The informal complaint from the U.S. Geological Survey officials came filed just two days before President Biden’s inauguration. But it may help lay the groundwork for his new administration to swiftly undo an 11th-hour decision from President Donald Trump’s USGS director, James Reilly.
“We will listen to the science and protect the integrity of our federal response to the climate crisis,” Biden said in remarks last week while unveiling his executive actions.
One of the agencies Biden’s team will look to fix is USGS.
In late December, with just a month left in Trump’s term, Reilly issued an instructional memorandum requiring researchers to use models and data suggesting climate change will not be as dire as many scientists think. The memo was incorporated into the Interior Department’s overall operating procedures a week before Trump left office.
In their complaint, career officials at USGS said the memo was “based on his unsupported and non-peer-reviewed views” and included “fatal flaws” that agency scientists had “flagged as problematic” several times.
They added, “this is to our knowledge the only topic where a USGS Director, as a political appointee, has ever tried to prescribe and dictate how the USGS does science.”
The USGS is the research arm of the Interior Department, which oversees about one-fifth of the U.S. landmass. Their scientists study everything from how rising seas will erode coasts, higher temperatures will melt glaciers and changing conditions will impact plants and animals as the heat builds up in the atmosphere over the century.
But Reilly, a former NASA astronaut and petroleum geologist, has urged researchers to limit forecasts to just the next two to three decades, saying it is too difficult to predict the future further than that.
“[P]redicting short-term, global climate changes … is far more certain than making long-term projections,” Reilly wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in December.
Career officials also took issue with Reilly’s op-ed, titled “USGS Gets Politics Out of Climate Forecasts.” In their complaint, they wrote Reilly’s article “may represent breaches in scientific integrity” because it was not properly reviewed by scientists before publication.
The USGS is now reassessing the Trump team’s restrictions on climate science.
“This document is currently under bureau review to determine whether it meets our rigorous scientific standards and practices,” an agency spokesman told The Energy 202.
The complaint could end up becoming a pretext for the incoming Biden team to scrap Reilly’s last-minute moves. Last week, Biden kicked off a 120-day review of scientific integrity policies across federal agencies, aiming to find instances of “improper political interference” under Trump.
Asked about the matter, Reilly said in an email there are multiple projected pathways for climate impacts used by scientists on the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as researchers in the federal government.
“I credit our USGS career scientists for putting forth an approach that will improve scientific efficacy and provide a higher degree of confidence for policy makers who are responding to potential future climate change conditions by providing a full range of plausible outcomes to be considered,” Reilly said.
Reilly, who said “validated” scientific integrity complaints at Interior declined 49 percent under Trump compared to the last four years of the Obama administration, cited the work of USGS Chief Scientist Geoff Plumlee as part of the basis for the new policy.
Plumlee, however, was one of scientists to sign onto the complaint against Reilly.
Other signatories include Anne Kinsinger, an associate director responsible for aquatic ecosystem research; Holly Weyers, Southeast regional director; Doug Beard, head of the agency’s National Climate Adaptation Science Center; Mark Sogge, another regional director who retired last month; and Kevin Gallagher, an associate director in charge of managing scientific data.
This is not the only instance of USGS climate science coming under fire during Trump’s term.
Last year, Trump appointees delayed the release of a study showing how oil and gas drilling encroaches on polar bears in Alaska. And early in Trump’s term, they discussed by email how agency scientists went “beyond their wheelhouse” when writing climate change “dramatically” shrank glaciers in Montana.
Power plays
Biden wants an all-electric federal car fleet. But how will he achieve it?
“One of the biggest issues: Just three automakers currently manufacture electric vehicles in the United States, and none of those cars meet Biden’s criteria of being produced by union workers from at least 50 percent American-made materials,” our colleague Sarah Kaplan writes.
Biden’s declaration that he wants to turn the entire federal auto fleet electric, however, could spur the fledgling EV industry and lead to more production within the United States. If he succeeds in making every car in the fleet electric, it could increase the total number of electric vehicles in the country by more than 50 percent.
The heads of ExxonMobil and Chevron reportedly discussed a potential merger.
“Chevron Chief Executive Mike Wirth and Exxon CEO Darren Woods discussed a merger following the outbreak of the new coronavirus, which decimated oil and gas demand and put enormous financial strain on both companies,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “The discussions were described as preliminary and aren’t ongoing but could come back in the future.”
It would be hard, however, to see the Biden administration approving the country’s two largest oil and gas companies joining forces at a time when it is trying to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The move would reunite two remnants of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, which was broken up under antitrust law in 1911.
But such consolidation in the oil industry is not unprecedented. ExxonMobil itself formed when Exxon and Mobil, then the nation’s largest and second-largest oil companies, merged in 1999.
The oil industry is looking for an unlikely ally — farmers.
The potential alliance between the petroleum sector and biofuel producers would work to combat Biden’s electric vehicle push, Reuters reports. Sources familiar with the discussions told Reuters that so far leaders in the oil industry have received a cool reception from biofuel producers, who are reluctant to oppose the new administration’s energy policies.
“While the oil industry and biofuels producers are competitors for space in America’s gas tanks, they share a desire to ensure a future for internal combustion engines,” Reuters writes. “The effort also reflects the shifting political landscape in Washington. The oil industry’s influence has waned since Biden replaced Donald Trump as president, but the farm belt remains a powerful political constituency.”
U.S. environmental leaders push Biden to make moves to protect the Amazon.
A bipartisan coalition of former Cabinet secretaries and climate negotiators wrote to Biden on Friday urging the president to leverage trade agreements, corporate financing and “debt-for-nature” swaps in an effort to save the Amazon rainforest, the New York Times reports.
The leaders sought to add more substance to Biden’s campaign commitments and a State Department directive last week to develop policies to protect the Amazon. But the Biden administration may face challenges from Brazil’s right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro. Deforestation has reached record levels under his leadership.
The group writing to Biden “includes two former Environmental Protection Agency administrators who served under Republican administrations, Christine Todd Whitman and William K. Reilly; Todd D. Stern, President Barack Obama’s special envoy for climate change; Tim Wirth and Frank E. Loy, both of whom served as under secretaries of state for global affairs in the Clinton administration; and Stuart E. Eizenstat, who led the United States delegation in the negotiations of the Kyoto Protocol climate accord of 1997,” per New York Times.
Paul J. Crutzen, a Nobel laureate who revealed threats to the ozone layer, died at 87.
Crutzen was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research on the ozone layer, which helped pave the way for environmental regulations to phase out ozone-destroying gases. He also helped popularize the term “Anthropocene” to describe the epoch marked by rising temperatures and human impact on the planet, The Post’s Harrison Smith reports.
Adept at launching ideas that would come to resonate widely, Crutzen helped warn the world about the dangers of nuclear winter when he co-wrote an article subtitled “Twilight at Noon.” The article described the climatic disaster that could result from nuclear war, in which smoke would blot out the sun.
Extra mileage
Huge piece of California’s Highway 1 crumbled into the Pacific.
“A scenic stretch of Highway 1 near Big Sur that collapsed because of a winter storm this week will cost millions of dollars to repair, and it is unclear how long it will take before the roadway is fixed,” per the Los Angeles Times. “The destruction is known as a slip out, a collapse that occurs when the soil on either side of the road is so saturated nothing can hold it.”
