global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius and announced an ambitious goal to quit fossil fuels by the end of the century.

On Monday, U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry tried his best to undo all of that. Perry sauntered into the G7 meeting in Rome and started pontificating like a guy who arrived late to a party and never bothered to ask what everyone else was talking about. He urged the leaders to keep using coal and natural gas without even mentioning the adverse impacts they have on global temperatures. (In fact, Perry didn’t even use the word “climate.”)

Perry also announced his support for investments that will “help renewables become competitive with traditional sources of energy,” apparently unaware that solar energy is already cheaper than fossil fuels in large swaths of the world.

The G7 meeting was supposed to end with an agreement on energy policy, but Perry’s backwardness scuppered the deal. When it comes to leadership on this crucial global issue, America is apparently not going to be first. Arrivederci, progresso.

Bureau of Loneliness Management

A leaked memo suggests that the Trump administration plans to make the Bureau of Land Management the center of the president’s effort to withdraw the United States from the rest of the world. According to the memo, described as a “priority work” list, the BLM will focus on accelerating the exploitation of public lands for coal, oil, gas, and hard rock mining, in part by easing environmental review processes required under the National Environmental Policy Act. As the recent G7 summit showed, Trump’s dogged fascination with fossil fuels will only push us farther from our allies.

The BLM’s other focus under Trump will be assisting in the approval process for security projects along the U.S.–Mexico border. It doesn’t take an eagle eye to read between those lines—the BLM will be helping to build that wall.

The delicious irony of this memo, which was leaked to E&E News, is the fact that we’ve seen it at all. The memo hadn’t yet been circulated to BLM staff, which means the leaker may have been a fairly high-ranking official. President Trump wants to make our border leakproof, but he can’t even do that with his hand-picked administrators.

Trump Is Eliminating Thousands of Jobs . . .

The White House directed agencies to prepare for deep personnel cuts over the next year, according to documents first obtained by Politico. The agencies will be required to have a plan by September to shrink their employment rolls. Although Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney adamantly, adamantly refused to single out any individual agency, he did let slip (oops!) that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency faces the biggest challenge.

Here’s a fact Mulvaney conveniently failed to mention: President Obama substantially slowed the growth of the federal workforce and curbed salary growth as well. The federal government currently employs an historically low proportion of the U.S. labor force. In 1966, the federal government employed 4.3 percent of American workers. Today, it’s around 2 percent. There’s simply no urgent need to fire thousands of people—especially ones who implement our environmental safeguards, many of which pay for themselves.

. . . But Creating a Few New Positions

In news that is absolutely, completely unrelated to firing thousands of his employees, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt apparently fears for his safety. Several news outlets are reporting that Pruitt is expected to request around-the-clock security, to be paid for out of the agency’s budget.

No past administrator has made such a request, and the agency doesn’t have enough security staff to guard Pruitt all day, every day. According to former EPA officials, fulfilling Pruitt’s security request will require cuts in other parts of the agency—the parts that protect our environment. Welcome to the new PPA: Pruitt Protection Agency.

If Scott Pruitt thinks he needs 24-hour protection, maybe he can call his buddies in the energy industry. They know people in security, and I hear they owe Pruitt a few favors.

Don’t Believe in Climate Change? You’re Hired!

Politico is reporting that President Trump is considering appointing Kathleen Hartnett White to run the White House Council on Environmental Quality. White is a rare breed of climate change denier. She doesn’t simply deny that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide is a threat to our way of life, nor does she make the argument du jour that we simply can’t tell how carbon emissions are affecting the planet. White takes it several steps further, advising a group called the CO₂ Coalition, which insists that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide will provide a net benefit to humans and other life on earth. (For a laugh, I strongly recommend visiting the coalition’s website, which I promise is not a spoof.)

White’s other argument—in addition to denying the overwhelming evidence of climate change—is a kind of misty-eyed nostalgia for fossil fuels. She talks about fossil fuels as “a necessary condition of monumental improvements in human welfare and economic growth that emerged around 1800.” But admitting we owe a degree of historical economic progress to oil, coal, and gas is irrelevant to whether we still need them. Draft animals improved the human living standard immeasurably, but that doesn’t mean White should have to drive a bullock cart to work. Although that would be funny.

Stay up-to-date on Trump’s environmental antics by visiting NRDC’s Trump Watch or following it on Facebook or Twitter.

