Renewable Revolution

 
Make Nexus Hot News part of your morning: click here to subscribe.

June 28, 2018





Just because the White House didn’t let Pruitt run amok with  doesn’t mean he’s given up on appeasing his conservative denier base when it comes to attacking climate science. The batch of emails FOIA’d by the Sierra Club that’s been generating stories all month led to two more revelations this week about how the EPA tries to accommodate conservative deniers, even if it doesn’t always give them exactly what they want.

On Tuesday, Politico reported that emails between EPA staff and Pruitt’s conservative allies showed how deniers sought to have a career staffer fired as a way to stall or stop the release of the National Climate Assessment. Lisa Matthews, who played key management role in the multi-agency process, was the target of this campaign. According to the emails, David Schnare and E&E Legal (a group known for weaponizing FOIA against climate scientists--which, by the way, recently imploded due to some very juicy intrapersonal drama) talked with representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) about it, and they brought the plan to the EPA. Fortunately, the scheme failed and the NCA was published without significant or obvious denial interference. (Some might tip their hat in thanks to the NYT’s coverage of the NCA draft for making it so that any political tampering would be easily noticed.)

But of course, plans to spike the NCA wasn’t the only effort to subvert science. Yesterday Scott Waldman at E&E reported that the CEO of an Oklahoma oil company, Randy Foutch of Laredo Petroleum, spent a year going back and forth with the EPA about a potential study on the accuracy of climate models with a focus on uncertainty 😈, suggesting a clear motive of casting doubt on the science.

Foutch’s idea, which was ultimately scrapped, was to have the EPA partner with the University of Texas’s Energy Institute for the study. As the emails show, UT’s involvement was specifically to provide cover for the study’s bias. “If industry hosted such a gathering, then environmental groups might be suspicious; if government hosts the meeting then industry might be suspicious; and so forth,” the head of the institute wrote in an email. “But the idea was that if UT brought people together, we could play the role of a fair arbiter or mediator."

But there’s a difference between playing the role of a mediator, and actually being a fair arbiter. Though it might’ve appeared as unbiased, odds are slim it would have been: Foutch chairs the Energy Institute’s Board of Advisors. And as Waldman notes in his report, the Institute came under fire in 2012 for a fracking-friendly study conducted by a professor who also happens to be a paid member of an energy company’s board.

Fortunately, the study didn’t happen. But Pruitt does still need it, or something like it, because of the lawsuit requesting the records of what science he was referring to when he said last year that humans aren’t the “primary contributor” to climate change. E&E reported yesterday that the EPA is yet again requesting more time to produce those records.

Apparently it takes a while to produce evidence that doesn’t exist.