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Welcome to our weekly Trump v. Earth column, in which onEarth reviews the environment-related shenanigans of President Trump and his allies.

Trust Falls with Trump

We all knew President Trump’s proposal to cut the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 31 percent would undermine vital programs. Now we’re learning which programs, and by how much. The news isn’t comforting.

A proposed budget document obtained by the Washington Post showed a 99 percent cut in federal funding for vehicle emissions and fuel economy testing. The proposal would withdraw $48 million from the program and eliminate 168 jobs.

Vehicle emissions testing was already badly underfunded, and it showed. Volkswagen used a widely known software trick to underreport its vehicle emissions for seven years before the company was finally caught in 2015. And it wasn’t even the government that discovered the company’s crime—most of the work was done by academic researchers in West Virginia.

The problem is that automakers conduct the overwhelming majority of emissions tests in their own laboratories. The meager funding the EPA receives allows the agency to independently confirm those results for only 10 percent to 15 percent of new car models. For the rest, we just have to take the carmaker’s word.

According to Margo Oge, head of the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality under President Barack Obama, Trump’s budget cuts would require “pretty much shutting down the testing lab.” They would turn regulating vehicle emissions into a completely trust-based system, even after automakers have proved that they don’t deserve our trust.

He Loves Research, He Loves It Not

Another major victim of Trump’s EPA budget is the agency’s Science Advisory Board, which is a group of mostly outside scientists tasked with ensuring that our environmental regulations are scientifically sound. President Trump aims to cut the board’s budget by 84 percent because of “an anticipated lower number of peer reviews.” In other words, the EPA is going to stop conducting and publishing research, so we don’t need anyone to review it.

This exposes, once again, the hypocrisy in the Trump administration’s view of climate change. Trump and his appointees say things like “We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis,” but then they cut funding for the very review and analysis they have prescribed. Who do they think pays for climate change research? Identifying and studying the threats to our economy, communities, and way of life are core federal functions.

Here’s the truth. They don’t want more review and analysis, because they know what it will say. So, instead, they cut the funding and silence the scientists. The situation recalls the oft misinterpreted Henry VI quote “Let’s kill all the lawyers,” which was uttered by a rebel who viewed lawyers and the law as obstacles to his coup. Trump has taken a similar tack—let’s kill all the science.

An Inconvenient Policy

Speaking of climate change denial, Scott Pruitt had a difficult week. After the EPA administrator told a CNBC interviewer that he did not agree that carbon dioxide is “a primary contributor to the global warming we see,” the agency’s scientific integrity officer, Francesca Grifo, was assigned to review whether Pruitt had violated EPA policy.

The review puts both Pruitt and Grifo in a tricky spot. The EPA’s scientific integrity policy states: “When dealing with science, it is the responsibility of every EPA employee to conduct, utilize, and communicate science with honesty, integrity, and transparency, both within and outside the Agency.” The policy specifically includes political appointees like Pruitt in its purview.

The policy also welcomes “differing views and opinions on scientific and technical matters as a legitimate and necessary part of the scientific process [emphasis added].” No doubt, if called to defend himself, Pruitt will point to this clause. Query, though, whether Pruitt is engaging in the scientific process. He isn’t a scientist and, to my knowledge, has never explained in scientific terms why he rejects the overwhelming evidence that human activity is driving climate change. Moreover, the scientific integrity policy encourages scientists who reject agency orthodoxy to “express that opinion, complete with rationale [emphasis added].”

This process will be nearly impossible for Grifo to manage. President Obama hired her to ensure that the agency—allegedly the subject of political interference during the George W. Bush administration—would adhere strictly to scientific evidence when forming and communicating its policies. Now her boss, and her boss’s boss, expressly reject the scientific evidence at the core of the agency’s mission.

Grifo may eventually have to choose between doing her job and having her job.

Check Yourself

Donald Trump donated his salary for his first 10 weeks in office to the National Park Service, in a mini-ceremony involving Sean Spicer, a park ranger, and a cartoonishly oversize fake check.

But here’s the silliest part. Trump donated $78,333 to the NPS while simultaneously calling for a $1.2 billion budget cut for the U.S. Department of the Interior, to which the National Park Service belongs. Even Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke noticed, saying, “We’re about $229 million behind in deferred maintenance on our battlefields alone.” Um thanks, boss.

Stay up-to-date on Trump’s environmental antics by visiting NRDC’s Trump Watch or following it on Facebook or Twitter.

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.